hurricane tea

I handed him a strand of hair

he twirled it between his fingers

and marveled at the shine

I pulled more out

one by one

and gave each to him

he kept losing them

I gave him my eyes

smooth and blue and white

he rolled them

round and round

kissed them for luck

and lost them in a game of marbles

I gave him my skin

he stretched it tight around him

stroked it with his fingertips

he poked and he pulled

it tight around him

and it tore to shreds

I gave him my breast

and then the other

he moved them

hand to hand

rubbery little water balloons

he squeezed them, smiled

and they burst

I gave him my heart

bloody, red mess

cupped in his hands

he held it to his lips

sucked it dry

let the empty mass slip

through his fingers

and fall to the floor

Standing here

head, no hair

face, no eyes

body, no breasts

flesh, no skin

soul, no heart

I asked for it back

for it all back

He shrugged

I never asked for any of it

to begin with

~ Lara Coley

It is not only that you suck out my dreams and chew on them like soggy toothpicks, it’s that

I can’t remember the last time I really, really wanted to fuck you.  I can’t remember if I ever did.  I keep thinking of Hraban, of waking with him and knowing it was going to end when I got in the train and how much I could give to him because I knew that the giving would stop.  But with you, I keep giving as if the universe has promised to give me as much as I give, and I am waiting for it to arrive, with a ribbon of desire, and kisses that choke me in their need, in their drowning intensity, an intensity that makes me forget to breathe until my lungs beat my nostrils into submission and my eyes flutter me up to the rustle of your hair like leaves in a tree and I inhale. 

But that is not the kind of drowning I am doing today.

~Lara Coley

make love

like you have no

secrets

like you’ve

never been 

left 

never been 

hurt

like the world

don’t owe you a 

single

wretched

thing.

~Warsan Shire

My mother is slipping out of sanity like it’s a thin, silk dress that lands on the floor without a sound. She is turning off the radio and memorizing parked cars. She is asking for the keys to doors that are unlocked and I can do nothing but shrug to strangers. On the fifth trip to the airport, I shrug. On the second time in the parking lot on Sunday, I shrug. When she asks why I want to go to school, I shrug. I am making myself a sandwich and answering the phone. I am putting away my toys and I am waiting. Waiting for someone to ask me the question that matters, the one I can answer, the one I need to hear: ‘And, who, my dear, is taking care of you?’ 

~Lara Coley

I want to be in the dark places, where you go looking for a word you’ve forgotten but my name surfaces instead, and when you’re angry at your boss and you want to scream into the void of his pallid face but the elevator fills with echoes of galloping damnations in my name in his place, and when you’re thinking of your ex and that thing she used to do that you liked so much, I want you to imagine that, but where her name should be swimming, the letters of my name float to your taste buds, and now, as you see the depth of my smiling dimple as the indirect proportion of the distance between my heart and yours, I want to feel my name written in the fissures as those brittle walls we’ve built crumble and the dust, oh, the dust… I want the dust so full of my name that you choke when you try to whisper that maybe, just maybe, I might be expecting too much.

~

Lara Coley

You are disappearing into the shadows of the past… Not to say that you will be gone, but that I will not see you for all the darkness made by obstacles that once were and the ever tiring speed of love and lightness.  

~

Lara Coley

The weight of loving you is like the weight of water to the drowning.  I dove in but I never thought your arms would feel like darkness setting in, breath dissipating with the depth of my plunge, your voice whispering, Almost there. Breathe… as I sink deeper into your shadows.

~ 

Lara Coley