Lisa justwrite 1

You tell me that pine trees have needles. My skin is paper, light shining through and seeming brighter on the other side. I used to believe the sky at night was cloth with holes chewed by moths, their wings clogging the air like ash so I'm afraid I'll breathe them in, a million tiny feathers on my tongue, my throat like chalk, my lungs aching. Yours do too. I can tell by the lines around your eyes, your laughter eroding like the banks of the Monocacy. I'd follow it to the Bay if I could, sink knee-deep in the marshes and feel the Earth exhale into my pores, come out smelling like sulfur and looking like a blue heron, my neck stretched so high I look like I'm flying when I'm still on the ground. Fish will fear me but still be so mesmerized by my grey they call blue that they'll gather at my ankles, waiting to be plucked like daisies with parched stems and petals whiter than my mother's stretched belly, skin that has seen no sunlight but so many hands, grasping for heartbeats so deep they are drowning, but all they really need is hers. My father has fingers that feel like bark, the hair on his face like needles that can't pierce skin. He smells like firewood. There are moths gathering around his limbs.

Russell Justwrite 5

The birthplace of my identity, where rivers intersect and the banks flood when it rains, hard, like the clouds are breaking hearts next to shattered vases, spiders in the cabinet covering their ears with four of their legs. Sometimes my hair is sticky silk, a web where your fingers are caught. My hand flutters to your arm and I tell you I never learned how to fly, but I can land anywhere. You tell me to look at the sky as if I'll find something there. All I find is myself, uncover her in the sand and remember why I left, trace the fingerprints on her thighs and tell her she still has more healing to do. When she tries to explain, I gather sand in china teacups and pour it down her throat, fill her to the brim with sand and watch it gloss at the edges, becoming glass around her gaping lips. I tell her she is a vase I never want to break, a fragile teacup chipped at the rim, a crack down its thin spine, my fingers on either side, trying to close the wound. The people around me are shouting, but I don't understand their words. My hands clamp over their mouths, and I am close enough to count their eyelashes. Rivers converge on their skin. I back into the ocean, deep enough to taste the salt. I think about the last time the banks flooded.

during a lecture justwrite

"There's nothing wrong." You tell me that gender is a universe and all of us are stars. I think about the space in between. I think about watercolor soaking into paper, not finding any edges until the white ends and the table begins. I pluck flowers from the Earth, gather them in bouquets and watch you stare at them during dinner, the wide, empty throats of daffodils gaping, open, like silent screams or paused laughter or hunger, hunger, their spines thin, fragile, green, snapping between my fingers like slivers of almonds. sometimes the world is a walnut, and we haven't even cracked the shell. Sometimes the world is a watermelon split through the rind, our feet up to the ankles in juices, your mouth watering and mine, full of sky, brimming over with watercolor. You tell me we are stars in the universe. I stare at the empty table, my eyes blank, my eyelids transparent, waiting. Your eyes sparkle. I wonder what's in them. They point skyward, searching for the moon.

Russell Justwrite 4

Lazy Sunday morning with no water but fruit, half an apple in my abdomen while I think about the shape of your heart and try to name it but can never think of anything but the pulse in your neck that I try to taste with my fingertips, but always from too far away. I tell you about the lazy Sunday afternoons playing scrabble with my grandmother, and you never call me back. I stop waiting. My childhood is a heavy bucket full of rocks, a can pulled from the weeds and kicked all the way up a mountain, tunnels in the snow, and hot stroganoff because it's a weekend and we had to do something with the egg noodles. My dad calls me to say he has to go. I call him to yell but end up laughing. He worries about my future. I ask him where he's been. The page turns and it's tomorrow, just another Monday, notebook paper and half-hour lunches, nothing to think about but the knuckles in my fingers, how they turn white when I clutch your arm, how they bend all day but I'm never impressed. I used to hate them. Now we barely think about each other. I can tell they're dwelling on the past. My phone vibrates during class and I don't look down to see who it is. I have nothing left to say.

Russell Justwrite 3

In the dark, dandelions are less like weeds than I am. In the dark, I imagine stems so thin the wind can break them being strong enough to life rocks. In the dark, there are streetlights that penetrate nothing but my skin, leave me open and glowing from the inside so it's impossible to hide anything but my voice. I bury it under piles of sand like I used to bury glowsticks when my cousins and I would play with them on the beach. We could never find them again, dug too many holes to count without at least six afternoons of standing, the sand branding the bottoms of your feet like lightning carving its name into the sky, leaving blue streaks on the white walls of your hotel room that are only white when the light is on and your eyes are as open as my body, cameras flashing morse code across my skin. I try to answer but my fingers have forgotten how to spell. My eyebrows can only lie. My voice is not a factor, and not even air can slip between the fingers across my lips. My mother spent months making this body, years tending to it, a dandelion planted with purpose. You tell me that a weed is only a flower where you don't want it to be. In the dark, I am more like a weed than your dandelion. I feel your breath across my cheeks, trying to blow all my wishes away.

Russell Justwrite 2

Straight from the crooked lines I draw on pages when I don't have anything to say, I am still thinking about spiderwebs, how male spiders pluck their silken strands like a harp, like they're teenage boys whose upper lips quiver under the vague suggestion of a mustache, thumbing awkwardly at acoustic guitars the afternoons they taste their first cigarettes. I'm untouched by their efforts, watch spiders so tiny they are shadows of themselves gliding on cables from the towel rack in my bathroom. I wonder how long it's been since I've hung a towel there, how long it's been since I've laid naked in the sun and felt myself grow six more legs. The trees look taller today than they ever have before. Their roots whisper to the soles of my feet when I stand near enough. Their leaves have veins that pulse along with mine, look like your forearms when the light shines through. I think about the spider vein on my left thigh, how you pretend that I should hate it when really your fingertips are aching to introduce themselves. I see words forming behind your lips, then rolling back to fill the cavities in your molars. I see the jagged lines carving themselves into the corners of your mouth, thin strands I want to pluck, weave a song that will bring your voice forward.

Russell Justwrite 1

The color of fading, like how I don't fit in my mother's arms anymore and I imagine her with grey hair sometimes, eyes like raindrops on the dirty window of our car, wondering why there's traffic on a day when everyone feels like staying in bed. I fold blankets to elevate your feet, imagine the swollen ankles of a pregnant woman, the hollow bones of my grandmother, aching when the clouds come in. I have a scar on the top of my right hand that hurts sometimes, but I haven't learned to use it to predict the weather. Sometimes the internet tells me it's snowing before I've opened my curtains for the day, shadows caught in the fabric folds like jail bars that can't be broken, with lace in between so thin it is a spiderweb, sticking itself to my memories so all I feel on my fingertips are the tingling ghosts of tiny footsteps, eight at a time, reminding me that I don't have a compass and the north star looks like all the others, fades before my campfire, hides behind my smoke signals so I have no light to read them. My skin feels like smoke sometimes, my stomach like steam, a raindrop rising again from the asphalt, my atoms repelled by each other, refusing to let me shrink.