MissAmberanda

spiraling down down down down down stop. relax. breathe. Everything will be okay. Drift away into oblivion, let everything go. Let go. Put a smile on your face. What you've lost in one place You've gained in another. Pause. Rewind. See that?  Its that smile you've been looking for. Now play.

          i. stardust scatters with the direction of my pupils – maybe secretly i am an astrology teacher, waiting for a sign to wink happily at me.          ii. excuse the rambling nature of forgotten question marks, but tell me: would you like to be the object of handwritten clichés would you like to whisper secrets in my palm and would you like to be the possibility          iii. air brushes against my skin like the torn petals of a flower still standing. [ hold your head up high, honey, and tell tomorrow to wait just a while,          iv. so you can figure out the difference between patience and having all the

When I was a little girl, I went to church. Our church was an illegal one: the building was unregistered. We would sit on the benches made from stolen floorboards and listen to a man dressed in black as he read us tales of angels coming to save righteous men from evil, their swords clean and their trumpets blaring. The man dressed in black was old. He was sick. His Bible was missing pages. One day in March, my mother turned to me and said clearly, "Masha, I want you to remember something for when you grow up." Maybe she knew she was dying. "God loves murderers." I just looked up at her, thumb in my mouth. My mother was still a beautiful w

xvii. i want to write about how this world of absolute truth, knowledge, and solid food— that which we hold high between two fingers is always full of watery applesauce and little white half-truths. and about how utterly strange it is that all the simple things that people write about on pages are, in reality, very few and far between. xvi. and i want to write about how there is peace and war and poverty and treasure and cruelty and sometimes, sometimes, small and important moments of grace. xv. i want to write a poem about why the hell i'm wasting my time writing poems when i could maybe actually be doing something produ