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I miss the taste of his Budweiser tongue inside my mouth.

Sweet, sweaty malt dripping from the follicles of his ginger American unkempt beard into the cupid's bow of my lips.

Whenever I get sad, I go out and buy a box of Calvin Klein underwear—some model I don’t already own. I’ve got so many by now—sadness comes often. I slip the new pair on, stand in front of the mirror, and take pictures of myself with my Pentax K1000. Something about the ritual—the film, the frame, the way the trunks sculpt my thighs—makes me forget what I was sad about in the first place.

Aphex Twin in the background. He used to like when I’d lie on his sofa in just white underwear, bright red from sex, legs resting over the coffee table. He’d stand naked on the balcony, smoking, the London Eye a blur in the distance. I’d just sit there, watching him—mystified by everything he did to me. He said I looked beautiful like that: silent, dissociated, staring at him from across the room in my Calvin Klein.

The older I grow, the harder it is

to find someone as sad as me.

Call me your Prozac baby —

but those capsules lost their magic long ago.

I’m pathetic,

wandering out of boredom,

as if someone is watching a movie about me.

No one feels emptier than I do

when the man I met on the internet —

who cradled me all night long—

rises and vanishes into the financial district,

where no one feels anything at all.

I’m mourning the death of depth.

American housewife, circa 1965 —

that’s what I fucking am.

I long to be possessed, owned,

but no one even bothers to court.

Fuck Jane Austen and her novels —

I’ve idealized men

who aren’t men anymore.

Fast fashion trends have bled into romance.

Fuck that.

Press your chest to mine, for God’s sake,

and listen —

listen to my heartbeat breaking and speeding against yours.

Stuff your tongue inside my mouth —

then have the courage to fucking write about it.

What is this nonchalance?

This numbness you call love?

I’m a writer,

an avid reader,

a fool,

a people pleaser,

and above all — a narcissist.

I bleed ink from my veins —

ink you could use to write about me

on the walls of your newly mortgaged apartment.

Does your wife catch my Jean Paul Gaultier cologne on the collar of your coat?

Does she know you are a fucking faggot like me?

Look at all the weight I lost for you.

What more can I do?

I know I don’t belong in a psych ward —

but the bland monotony of this world

makes me feel

like I ought to be locked away in one.

Look at me, going crazy, typing words on my Notes app once again.

Walking the empty streets of Madrid at 4PM.

Starving, hands jittering, downing another can of Diet Coke — but at least I’m getting skinnier.

Writing like someone is going to give a fuck about this free-verse poetry.

I swear to God, I’m not trying to be melancholic —

I’ve just been waiting 23 years to be a painter’s muse.

Grew my hair long, like Kurt Cobain and Johnny Depp in the 90s —

maybe that type of femininity will fucking capture him.

Shot a film in black and white about the Spanish church and a horny-ass priest.

Oh look, that guy just glanced at me up and down.

Thought I had written the next great American novel —

but instead got drenched in bad reviews.

God, those liberal debutantes.

I fucking hate the gays, but I’m a gay.

Do me a favor and lock me up.

I’ll keep walking, keep fleeing, until my knees hit the ground.

Wish I were brave enough to shoot myself in the head —

but I’m too prideful — convinced I’m the fucking best.

Sylvia Plath didn’t put her head in the oven for this.

Where do the wild-hearted people hide?

Take me home, country roads.

Let’s suck each other off in the backseat of your car and write a song about it like we were going to die tomorrow.

I’ll just keep walking these streets —

drunk on poetry you’ll never fucking write about me.

You left this world a week before my parents’ wedding in 1994. And even though you never got to hold my newborn body in your arms in 2002, I could still sense your maternal warmth and your heartbeat on the left side of my face when I hugged my beige linen pillow crying on the night I turned eighteen.

Everyone used to talk about the beauty and grace your soul and body radiated.
Your son used to think you were one of the most beautiful women on earth, and the grandchildren you never got to meet in person thought you were a shining superstar lost in the film reels of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. A Maria Felix, Dolores del Rio, hybrid of a woman. They used to call you the Mexican Audrey Hepburn. Your winged eyeliner, your jet-black beehive hair and your 1960s ruffled lace trim dresses. You were a fucking icon, and you didn’t know it back then. Because you never got to see yourself through the glorified pink vision of my eyes.

Francisco, my grandfather, was your Elvis fucking Presley. A gentleman caller. The Frank Sinatra that flooded all of your dreams as a young, lustful Catholic teenager.

I can still smell the sweet notes of the archaic rose perfume you bought in Saks Fifth Avenue in 1956 when I go through my mom’s jewelry box in the middle of the night. The crystal clear Japanese pearl necklace you gave my mother when she got engaged to your chivalrous son. The pearls that pierce right through my father’s heart every time she wears it around her neck on their floral gilded anniversaries. The Sharon Tate baby blue dress you once wore as a young office lady now hangs all the way in the back of my sister’s closet collecting dust.

Rosa Maria, I don’t know how to explain it, but I have been able to sense your shadow walking behind me ever since Cecilia and I opened a supernatural channel with a wooden spirit board on that hot Texan summer night in August when all the lights in the house went out. The goosebumps we both felt when your ghost permeated through our skin pores, into our bodies at the same time. The tears that fell from our eyes onto the mahogany hardwood flooring. The clock in the living room that loudly chimed at midnight. We had finally opened a door we were never going to be able to close.

Because now when my candles blow out at night before I go to sleep, I wonder if it’s you trying to communicate with me. When I run under a hefty rainstorm on the perfidious streets of London, I wonder if the water that is pouring over me are your evangelical tears. Or when I come back home drunk from the bar, I wonder if it’s you who tucks me inside my bed and puts me to sleep.

The amount of times I have screamed at myself in front of the mirror, trying to deflate my lower belly with my feisty nails. The time I fainted on the cold-hearted floor of the rusted suburban mall because men used to sexually fetishize my anorexia nervosa. Or the number of occasions I put my index finger down my throat all of last winter. Commercializing my skin and bones on the internet like a fucking wet market. But I was only screaming for help. If only I knew you were the one holding my hair whilst I vomited the food I had just eaten on the toilet bowl.

As leaves start to fall, and the autumn sun starts to bleed my heart dry, I wish you could still be alive to teach me a few things here and there.

Rosa Maria, please teach me how to grieve the loss of my innocence; it was brutally taken away from me at the age of fifteen. Please teach me how to redeem myself; I was corrupted and adulterated before I even became an adult. And lastly, please teach me how to feel as pretty as you did. It doesn’t matter if they all think I am, because I don’t.

the tree in front of my building is starting to grow cherry blossoms, but sometimes i wish i could stop being mean to you. it’s the end of march and as winter starts coming to an end and spring begins, i wish i could stop finding reasons to hate you. sometimes i wish i could see you in the eyes one day, smile at you and forgive you. but forgiveness is hard. you walked away and left my fleeting corpse on the highway rotten and wretched while trucks and cars kept running over my body, cracking my frail bones apart. because ever since you pushed me into the freeway, i am just a forgotten ghost in people’s lives. i want to breathe and exist but want to wipe myself out of everybody else’s mind.

i no longer have a man in my life that can lick the blood leaking from my wounds with his tongue. i only have men that invite me over to their prison cells at midnight, kiss me and use me and then dispose of me. because ever since i started eating again i stopped feeling beautiful. “you are much bigger now,” one of them said with a certain quality of disgust as we were both naked and stoned in his kitchen and i was stuffing myself with dark chocolate chip cookies.

but what he didn’t know was that i was starving myself to death and purging every meal that went down my oesophagus when he first fucked me in the first week of january. i sometimes just forget i was left on the pavement under the rain at two am like the poor festering dead fox i saw lying on the road in my fugitive morning birthday run the first of march.

i wish i could erase the initials the french german-born guy carved on my back with his knife that night under candlelight when he brutishly fucked me and pierced right through me with the thorns of his phallus on the cold-blooded sink at midnight.

sitting on the cold-hearted tube sat all the way in the back of the train, the luscious fluorescent lights from above expose the tears that stream down my eyes as they erode the skin of my cheeks. “i thought i was over this.” i quietly say to myself, as i secretly and savagely pull the strands of my hair on the back of my head. an old woman with a yellow peacoat and undone frizzy curly ginger hair comes up to me and asks me if im okay. im unable to speak. the only thing i want to do is get out of this tube and run all the way to the bathroom and put my finger up all the way down my throat, i want to throw it all up. i want to starve myself again. but i remind myself, that i never want to be in that place ever again.

i was finally happy and tranquil, but that can all change in the snap of a finger, like an unpredicted ruthless baseball coming at you hitting you in the back of your head and callously knocking you over the murky floor you once used to flood with your snot and tears. you realize that you don’t really have that many friends in your life and that you are truly alone in the big, tumultuous, city of london. it is a march, and the trees, like standing corpses, are still dead and leafless.

my messages seem to be swamped by desperate, distraught men who want to kiss my face, take me on dates and hug my body during my sleepless dreams. but i don’t want to love anymore, i don’t want to get hurt anymore. I’ve taped my broken bones together far too many times, but it seems like the adhesive on the tape always starts to mould and dry whenever I hear his name in public which makes my frail, brittle bones break apart once again.

i don’t want to post myself crying on my Instagram stories, and it’s not that I’m craving or seeking attention, I sometimes feel alone and simply just want someone to ask me: “are you okay?”