Category: Poetry

my masc is a mask that protects the little girl inside with pointed spines and puts her in a cage inside his beating heart “I never meant to be like this,” he says in quiet tones, “I only meant to keep her safe from the harsh realities of life, but somehow, as days went by,…

I will do my best to be kind to you. It’s hard, sometimes. I am so used to people wanting to hurt me. I am so used to people wanting to be cruel to others. It is so hard to see that cruelty and say, I will do my best to be kind to you….

i am devoured i am exhausted i am denied that which i have been i am relegated to the edges i am devoted i protect my charge and when she whispers i elevate her voice until it shimmers and shatters and tears itself asunder i am legion i am nothing i am left to scrape…

the name that i have been given speaks to a child that doesn’t understand the cruelty of the world as if it is a given as if that is how the world must be as if the child is the one that is broken because they cannot understand you might say it in the space of a heartbeat…

i have a poem sitting on my tongue like the eucharist and it melts into my skin even as i try to expel it i want to let these tears go but they stick to my cheeks like icicles that crack with my forced smile these words used to matter but they’ve folded into themselves…

i am a gnat and one day i will die crushed by a wiper on a windshield of an indifferent car no eulogy no funeral just a snear for a gravesite as a reminder that i was here ptkh 052220

i covered my canvas with seventeen layers of white paint, one for each time i lost my purity like a picture of Dorian Gray, in reverse, a testament to my slow corruption into adulthood some dreams are shattered all at once, some are left intact, but mine were stripped from me, like seventeen layers of…

i slip depression on like an old pair of jeans softened and pliable with the familiarity of time this tear on the knee is where i scraped it when i fell down on the concrete that was harder than it looked that patch covers the place where the fabric was worn through by time and…

leviathan is a tapeworm inside my skull devouring the me that it finds it rises, roils, recoils, and leaves me hollow and alone as i stand against it, it warns me: boy, don’t make me destroy you and i ask: what if i’ve never been a boy? what would you have to destroy? — ptkh…

when i was a boy, i was a fragile boy who shattered in the slightest breeze my storms came quickly and violently and even on the sunniest days, the clouds still hung low when i was a man, i was an angry man who screamed and flailed in private in public, i wore a mask,…