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I said a living girl is a dead girl. I said my guardian

angel is racking up debts that I can’t pay. Winter is a 
debt collector. A living girl is a bled girl is a girl milked 

of her innocence. Hey you, I’m looking for directions

to a place where I won’t get homesick. Where the ground 
doesn’t smell like a lottery ticket. Where the sky’s gradient 

doesn’t shimmer like a blue raspberry gas station slushie. 

The last time I asked that, we ran off west through Nebraska.
Then we changed our minds and drove down to Texas. Wind 

turbines gaged the earth like a punk’s septum. The flatter 

the earth, the bigger the sky. The bigger the sky, the louder 
the wailing. I’m gonna live there one day. Go ahead, call me 

crazy. Call me cowpunk. It’s true: We don’t get to choose

where we’re from, but we get to choose who we relate to. When 
the doctors told me my eating disorder was killing me, I said 

instead, I was dying of desire. I still desire a wet ring of my 

strawberry lip gloss around your mouth and the curls pulled 
out of your hair by a cotton pillowcase. I still desire testimony 

carved into screen doors. I clung to you like the spit-soaked white

bread from my grandpa’s fried peanut-butter banana sandwiches 
clung to the roof of my mouth, like “I’ll Never Let You Go 

(Little Darlin’)” clung to its chords. Give me one more time to 

prove I’m okay with not doing it right. Give me one more time to 
prove I can not be good and still be yours. I rehearse requiems

in the knotted knolls of the night. The moon chaps my mouth.