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We used to have screaming matches on the playground. My friends and I would clench our tiny fists and squeeze our eyes tighter than exploding stars and let our vocal chords rip into the afternoon air. I always won.

There isn't enough real screaming in the adult world. It's all turned internal or into razor blades and bourbon. My lungs are aching and punching for a chance to let a scream slit the sky into shatters. They want to lacerate my ribcage and tear my esophagus into ribbons.

The killer in all of this? Our teachers would always run to us when we had our screaming matches and check our knees for scabs and our elbows for freckles of blood. But now if I let out a scream no one would come running.

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rock candy

He was so beautiful, that long haired boy.
Smelling like weed and guitar strings
And fogged up car windows in January.

Hot summer sidewalks. Blown out matches.
Skinned knees. Ice cream cones. Sticky rock candy
Now transformed to whiskey and cocaine.

The cobwebs now pull his mouth down,
Sand has settled in his cheekbones, speckled
His face with pretty lies and bad boy charm.

Everything burns him like guitar strings
Snapping against calloused fingers, iron
lowered into the flames of premature age.

Cigarette smoke and ashes curl and veer
Through his dripping hair and down my back,
Sparking on my spine, ripping me up.

He ripped me open on a night of velvet and
Fractured glass. He rips himself open every night
With needles and bass lines.

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