i was thinking about what’s in my blood and it’s mostly genetic stuff but also a wasteland if you’ve read T.S. Eliot so if you’re curious here’s not all just some of the shit in my blood: 

1. 55% plasma, mostly water carrying salt & proteins, tranquil medium that shapes time and space, the osmotic normalcy we take for granted 
2. 45% cells, red and white and platelets and probably some mysterious thing my sixth-grade bio teacher never explained before the classmate who caressed his hairy forearm got him fired and stayed friends with his son 
3. so much water, even though i cried until my throat drowned a summer pool, swallowed the concrete tiles during those chlorinated swimming lessons, tasted the lifeguard’s sunscreen and celestial sadness boiling into blood 
4. 7% protein, from chicken and protein bars and every prehistoric ancestor who ate someone else’s great^34 grandparents then called it zeitgeist
5. 1% miscellaneous, sugar and fat and hormones and nicotine and backyard trash and administrative sins rotting under star stickers underneath our dining table, the illegitimate birth of my dad in Rome, the excommunicated priest known as my grandpa, the way my daughter already writes me emails asking for a new credit card 
6. yes, that trace of nicotine, offered by a french man at an open air bar; i punched him for saying ni hao, he kissed me to apologize and exhaled smoke in my face then said “t’es si, si belle,” and we ate pasta like angelic thieves and i said i could recognize you in either heaven or hell
7. iron, now let’s get real dirty and talk about BLOOD, someone once told me period blood “mixes back into your circulation” and now i picture it as a private sabotage coming home, gorgeous and impolite and endearing, a rogue current blushing through the body, morphing into the red in lipsticks and colognes and someone else’s pulse on my neck
8. snail blood and other accidental carnage, since i have stepped on more snails after the rain than i have been choked, the sound so soft in its immediacy, a shell’s surrender weaving my guilt into the watery air of a city with 100% humidity, yet i never wrote poems about it, only kept walking
9. my mother’s paranoia dissolving like salt into plasma causing the membrane to shrink and crinkle and wrinkle and winkle yes we adored those little star stickers still underneath our dining table and when i decided thirty minutes before the 16-hour flight to become employable again i slid under the table and she just asked if the stars were still there 
10. officially known as hemoglossia, the site where language breaks down because look i only swear in English and only learned to do it right quite recently so that means i can really speak it now though i still can’t swear at all in my native language but that’s okay! i also wish i would never have to hear moans in chinese again, translate your pleas or stop 
11. someone would have to say fuck language, right? my high school calculus teacher’s silence, sticky like platelets and toxic like clots around my vessels and the bitcoins he mined on school computers and from graves my friend hexed who was burned on our school’s building then granted a new life in the ER 
12. a rehearsed FirstKiss aesthetic, practiced in mirrors to look as cinematic as Amélie and realizing oh that might not be me, not necessarily, so then i asked my younger brother if we could kiss and so that was my first kiss, with grape cocktails on our underage lips, our knees pressed against the cracked wooden floor, the taboo experiment that made me believe, for a short while, that those philosophers were right — what was aesthetic was indeed ethical
13. the EXIT sign burns either red or green but never Christmas, never that impossible harmony of colors resembling a forbidden romance, just the ugly sans-serif stretching at the end of the hallway, the other side of the theater, WHAT AM I DOING HERE? oh RIP Thom Yorke, you would’ve loved me, we could have been the coolest creeps together 
14. enough embarrassment to strip naked just to offset it, the girl in third grade who smelled like vanilla and clean laundry and Shenzhen clouds probably wanted me more than i understood, and even now i still picture kissing her just because i couldn’t have gone back and so i could stay a coward in this horrid present moment 
15. the specific shade of green of the tote bag belonging to a professor who carries the air of libraries and the Seine to wage war, without realizing, against the ridiculous part of me that once wanted to marry someone in private equity, that i ended up making ruinous eye contact, all my Lufthansa fury flickering inside it, with this tall gorgeous man in academia, GOD you are so devastating and you will never know 
16. the sound of chess clocks in a near-empty arena, the click that once crowned me a national champion now just counting down to my losses to a machine, the piano lessons i fled to as if those five sharp signs would have made me win that earlier match, the 9-year-old girl who could destroy me and whose two pigtails disappear every time i run to her 
17. parasites, meaning rumors i repeated once a backpack i stepped on once showers i keep taking to feel less evil though i remain a sinner with that hospital wristband from the day i bit into someone’s lips and sucked out too much blood and even my mom says i am no longer a human being i know —

i KNOW i am a parasite myself because all this shit, literal and metaphorical, keeps cataloguing bad choices like stamps on a passport and i’ve read too much Ottessa Moshfegh to reintegrate into this normal world which honestly isn’t that bad but i need to sort all this data and sterilize the bloodstream so let’s start over again: 

1. 55% plasma, but it’s actually 97% mundanity, random shit i may have invented just to keep you entertained 
2. blood red for the art of it, injury as punctuation, an old voicemail i neither listened to nor deleted, a box of chicken nuggets buried behind a stained page that greasy fingers once pinched 
3. coagulant syntax, the academy that taught me to be bearable and shut up and read micro-expressions and place parts of speech where they should land, the way i shuffle tarot cards and deal myself justice over and over until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
4. ambiguous toxins, i like my men gagged, a gym-floor one-liner dropped like my arms abandoning a 30-pound dumbbell, an ultimatum aimed toward nobody in particular, just to scare off men to the extent that they themselves choose the bear 
5. profanity in my second language as a shield to the horrors of the first, even when i confessed to my priest and therapist, i said the dirtiest things to both, i have never used deodorant in my life, i only produce odor deep inside my livers, one of which is donated to save a child who was dying from too much Advil and cocaine  
6. those EXIT signs blinking again and again because i do need to exit at some point, perhaps not now, then when? you ask, i say i don’t know baby, i don’t know, maybe after i finish calculating this one section of this one segment of this one line  
7. so there is shit in my blood and i might have given up trying to make it pretty since i lost my childhood at 4 in kindergarten or at 8 during a school shooting in California. i am still mostly water and so many random words. i inherited parentheses and commas and whispered sorry’s and thank you’s and still wonder if some greater deity would ever want me romantically. 

this is but a geological fault line under my skin, sediment rising in a cloud of setting powder, the confessions leaving me mortified & safe & hollower than i imagined. i’ve set the wasteland on fire and all it does now is stink. 

if counting meant control if prayer was just punctuation if mom you’re reading this if i keep gagging my men if every Gauloise i’ve burnt to its butt if every envelope of pig blood i’ve mailed to my grandpa if every chess match i’ve ever lost could all count as redemption, i might as well stop counting.