I.
Sometimes, you have to be disgusting to feel clean.
Like throwing up after throwing back sixteen shots on your sixteenth birthday
to make sure you don’t wake up hungover,
Or eviscerating your bowels after a nauseatingly heavy meal of steamed chicken and broccoli.
But how do you purge after binging philosophical Twinkies?
There are no fingers long enough to shove down your throat and reach your soul.
Goodness knows the bile burns like bible-wrapped joints.
Mama, do you think I will be reincarnated as a cockroach
Because I prayed to the porcelain gods more often than I prayed at temple?
II.
Sometimes, you have to be disgusting to feel pristine.
Like waking up covered in someone else’s spit, and a stranger in your clothes;
wearing your matted hair and your sweat-soaked skin.
Ready, unready, unready, and then ready again.
Am I molding because I’ve been out of the freezer for too long?
The ground beef bought on clearance has been four days in the fridge—
Maybe soon I’ll feel like cooking it.
Father, have your salt tears become indistinguishable from the sea mineral spray,
The ocean wave nightmares you’ve passed down to me?
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III.
Sometimes, you have to be clean to feel disgusting.
Like sinking your lotioned hands into dirty dishwater,
scrub-scrub-scrubbing away burnt-egg deposits on stainless steel,
Or being covered in sticky dust after you finally sweep the halls of your grief-brick cave.
Can you mourn a part of yourself that hasn’t (yet) died?
I won’t have to be sober if I am never not drunk,
But the liquor is getting harder to stomach.
Mama, did you know that when you were pregnant with me, You were also pregnant
IV.
Sometimes, you have to feel disgusting to be pure.
Days pass since the shower has seen you naked,
But the water is polyethylene,
so you decide to drop plastic instead of glass; at least the shards are easier to clean.
How many cigarette butts pour out of the rusted piping in a peeling bathroom?
When my friend smokes, she jokes that she’ll eat the filters
so she can beat the Pacific in nicotine addiction.
Father, do you see yourself in my reflective pieces,
and shatter them further so you can escape yourself?
V.
You just have to feel to be.
The past is a bullet nestled in the sinews of time,
and surrounding it with stem cells keeps it stable enough
to only throb sometimes.
Am I to limp through life,
With the knowledge that a pistol shot at me in 1951?
The dull ache is almost bearable when I laugh.
Father, does the same lead leech into you,
that seeps into me?
VI.
Mama, is this what you meant when
you talked about growing pains?
That growing up doesn’t mean growing out,
but growing around;
adjusting your gait and learning how to walk again?
Mama, if I am able to bite the casings off,
limp towards the artillery,
And swallow the gun,
Will I be more metal than me?
Or is that the sacrifice I have to make,
In order to be?
