when dolphins are born, they burst into the water tail first.
within minutes, their mother herds them up to the surface
for a first breath of air, sharp and dry,
as they exhale a spray of water into the sky.
when dolphins are born, they are born smiling.

when i was born, i opened my mouth before i opened my eyes
and screamed for thirty minutes straight,
my young lungs choking on the unfamiliar taste of air, sharp and dry.
by the time i blinked through my first spray of tears,
my mother said there were enough to fill the pacific ocean twice over.
she said she hoped that it would be enough to last me a lifetime.

in 1966, a twenty-four year old brian wilson began recording
a teenage symphony to god.
smoke in his lungs and fire in his heart,
he transcribed the california dreams that kept him up at night,
held his breath underwater until he saw constellations in the pool,
built a sandbox beneath his grand piano just to bring the surf inside.
even after wilson shelved his SMiLE in favor of
pillbox teeth and bedsheet sunsets,
the world never stopped searching for it.

in high school, my nickname was "smiles"
because it's all i ever seemed to do.
i navigated campus like i was being showcased in a tank half full,
jumped through hoops of
fire,
boys,
and college apps alike
without ever showing an ounce of discomfort,
like perfect was indeed possible without practice,
or even possible at all.
it became easier to dive deeper, move quieter,
bury my insecurities beneath a wide-eyed grin.
no one notices an overabundance of skin or body or
words when confronted by a hundred-tooth barricade.

i went through boys like storms go through ships,
my fingers springing accidental leaks into each of their sides
until they fell,
captivated,
captivating,
capsized,
spiraling into the depths below.
yet i was always the first to hear their cries when the tides withdrew,
the only siren in the world capable of regret,
the eye of the hurricane that granted them safety.
even after i emerged from the fray,
soaking and breathless and alone,
my eyes were dry, my smile buoyed in place.
staring out over the wreckage behind me,
i did not know it was possible to feel anything but relief.

it is 2016 and brian wilson is seventy-three years old.
he has felt every vibration, good and bad, and now chooses both,
now understands that every summer must eventually come to an end.
on the days he feels alone at his grand piano, he wanders down to the beach,
buries his toes in sand still warmed by the sun.
when he smiles, the ocean roars in approval.
as he closes his eyes, it calls for an encore.

these days, i have stopped ornamenting myself with illusions,
though sometimes i can still feel them tug at the corners of my mouth.
i am too wary, too large, too loud to be sealed behind glass anymore,
to either save or be saved.
some days, i wake up and there is not ocean enough in the world to contain me.

when dolphins are born, they are born smiling.
that doesn’t mean that they are always happy.
even when tossed by a sea of its own blood,
surrounded by the gaping jaws of
mothers
and brothers
and daughters
who can no longer sing back,
a dolphin cannot frown.
i have long learned to be grateful for my ability to.

my smiles come and go,
brought on tides i can no longer control.
but each time one washes ashore,
i cradle it in my arms before letting it go.
just another wild thing that needs to be free.

sext: it is a sweltering august night and we are caught up in the music of our own naked bodies. it is not 1969 but i feel woodstock in my bones.

sext: finger me like i am the strings of your favorite guitar, until my vertebrae vibrate with the melodies hidden in between the spaces of my spinal cord.

sext: the needle touches vinyl and i can’t get my hands off of you.

sext: our breaths quicken into quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes. we crescendo to a chorus of carbon dioxide and then begin again, panting.

sext: i’m stevie nicks and you’re tom petty. remind me that there is still a way to translate love into music. remind me that a heartbeat can be shared territory.

sext: even my name sounds like music when wound around your tongue.

sext: save your forevers for a stadium packed with screaming lights. i just want your now, amplified loud enough to shatter my stereophonic rib cage.

sext: come closer, i want to map out your body on a mix tape and press replay so many times that you can hear the smudged fingertip traces.

sext: whoever they are, wherever they are, they are singing about us.

sext: they will always be singing about us.

I.
i was fourteen when i learned that columbus brought
guns and shackles to the new world instead of turkey.
last weekend, when you told me what happened to you
the night of october fourteenth, i had to check both of
your wrists to make sure they weren’t bound together.
i had to grow sea legs in the backseat of a parked car.

II.
sometimes hands are not kind.
sometimes hands explore people like diseases invade towns,
choking the distance between breath and body in seconds.
when he touched you that night, you must have confused
the cobweb of lines across his palm for transatlantic cables.
you must have forgotten that each year, the ocean spits out the
skeletons of ships who rattle the tides without her permission.

III.
when christopher columbus hit land, he wanted gold so badly that
he excavated it from the hearts of natives, took a midas hammer
to their spines until they bled pools of light around his ankles.
that autumn night, it happened to you too, didn’t it, golden girl?
except afterward, the stain you left on the white sheets was red.

IV.**
in 1491, no one thought that the earth was flat.
sometimes history tries to rewrite things that make no sense,
that should never have happened to cities carved from trees
or girls whose bodies sing electricity into the midnight air.
if you listen, you can still hear the hiss of sparks on cold flesh.
you won’t forget the smell. they can’t remember anything else.

for nine years, you’ve starved me of words,
trading syllables for meaning like candy on
an elementary school playground. there are
thousands of entries now, scraped a to z and
in between from the alphabet until it bleeds.
but who cares, no big deal. you want more.
hours past midnight and the tea in your red
mug has gone cold again. lately, you’ve
converted to a religion of definitions but i
still hear you praying for truth in your sleep.
when we walk together, the sky feels more
like a region of atmosphere than the basin
your sister tried to bury herself in last fall.
when they found her crumpled like a lace
dress promise under the tree in your yard,
you wouldn’t watch the leaves dance for
weeks. it think it reminded you too much
of the way we play in the tears of clouds
every time it rains, when you should be
thinking of gravity (noun): the force that
attracts a body toward the center of the
earth. you see, that’s all it is to you now,
words paraded as equations and locked
between the pages of your very own bible.
but some nights, you are god only over
my hands. some nights, we extinguish the
candles and leave the words alone, watch
them dance like embers from a flaming tree.
when you ask me the meaning of love (noun),
i draw in a breath but let the words firefly on
above me. i do not regret letting them go.
i still do not regret you.

i.   on our first date, you ask if i want to learn how to fly. guiding my trembling fingers over the yoke, you introduce me to an old friend, a mechanical anatomy you’ve had memorized since you were sixteen. the first time your hands leave the two of us alone, you watch my terrified eyes and laugh. flying is the easy part, you say.

ii.   there was a time when explorers would name new lands after people they loved instead of themselves. somehow i’ve never found that idea comforting. it worries me that places out there exist that can wear my name better than i do. on nights when you’re gone, i spend hours trying to picture what an island looks like when it smiles.

iii.   even as she was bathed in the icy blood of a dying vessel, rose sang a love song to the stars. when i think of romance, i think of hands that dissolve into air so that hearts have to sprout wings just to find each other on the way down. i think of ships of dreams and flying machines.

iv.   these days, i have stopped waiting for the silhouettes of planes to paint demolition across the sunset. when i’m lonely, i play fleetwood mac records and spin around the apartment until i exorcize all the ghosts. i try to convince myself that when loving rhiannon, no one gets to win.

v.*  on our last night, i ask you what the hardest part of being a pilot is. you unstitch your eyes from the cerulean-sewn skyline and look at me. *landing, you say. your hand feels warm in mine.

the last time i waited for life, it hit me like a car crash.
glass ground into dust, bones playing off each other like
a skeletal rockshow; i was a human kaleidoscope.
when i finally opened my eyes again, i saw clouds in
the cracks on the sidewalk, found pieces of myself
smashed into concrete like a chalk-drawing anatomy.
skin met ground easily, like it always belonged there.

life must be the hit-and-run type, because i never saw
its eyes leave the road ahead; i never even saw it look
back. accidents happen, they will say, when they find me
unfolded like a street art snow angel. and maybe they do.
but more likely, the car windows were obscured by dirt
or the roads gave up on storing rain for the springtime.

or maybe it’s just me, a permanent fixture of boulevards
that smell like regret and missed chances, trying to predict  
changing street lights like they are signals for starting over.
just another halcyon disaster zone, entertaining the collision
of twin headlights on skin, the iceberg that devoured a ship
just for declaring that it had dreams to carry across the sea.

i will never stop turning myself inside out to see if the future
is something inscribed on dna, to watch the pieces of my soul
bleed into each other like wax in a technicolored lava lamp.
i will never stop filtering life through a maze of mirrors and
colors, tilting it this way and that until i can turn the pieces
of broken glass into keys that fit the lock of an escape car.

i will never stop.

there is an old persian legend of a man who falls in love
with a woman and goes insane when he cannot have her.
even after she is married to someone else, he spends his days
composing love songs in the dirt, building sandcastle hearts
just to watch them collapse again when the tide rolls back in.

years pass, and the girl never writes anything back.
i still wonder if she was ever given the chance to.

i was twenty-seven when i learned that you could fashion a
stethoscope out of a cassette tape, broadcast the sounds of your
heart to a double guitar riff that screamed desire. you pressed
play and in an instant, i was priest to your deepest confessional.

i never asked about how you looked at me on the days that my
husband was too busy finding god to join me in bed at night.
i never wanted to know that you sinned in the color of my eyes.
i never thought i’d be remembered for the moment that i traded
krishna for *******, and the thousand days that followed:

day 176: we mix love and self-destruction in an old hotel room
until they go down my throat as easily as sweet red wine.
day 472: you turn watching me get ready for a party into an
excuse to make love to my reflection with the windows open.
day 894: you spend the entire morning restringing your guitar
but i can still recognize another woman’s voice in its tone.
day 1000: i loved you but never had the instruments to prove it.

we’ve both realized that obsession is a drug best left to legend.

to this day, they still call me the greatest muse of rock and roll,
but each switch of the radio dial is just another reminder that i
once tasted like music in the mouths of men, that their words built
me up like a flower-child mona lisa in all the permanence of three
minutes of vinyl, that though i inspired the most beautiful lyrics  
ever written about love, they never called me onstage to sing them.

i was once told that if you love a woman to the point of madness, she
will become it. but any insanity i have remains etched on the insides
of my veins; i walk beaches now, much too old for sandcastle-building.

years pass, and the girl has never written anything back.
i still wonder if she will ever be given the chance to.

even the world’s greatest muses sometimes want to hold the pen.