Heaven is the certainty that you will be avenged
            I know    	     I know             the kingdom is not fair
but it’s what I have  a montage of red and a mitosis
 	     of knuckles   I’m not sure how you could expect me
to love anything       Ain’t no question  	
	                                       sadness is regal like that
                         golden and replaceable     once I wanted
a lineage of identical men   	    once a mouth soft and hot
as the quickest way that gold can hurt you     You see
       a pattern yet?               I practice the want of nothing	and fail
                                          I’ve been shown how ugly I can be
when I am invisible
   	                                  I don’t believe in yesterdays
The throat of loneliness?               Straddled with my knife
            I press my hands to my face  	      and the lament is a valley
the light sags through       What do you do when you have
 	           lost Everything?       Rewrite the history of Everything
I don’t like my smile  	      because someone told me I didn’t like it
    	   Now I am gorgeous in all the languages I mothered
                 Flex the antonym of Missing   	     I avenge myself
Stretch my hands     I orphan my grief for the living and it is beauty
                                         ain’t no question       	I monarch
the lonely     I my own everything now	  I miss my love and
            it is an American grief     I strike the smell from nostalgia
cut my memory to spite my country         What is the odor of nothing            
            but my dominion in want of excess   	  I grin and pillars of bone flower
into sawed-off crowns      say I flex the light and the light flexes
            heat shimmer    	   unfurling like a bicep 	 my lust a mirage
where the body is merely a congealing of the river  	I can feel it
      slowly drifting away from me 	The world I knew is gone
and getting more gone	   and my anthem populating my nose            
            with an abundance of salt I slip the shroud over the life I named
and forget I belonged to someone once       My soverign's face is a riot
of diamonds whining    	This will be a beautiful death   and I am free
and gorgeous and desperate to never have to miss anyone again
I rock the jeweled shroud        become the bride of my own sad light

Dear Empire, I am confused each time I wake inside you.
                      You invent addictions.
Are you a high-end graveyard or a child?
                      I see your children dragging their brains along.
                      Why not a god who loves water and dancing
              instead of mirrors that recite your pretty features only?

You wear a different face to each atrocity.
You are un-unified and tangled.
                      Are you just gluttony?
                      Are you civilization’s slow grenade?

     I am confused each time I’m swallowed by your doors.

No matter the rush of undertow
everything else is still
here. I scrawl your name 
at the bottom of the river
I sing it and it sings me 
back. What I’d give for a name 
so keen     it whittles
the valleys of my neck. I’m forever drenched 
in this night, and you 
no longer exist. The river catches 
the sky’s black, ink 
meant to preserve a memory. I stay
because it’s easy. Here. I relive 
what you did to me, find myself again 
in the water—swollen and sullen 
as a bruise. I trace 
and retrace, graffiti 
every river’s bank, drown 
into ecstasy

instead of moving on with my life. 
I wear what you did to me 
like gills, a new way to breathe. 
I jump into the river
for days. I forget I have lungs at all.