Cat Singh

i am floating somewhere between the walls of my skin, hovering like a ghost in a haunted room

my body is a glass jar, and i am inside floating in the brine. i slosh about it like a boat on a brackish sea, growing sickly green

i am pressed between the pages of my body like a flower drying flat inside a book.

my body is like the clothing i wear, like a phone case or a casket. my body protects me from things I need protecting from.

my body is the thing he sneaks up behind and breaks into like a burglar with a crowbar.

My skin was a secret to be kept, even in the hospital where they pulled my blood out of my body and kept the insides of me in vials. My body was a secret to be kept, even here.

I don't know how she spelled her "Zoe." I don't know how to spell the way her fingers parted the tendrils of her hair. I don't know how to spell the nurse's voices as they spoke to each other about "that little Zoe" who will be out of here in no time

I feel your pull: deep, gentle, and short. My stomach lurches from the sweet-toothed indulgence. Your fingers are made of candy.

The water is clean and clear. It flows over me gently and does not wash a single, unmelted bit of me down the thirsty drain.

I write poems about you, and people think they're love letters. They think we have made the mistake of caring while we hold each other's bodies in our mouths like cats bringing dead mice home to a doorstep

My pain was a bird with a blanket thrown over its cage. It sweltered and did not sing.

There is something so horrible and miraculous about being a child and coming out of it alive.

Our fish bowl bodies poured into each other. We bawled out loud like waterfalls. We slept next to each other in dead man's float. And still, did not feel loved.

I had no idea what this meant, but I'm sure I pretended to. I knew there was blood, probably still underneath the boy's fingernails.

Her laugh bubbles and bursts. Her legs fan out across the car's seat like a beautiful ocean across the sand. Her hands grip the steering wheel nonchalantly and with purpose. She doesn't look at me.

Mourners are so alien to me. They speak gibberish. The martian boys shuffled out of my door, a funeral procession, patting each other on the back and swearing to speak again.

Our bodies are littered everywhere, but we can't make a dent in oblivion. I break down into bits, slowly and methodically, and I am nothing nothing at all.

Do you care if God is here at all? Is he here? Can you hear him in your ears? Would you believe it if I said I couldn't hear anything at all?

To have my hands on the hills of a girl's body for the first time is to hold the world under my palms, to plant my fingertips into soil and commune with the earth.

When we kissed, it was slow and rhythmic. It was like plucking flower petals off her lips, the light popping sounds pitter pattering across my whole self like I was standing in a rainstorm.

Belly up toward the sky, I think the black pillow of night will catch me when I fall, tipsy and unsteady, even as I lay.

Our hearts lock open like jaws stretched too wide, words spilled out as spittle on the page. My words are wet and dripping.

Your voice on the phone is your voice on the phone, and it pulls me into memory like a photo album on the coffee table.

I want to buy a bible and make each page into blackout poetry, highlighting some words and discarding the rest, just the way I am told to use the bible anyhow.

The medication is poison, and the lord will save her if she prays hard enough. If she yells loud enough, maybe he can hear her from the sky.

Your body is like a brick and mine is like a window. You smash into me and we scatter across the carpeted floor of your living room. Every piece of me gets carpet burn.

He fucks me till I stop shaving my armpits and shave my head instead. Then he makes me keep my shirt on and fucks me from behind. My queer body blossoms forests under my arms and dark prairies on my legs. My queer body blooms.

I am tired of being told how to heal from myself. I am tired of how healing just seems to hurt.

The sight of me made you whimper, a weak breaking sound, frail like my fingers in your hair. I was never quite emaciated, just translucent when I tried to smile or speak. I was disappearing, see-through.

My brain is like an animal. It sleeps when it likes to, wakes up to the touch of a hand.

He mewled like an animal because he was an animal, his personhood just an illusion we created for ourselves. His little hands became paws and his eyes were slit like pins in the round craters of his head.

My body carries me like fish are carried by the sea. It does not know me, does not wish me harm,

You once hurt me softly, then twice, and again. You hurt me softly, and now that is how you hold me. I hate you so much, but you smell like you