Oh my God calm down
no need to make a scene,
your hair is crazy
and the wailing is obscene.

Buck up buttercup
we ain’t got time for that,
dry off those cheeks
and re-adjust your cock hat.

[tick tock tick tock
you drag on and on,
leaking cheap mascara
after my buzz is long gone.]

Get a grip Rachel
being alone is not so bad,
at least you’re not marrying
a coke head older than your dad.

© Nancy Botta, 2019

(I don’t know how I got here,
surrounded by temperance and emptiness)

old habits slide under clothes
and explore cross-stitched hips,
looking for new canvas to stipple
with flesh-wounds and rusted guilt;

(but one day I woke up unraveling,
thoroughly done with all this cleanliness)

angry compulsions knock around my head
under a hail of calcified shit,
like the pebble in my shoe
or a weeping scab on my lip;

(so I unsheathed the knives and got to work,
stripping myself of mercy and forgiveness).

© Nancy Botta, 2019

A practical woman
builds her hearth and home
with skin from her body,
bones from her dreams,
and circles it with
salt from her tears.

© Nancy Botta, 2019

I leave before sunlight
could wash me out of bed,
because a photographic headache
is all I have of last night’s weakness,
and the way you look right through me
tells me all I need to know;
your heart has no twitch
and my body has no sway.

© Nancy Botta, 2019

I used to like roses,
and a stiff drink-
maybe?
I can’t recall now,
it makes the scar itch.

They said I argued too much,
“quarrelsome and prone to hysterics”-
footnotes to an epithet (or is it epitaph?)

Sometimes my skull aches,
and sometimes I forgetthereisaspacebetween
my
self,
like a pocket of air
beneath the skin.

(helpless blood pooling
into a nice white space)

I don’t know why
I’d bang and scream,
why I’d claw at my arms
and let things vex me so much,
claw at their eyes
and let them vex me so much.

Troublesome;
but they had a cure,
a treatment for tempests
drinking from tea cups-

I told them
I told them
I don’t like the blankness
filling up my mind—

did you know
I used to like roses
and a stiff drink?

© Nancy Botta, 2019