OPEN-BRAIN SURGERY

on consuming one's self for love of Him, tu novio, un gringo

so i'm sitting in my basement with my brains separated from my skull, sloshing around in some water inside of the kind of little pink bowl they give you in hospitals to drop your organs in. it has silver stars glued to the bottom and mine and his initials etched into the sides. he's braiding my hair with his deft and soft fingers, tripping over strands and split ends, making love to curly black reaching upwards for the sun and he doesn't even care about the pink wads of brain threaded through my scalp. maybe it makes me even more darling. everyone likes a smart girl.

we're waiting for his parents to show up and kick me out. i am the bad girlfriend — i am the dark demon, the colored succubus that poisoned and corrupted and confused their precious blue-white boy so much he finds a brown girl beautiful. this is crazy for two reason, and one of them i cannot say, because my teeth, like my brain, have fallen out, swirling around in a tiny pail next to my brain bowl. he clinks them around like coins in a jar every once in a while to remind me i am alive.

we are hiding from ourselves. from our reflections in the mirror. from his parents and his sister and his dog sleeping upstairs. from the rats living under the freezer. from Jesus hanging from a cross by the bathroom mirror. from  the whole neighborhood. i am jezebel with two Bs, i am waiting for a white man's vengeance to make sodom and gomorrah out of me, i am already dead at their hands if he so much as cracks open a window for me to breath. we're sharing oxygen back and forth, through a little tube extending from the center of my chest. i think it makes us closer. i think my skin looks lighter, with his head against my burning heart. i think i'll have kill myself, to get any closer to him.