(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

How can we possibly
sew our lives together
when the hurt we’ve woven
unspools from our mouths,
when all our severed threads
leave us knotted up yet unraveled?

© Nancy Botta, 2019

Generation loss of a happy moment—
sun and grass, watermelon smiles
loop back
cut the noise
record, lets try that again.

Static glows from her head
and pitch shifts her voice
(the one you almost forgot)
when she pulls you in and says
“smile for the camera!”—
red juice drips off your chin
as you jostle pink meat
against white teeth and full cheeks;
beaming at a little red light
beaming like a little sun.

Generation loss of a happy moment—
sun nd grss, watermlon smils
loop back
cut the noise
record, lets try that again.

© Nancy Botta, 2019

I like a blank silence
and that I get too high
to hear words flare out—
I fog up windows
because I don’t want
angry spittle in my eye.

It’s okay to be lonely
and twist myself away
from nagging hands—
there’s no tension
in a bouquet of vapors,
just a softly unfocused smile.

© Nancy Botta, 2018