Member Poem

The Typos on My DNA Strands
 
Unrevised hand-written letters and misprints in zines
are an excavator creating craters in the chambers of my concaved chest.
My epidermis is an exoskeleton that I will cut/crash/thrash
to make room for misguided organs and ventricles.
My bloodstream is geysers erupting polluted waters.
My pipelines rust and burst at the seams.
I don’t know how much more gum I can swallow
to keep these overflowing rivers intact and inline.
The forest floor
of my stomach
is littered with so much cedar dust.
I down Molotov cocktails and gasoline by the gallon
& wait for a lightning strike to ignite
a misplaced match inside of me.
 
You were a wreck, and I was a recluse.
The same shipwrecked penmanship
that etched personalized songs onto your skin
to make your body a body of art, carved
[YOUR NAME IS A BITCH]  
in the stalls of rest-stop bathrooms.
If you were an etch-a-sketch, the poems would have been erased
from the layers of your skin when I shook your world.
 
There was something waltzing through my body on the fourth of July
that made me feel dependency for the very first time.
The percussion of fireworks embodied me after
the detonations in the sky had settled to a murmur.
You looked at supernovas the way I looked at kamikazes.
You looked at them like they were Deities.
You knew they’d explode, burnout and die
but would continue to keep coming
as if they skim the sky for only one thing:
you.

-Previously published in Crab Fat Magazine