I.
Period blood drips down my legs like fugitive scars
I wipe clean with tissues from the wall
My sister’s hitting her pen
and laughing at the vicious thrashing that is the real housewives.
I figure eight around the place,
looking for the pieces of myself I will accidentally abandon here,
the ones the maids would sweep into the trash.
But they’ve sunk into the floorboards.
No one has ever been here before and no one will be here after.
Dad watches the news on full blast in the room over
I stab at a bagel I picked up from the to-go kiosk
I pull it apart thoughtlessly,
gray and more gray
Where did you come from?
The entire world is burning inside of this bagel.
I miss when I could still be angry about everything
II.
Alone, the morning feels opaque and cruel.
I imagined that when my family left,
the whole place cringed and keeled over and burned and died.
It glimmered in existence and faded into the sky
— a two dimensional cardboard night
And now I remain with self-tan sputtered on the bed,
One window with warm yellow light that eats away at the place.
You’re ruining it I said before closing the blinds.
I live here and only here.
Everywhere else I am a to-do-list of yearning
–An infinitesimal breath.
Life-waste.
I stretch out on the bed with someone else’s dust,
microcosmic miasma.
I’m something of a god here.