my fingers taste like oranges.

the ghosts in my bathroom mirror played charades with my reflection, and the glare of my anxiety echoed through my skin.  my lung capacity shriveled up in its seashell carapace like a hermit crab or a dying tortoise, but aren’t we all just turtles stuck on our backs?  aren’t we all just brittle skeletons trapped in skinbowls?

-

i peeled the aurora
from the citrus sunrise
like ultraviolet scabs
from hollow rind.

-

lately, my memory’s been marching tangy tangos in moshpit ballrooms, and bruising like a wastebasket of rotten fruit.  i tried refreshing the page, but the swirling adjectives in my mind skipped their shift to skip stones.  last tuesday, i bit my nails to the core because of you, but this wasn’t even about you originally, so now i have to polish my looking glass again.  because remember? my mirror is polish and my shadow is swedish and all my kitchen appliances are european.

the gremlins and goblins in my cardboard mouth rewired the anagram letters of rewired to spell weirder and contradict the cracked tissue around my oral cutout of bleeding collagen; spontaneous surprises exploded nouns and verbs out, and they’re so chapped i need lip balmshells like the broken eggshells of all the world’s dying turtles.

-

you recklessly replaced
the hydrogen ions on my tastebuds
with entirely unnecessary adverbs,
as tricky thieves stealthily snatched
sour slices from my tangerine face.

and there i go again,
bringing you up where you don’t belong.
but i’ve always had a tendency to ramble
on about unimportant topics.

-

the acerbic acid careened on my tongue, tickling my hypersensitive nerve endings, and the tingling sensation danced rough waltzes on my fuzzy epithelial cells like a duet with my moshing retentive gland.  neither of them are concentrated, but who can blame them?  i’m lacking in vitamins a-z, and maybe even some greek letters, but that’s only because drinking juice makes me sick, and i take my parts of speech in colored wedges.

-

you’re just a pulp adverb,
recyclable and overrated,
but adverb is a noun, and
i’m the one who keeps on
writing about why, oh, you.