i’ve decided it’s impossible.

you only get to love like that
once
in your life.

the fire was so hot, so
consuming
that there’s nothing left
of me
to burn.
i am but ashes in an
urn, and what are the chances
anyway,
really?

i know how special
finding you
was. i know how
rarely
that happens
to people so distracted, to
people like us.

and i’m tired of wasting my time
waiting to find that again,
when i know how
despairingly
unlikely
that is.

my fuse has all gone down
to nothing; how could anyone else
ever light me?
and how will he ever find me
in the dark?

I had it in a blue bottle,

and it made you want to
dress the floor in my
clothes.

On my way home, I looked
off and when my eyes met
back with the road, I had
to slam my breaks on
and I believed in God
for a second.
I wonder if you would have
come to see me
in the hospital.

Every time we do this,
I cut my hair, I contemplate
getting a tattoo, and I
start listening to music I know
you never listened to.

I’m always looking to be someone
in spite of you, for an escape
from the way you
defined me.
I haven’t worn that perfume
since the day you said
you wouldn’t
hold me,
and now I’m not sure
which one of us that’s
empowering.

The more I change my life
to forget, the more
I seem
to remember.

why can’t i be
weaved into the cheap leather
your wrists are laced with?

my body is limber enough
for at least that.  

why can’t i be something
you always make sure to
keep up with?

i just want you to feel naked
if you forget to leave
the house without me.

oh
my
god

why aren’t you sitting on my
bedroom floor right now,
watching me
do nothing but
watch you? who are you
that i cannot wait
to meet your family, that you can
make a poet unable to
find words that form coherent sentences, and
what did the angels say
when god made you
more beautiful
than they are?

i wonder if they committed the same
of the deadly sins i’m sure i will give in to
on account of your body and the way
that it moves

and the way that it moves
me.

i often wonder if the world had
no religion, would anyone
find reason to
do good things.

you took my waist in your
hands when i needed it,
and i know god didn’t
make you do that. there was
no promise of heaven for
making a stupid girl feel
worth something,
and i just knew
something would become of you
after this life,
regardless.

i’m not on the other side
of the door for you
anymore, to tell you
that death is only
the beginning
and that we will be together,
and now i think, to avoid
disappointment, you believe
nothing and have chosen
to die alone anyway.

i would have been there
if you had wanted me,
and that isn’t because
i think god would reward me for it
later.

the reward was in your shifting eyes
as you were reading, in your
fingers as you touched the
most fragile parts me of,
playing them each like
piano keys.

i hope you really learned
to make music, like you wanted.
i hope you learned to love yourself
as much as i did.

My hair doesn’t feel real
when I touch it.
I started to wonder
about the rest of me.
And I realize I’ll never know
what I felt like, what your hands
thought
when they touched me.
I bet you could feel
how fragile I was at first,
and how much more durable
I became
afterwards.
I wonder if you miss
rolling me between your fingers.
I wonder if you stopped
because they were starting to go numb.

My body has never been held
by hands
so carefully.
I still can’t believe
that you dropped me.

i can’t keep
running in circles
to find you.

the only places i know to look are
all the places we’ve already been,
and you’re not in any of them
because you know better than to
hang around, or linger.
you’re the only one of us
who knows how to keep moving
without looking back at me.

i might as well
be a pillar of salt,
i tell you.

I can’t say
that I miss
the stress of it all,
that wall-pounding,
fists-full-of-hair,
floor-cradling
sensation in the very center
of me, somewhere between
the pit of my stomach and the
base of my spine.
And honestly, I think love
is meant to be easier
than ours was.

But sometimes I want that.
When I meet someone who is willing
to love me again, I will want him
to love me enough to fight with me,
but without all the dramatics,
without caring if the speeches
come out right or if the sighs fall
in all the right places.
And occasionally, I hope his wanting
to haul off
and punch me and his wanting
to take my face between his
palms and kiss me
are one in the same
emotion.

I want to feel that fever
in someone’s hands again.

But I want it to have the tendency
to be easily broken, for his skin to cool
enough not to be burn me
when I try to hold him,

like yours did.

commas are crucial.

sometimes, i go back in and i add
a comma, just so you feel
the pause
in the words
when you say them,
the same as i imagine them
in my head.

and i hope you’ll catch on,
and know that when there is
no comma you are not allowed
to even breathe until you have finished
my sentence and that may be
the only control
that i have,
or that i need.

and i don’t think you know how
important periods can be.

like a cliff at the end of
a 12-minute mile.
there is nothing more final.
than words can seem.

that’s why when i finally
told you goodbye(.),
i made sure not to leave it
unpunctuated.

maybe the fact that i can’t
think of anything to say
means i’m finally starting
to forget about you.

i keep wanting to write about
how i can still feel you under
my skin, how my body aches and
my mouth hangs open
and lingers, waiting for your
breath to fill my lungs again,
but i can’t, and it doesn’t,
and i don’t feel like that,
anymore.

i thought it was because i was so
irrevocably in love with you,
i thought it was the way your
hands were the first to really
touch me, i thought it was
something in how i knew
all of your best moves
and how you could tell what i
was going to do before i even
knew, but now i think
i kept this up for so long
just to have something
to hold on to.

i’ve finally stopped feeling
like i lost something,
and now i have absolutely nothing
to write about, and i think that
is far worse
than your not loving me.

i could see the glare of the t.v.
in your glasses.
i always loved looking at you
when you didn’t know i was,
memorizing the size
of your irises,
the exact curve of your
brow line, how perfectly
symmetrical
your eyes were, and wondering
what in god’s name
they saw in me.

i used to find your eyelashes on me
in the mornings,
and i’d pluck them from my cheeks
and pucker my lips to make
wishes as i blew them from my
fingertips, and in the mirror,
suddenly realize
that i had no idea what to wish for
because i already had everything.

I don’t even look like who I
think I am.
I caught a glimpse
of her in the mirror hanging from
my closet door, while I was lying in bed
with the lights on, and I still look like
I did when I was fifteen.
My face has not changed.

Sometimes, I can still see the
eight-year-old staring back at me.

I lay there, arms overlapping,
extending and retracting my fingers
the length from the back
of my other hand
as far as they would reach
beyond my wrist, and those fingers
did not even look
like my own.
Long and thin.
Bony and lean.
They may as well have been the
legs of spiders for all I knew of them,
for how absolutely foreign
they seemed when they were
on me.

I wish I could say the same
about yours.

But in my dreams every night for the last few, I have lived the pasts of
many years ago,
and they are still as real
as if they were currently happening,
as if I had just left your apartment
wailing and beating my hands
against my steering wheel,
as if I had just slipped on the ice
in your driveway, and you’d asked
if I was okay, and I sincerely wanted
to know
if it mattered.
And the pain still burns in my chest,
still heaves heavy in the bottom
of my gut, when I
wake up to this cinder block
cell they call a bedroom,
and you are not here, but the walls
are so white, like I’m supposed to be
clean of you.

Like I’m supposed to be
clean.

Time heals all wounds, but it cannot erase
the scars they leave.
I don’t even see that I have scars,
I don’t even remember how free-flowingly I
bleed, until I’m sleeping

until your imaginary hands
wake me up,
and remind me.

These dark circles under my eyes
don’t sleep.
I get up to turn the light off
and can’t find my way back to my bed
without your voice
there to guide me.
I can’t remember the sound of my own
giggling.

I thought,
in the beginning,
I couldn’t wait until a year passed.
I thought by then that everything would
be okay.
But every moment that passes is just
an anniversary of a moment I thought time
would help me forget when all time does
is make sure I
remember.

I just want to feel inclined
to get out of bed in the mornings,
for some reason other than
I have to.

That song came on the radio
tonight, the one we used to
sing to each other.
It will always bring everything
back for me.
I just don’t think you will ever
know how deep in
my gut I meant it when I said
you were the closest to heaven
that I’d ever be,
and I never want to go home,
without you.

It makes me remember things
I was sure I’d forgotten,
like the names we’d already
picked out for our kids,
and the way your teeth would
click together when you were
falling asleep, and what your
voice sounded like when you
actually sang, instead of
inserting your name into every
line like you liked to.

They were right, that
sooner or later, it’s over.
But I miss you whether I want to
or not.

I wish I could lay all these parts
of my past to rest, but I can’t,
because all I really knew was how
to give myself to you.
I was never worried about how
I would get it back
if I needed to.

your name isn’t just a word
to me.

it has so much personality,
it strikes a chord that no
one else feels the vibrations of
when they say it.

it’s not just what people
call you by. it’s the thing i
used to giggle all the times
that you would tickle me,
it’s all my heavy breath
could think
to call out to the ceiling
from underneath you.

it’s the only word i actively
avoid using in conversation,
because i don’t want to
feel my mouth
form the sound of
every letter, i don’t want to
hear my voice falter at the
thought of you,
i don’t want you to linger
on my lips

anymore.

Eight pills on an
empty stomach.

I can hear the fluids
bubbling and
churning to the rhythm
of you telling me
I stressed you out
to the point of physical
illness, and
that’s why I had to
leave you, partly,
but mostly because
you left me

no choice.

Maybe if I’d purged
myself of all these
toxins sooner,
you would have actually
been able to
stand me.
I always knew I was sick,
but you’re the only one
who’s ever said
that I was sickening.

you made the part in my hair
forget
where it should be.

maybe it was all that
sharp turning
wall breaking
sheet clenching

time we shared

or maybe
my hair was just as
enamored with you
as the rest of me.

i think sometimes it
got redder
when you were there.

i swear, it blushed
every time
that you touched me.

I keep cutting my own hair
hoping to deviate from
the girl you knew.
With every chunk I throw into
my trash can, something else I
liked about you is discarded and
forgotten or left loose, stray pieces
that pointlessly decorate
my bathroom.

Sometimes I think about
shaving my head
to get rid of this smoke smell
and the things you used to whisper
at night when you held me,
an overused excuse not to
look me in the eye,
saying everything with your lips
pressed, voice muffled against
my temporal lobe, making
barely audible your
I love yous and goodnights.

I want someone to love me
for things that you hated me for,
like when I paint my nails or
how I use big words when I get
angry or
the fact that other people
have touched me.

I just don’t want someone who
loves me because he thinks I’m some
perfect being.
I want someone who loves me
because I gave up being perfect,
and I chose to be a real person,
instead.

And I make mistakes, but I make
good decisions sometimes, too.

my lips have chapped
and peeled enough to
guarantee that there is not
an original inch of them left
that has brushed against you.

they know,

just as well as
i do how easily it can be
triggered, the faintest
hint of cologne from a
passerby, but the rest of my
skin is not as much,
yet somehow, even more
stubborn that it does not
shed its layers
so willingly.

i always hear people say
that the person they love
makes them better than they
are, and better than they
thought they could be,
but you made me
lazy
and you stole away
my ambition, and
your very embrace made me feel like
an animal, and i would have
killed anybody in my way,
to get to you.

you made me into
everything that
i hated,

except happy.

i really liked being
happy.

i am a sailboat in
open ocean,
and i just need you
to take me
by storm.