Decades alone slipping through crowded rooms, filled with low pockets of air, spaces between bodies where in the timestamp of a laugh the...

Speak out (that’s enough, the mouth on her) about only that deemed to meet Her standards for polish (uphold the shine), did I seem fine?...

Snap out of the past, tensed against a grizzled corner of memory, but a wisp of rancid smoke seeps from a crack, paneled grooves echo...

You spoke and sounded my own pain, a cascade of spilled shame, the rolling arcs of the ways we break, reach back into the dark to reshape...

A frantic pipsqueak plea against the fringe, shushed and hushed, later praised for every word (don’t speak, not those, not heard, never...

I always understood (I should unlearn, but the stern lesson, less than, remains) that shape equates worth, abstained control elusive,...

Through half-lidded blinds, shift with a twist of tangled strings, slatted shapes, patterns diffused, pull the drapes aside, long-used...

They didn’t trust me then (again my skin, my voice, I screamed) so why would I dream they’d trust me now (nerve endings charred, fires...

Run ragged, pressed to recesses of crafted catacombs, jagged textures (sharp in their own right, far from Their wrongs), still, the echo...

I cannot (still, will not) pretend I didn’t anticipate, dress and wait by windows in late-morning light, dread and delight learning early...

Drape my body backwards over something round, press together the blades that hold my wings, boldly splay my hips, tip my head away and...

Trapped amid wavy quavering mirrors, bouncing ideas between warped reflective surfaces, distorting themselves, recording in cells and...

Pulling my Self from the inside out, shed layers of mortified cells, inches of hair that fell to the floor; my nape a place exposed,...

Peer through this lens, our own jumbled works in progress, lives grown here from the inside out, the outside in, ways I have shaped you...

I cannot have both past and present, a tense unspoken war between Her truths and my own, the line growing clearer, here, as I’ve grown;...

He didn’t mean it that way (how should He have meant it, when He said my ass belonged to Him alone); He said it with love (then why did...

Not good enough (never good enough), the primal refrain sustained, climbs the echo chamber walls, falls in the chasm between Who Loves...

I will not love as You taught me: an excuse for control, abuse of power, debts to be repaid, where instead should be curiosity kissed...

Stale cigar smoke in every velvet cushion, every vinyl tile crevice, pushing into edges of tweed carpet, channels of stairwell paneling;...