Thing of the Past.

All of my most beautiful parts are just collections of scars

an excerpt from my work ///

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If you were to “attack me,” as they would call it, right now, in this exact moment, I would not paw your chest and let the air vacuum the space between our sticky bodies. I would not bite your lip or open my eyes. I would not lay unresponsive, starfish to predator, spaghetti to fork. I would kiss you back, but I must tell you, it would be the most bitter kiss of my life. You see, I want to savor the time that separates the exact distance it takes for the tips of my eyelashes to reach yours, I want to taste the seconds between your breaths, I want to suffer those long hours in the grip of apprehension when you taste your lips and I lean into them. I do not want your simplicity or your pitying stare. I am not here to take from you. I am here to make something entirely new. The ingredients? My nails on the crescendo of your collarbone, the sun on your teeth in my eyes, long midnight explorations of the dunes and troughs of your hair, and the tears that I mix into the creamy hazelnut of your cheek when you give me that old, old smile, that smile I hope to keep in my hands like a pearl or a secret until we crystalize, new butterflies on the background of black space and hope-like stars that only you can see.

Let me be your parasite

Let me take you in and bite your shoulders hard;

find my teeth tracing your collarbones;

white bones, white flesh,

I want to suck on you with my eyes

trying my hardest to steal any part of you away.

Let me close your eyes to my breath, trust my

cold night air to keep you safe.

I am that selfish leech who would sooner die than

let you go, you’re so warm;

my hands clasp hard on the insides of your elbows

feast on my addiction:

drip a shadow of blood, but

collect my relinquished body and soul.

watch me crumple on the floor in front of

a full moon, transforming by your warmth into

a creature—

thirsty

for the space between your lips.

Let me be your hearty, wholesome, nutrient

darkness (and you can be my white sun)

…who promises that lips might touch and that organs may crumble…

Chemical Love

Every bump on my skin is goosed

My eyes are dilated and their ceramic gloss is two faced, melancholy tears and wedding joy both

Intestines I had forgotten now beat with my heart, shrink wrapped against its Juliet desire

The time passing vexes and seizes me, the quiet thump of butterfly wings

I can feel tingles, lingering on fingers—fingers? Or under my skin, my nerves shot up with opiate electricity

Mechanic engines roar instead of hiss, letting slip that they are more than patched up airbags

Bundles of nerves conglobate into a single image, the whole potential of the brain looking at lips

I am stuck on that awkward divide between happiness and tomorrow

and it’s wonderful

Love Someone Like You’re Six

obdormio:

Love someone like you’re six. Bring your favorite toy to school to impress her; watch her hold it in her tiny hands and swell with pride when she’s receptive. She has good taste. Watch her cautiously; you couldn’t live if she accidentally dropped it, broke it. Draw pictures of her in your coloring book, in the margins, and ask your mother if she’s allowed to come over. Blush when she kisses you on the ear after you’ve skinned your knee. Blush whenever someone says her name. Whenever someone says her name, think it sounds like a curse or a whisper or a prayer.

Love someone like you’re ten. Notice that you like all of the same things: the same songs, the same animals, the same colors. You know there’s something between the two of you but you’re both too inexperienced to acknowledge it. Stand side by side during your elementary school graduation ceremony and feel a surge of loss course through his body and then through yours. Sign his autograph book; skip the white pages and the yellow pages and the blue pages. Sign the pink page, the one that means ‘love.’ Wear gloss and press your lips against the paper. Leave an imprint of your mouth between the words, ‘See U Soon’ and ‘Call me – 718- 768 – 8404.’ Never see each other again.

Love someone like you’re thirteen. Let him walk you home one night in October and ignore every chill. When he leans in to steal a kiss from your mouth, let him. Open your eyes in shock when you realize there’s tongue. Clench his shirt with your fingertips, release it, rest your open palms on either side of him and be unsure if you’re pulling him closer or not. When it’s over, slap him because you don’t know how else to tell him you liked it.

Love someone like you’re sixteen. Pass her in the hallways at school and try to transform yourself into something alluring, something confident. Know every CD she has in her car and her Taco Bell order and who her best friends are. Feel like your heart will explode when she signs on AIM, when she arrives at a party, when she looks in your direction. Get her alone one night, sit in her car and listen to songs you’ll never forget the words to. It’ll be the only time you lose your virginity but the first time you lose yourself.

Love someone like you’re nineteen. Spend hours looking at each other and saying nothing; meet each other’s parents. Text him from the bathroom of your childhood home when you’re visiting for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas; say, “I wish you were here.” Drive around town together, put your hand on his knee and watch sidewalks and miles fly by; take interest in the blur because you can see your future in it.

Love someone like you’re twenty-five. Go to the movies even though you’re already sure you hate going to the movies, do it because she wants to. Spend weekdays and weekends together, get to know each other in the backs of cabs. Stay up until 4 AM because you’re young again; go to bed at 9 PM because you don’t have to prove yourself anymore. Don’t feel overwhelmed when they call instead of text, don’t feel afraid to be yourself. Be in Love.

Love someone like you’re thirty. Not like you’re running out of time, not like your options are drying up. Love him because despite failure and disappointment and fear, you can’t help yourself. Love him in spite of your past; believe in your potential when your better judgment tells you not to.

Love someone like you’re fifty, like the future has come and gone and will return again and it’ll all feel underwhelming because you know who you are and who she is and who “we” is and knowing that makes the rest manageable, you’ve learned.

Love someone like you’re eighty. Look out of your window or in a newspaper or at the television and hear smell taste collateral damage: the result of the world passing you by, leaving you behind. Count the things you no longer understand on both hands; then count the one thing that still makes sense, that has always made sense and think, that’s all right

By Stephanie Georgopulos

We almost died that night. She ate the

dying fetus of a donut, as I huffed the

whipped cream of my espresso. The hurling

ball of fire in the air was not the sun. Indeed

it was the first coming of Nix, and none other

than his messenger Thanatos, death. A body fell

from the roof above us into the fray of a blue mustang.

The screech of metal on glass was deafening to our mellow

milieu. We were thrown out of a world, much like children

witnessing their parents masturbating each other or the first time

you feel the cold rape of a dirty syringe entering your blood vessel.

My glasses fogged up with apprehension, the glasses themselves felt the

fear that emanated from the words that escaped my breath. She cried out

one word, a word of which the time of conversation would of allowed as

appropriate but now fell isolated and prejudiced by other words and breaths alike,

‘Funny.’

Things were shattering on the dance floor. The chandelier was aging and dying in front of us as time took its toll all at once. Rain, like arrogance, is a concept; it has shortcomings and you can argue its qualities and significance. Tonight, it was raining glass. Tomorrow, flowers could be falling from the sky. The innards of the building was like a mouth, unleashing its patient scheme and catching us all in its vice. I kept to my one-two step and forwarded my partner into the Romanian waltz, she was bleeding down her left arm.

Her painted lavender mask tragically ironic in a grimace. She was panicking. I let her. After all, my face was taken in a scarlet smile. I felt Satan’s heat on the blunt of my cheeks. Some women screamed while others simply did nothing. No one in the room was resigned to the death they had been assigned. No one, but me.

Fortunately for us, the ceiling and floor kissed.

Maybe we could have just started off at the climax.

The part where we die.

Then perhaps we’d have a chance at understanding,

at friendship.

The space and spaces in-between life and living.
“Who are you? Where am I?”

The part where he’s crying and she’s crying. Because he’s dying.

The part where she falls in love with him not because he was so close to ephemerality, or because he was her soulmate, but because love was appropriate, because the situation called for love.

The part where we all become as close as the touch of the dying.

The part where we find out what was meant to be.
Where we uncover our own paths.

Where we can close our eyes.

Where we can lock lips and feel as one, instead of just human.

The part where she is shaking with tears. And he is alone—dying slowly on the shower floor.

The part that has no blood.
The part that is stained darkest.

The part where you & I meet.

A Beginning and an End. Two lives, but one.

She smiled that secret smile, unconscious smile down the foyer bee-lining for the overly-majestic, gargantuan ballroom doors. She touched lightly the door with her gloved palm. She had never felt more fire…
extinguished.