(Photo of Juliet Lauren)

Big Pills and an American Tongue

If the days are long my gun is bed-time syrup.

Hopes and dreams are filtered and measured until we're left with promises

we want to break like chopsticks or bones. 

Do you vomit to feel clean?

Are your hands not getting the job done anymore?

You either love the numbing or not. 

I don't know about you but

I don't want to live in a world where God

makes kittens with birth defects where they

defecate through their vaginas.

I don't know about you but I've seen shit a God wouldn't allow. 

Cruelty that shouldn't be made into art. 

Pain that shouldn't be crammed into stanzas. 

Poetry is just digging up all the deepest parts of yourself and spilling it onto the page. 

You reassemble the cerebral slop when you have a cigarette. 

I guess she's the only one I want to impress. 

You could say I do it all for her. 

I make people fall in love with her because I can't do it myself. 

I write to find her; check up on her.

She's almost never doing well.

She misses the city and the little beach towns before she was sick. 

She misses tights and scarves and snowmen. 

She wonders how we got here and if I really want to make 

feelings tangible for a society we hate. 

She just wants pills and quiet. 

She just wants blonde! Blue! Lilac! Hair.

She smells like roses and coffee and a hint of fabric softener. 

Or maybe something like ashy lilac on the days she smokes.

I never seem to have any memories I like.

I always seem to answer the phone when there's ghosts on the other line.

Stripmall Princess

My consciousness never leaves the funeral.

It stays past the houre d’oeuvres running out 

and will most definitely need a ride home.

You may find skeletons when you're looking for your shoes but you

feel butterflies when you’re shaking the mattress.

All I eat is toast and pills because I have big plans.

You tell me I’m an angry god. 

I’m as glamorous as a dehydrated palm tree.

I’m as soulful as dilapidated graffiti.

I’m running from my demons on a solar powered treadmill.

Ghosts choose to haunt me.

Satan has the lead on our chess pieces.

And my black and grey eyeshadow is really just the ashes of rapists.

While the man I love is experiencing emotional decay and stale hope.

He can’t react as required.

I hope there’s still fireflies in his eyes.

You offer a resilient human spirit and there’s confetti in our kisses.

But I’m a former strip-mall princess whose love will wax cold and colder.

Relative Hercules 

No doubt, 

demigods get microphones

and electric colored lighting.  

Lit up until the stage air is glazed with cherry cough syrup. 

Lighting as luscious as blackberry jam cake. 

Lit up, green smoke, orbs, ours. 

Tattoos, dreadlocks, cigarette throats bubbling poetry. 

Clothing that screams until you get daydreams. 

Drum beats and guitar chords translating sex or freedom in the soundwaves. 

World handling from artistic understanding. 

Confidence, charisma, born from splintered consciousness, 

January revelations, feverish heartbeats. 

Artists know 

that love melts cynicism 

like fleshy fingertips grazing an electric stove.

© Juliet Lauren

Bio: Juliet Lauren is an eighteen-year-old emerging writer. Her work can be found in Gold Wake Live, SkyIsland Journal, and Ghost City Review. Her manuscripts and poetry have also been recognized numerous times by the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards. She currently resides in Florida and you can follow her on instagram at jadore.mon.amour