I’ve always craved skinny,
The way other fourteen year olds craved their parents *****
I wished for hip bones that could slice me in half
Skinny was always a glowing exit sign in a dark room

Breakfast was 4 glasses of water
My organs floated in my body like trash in the ocean
I didn’t feel full unless I was empty
Which doesn’t make sense
But neither does starving yourself
Yet I mastered that a long time ago  

I still count the minutes after I eat
Food feels like a brick in my stomach
Some days I want to feel my bones more than I want to be healthy

It’s been six years since I first looked at food
and saw only numbers
My bones are no longer accessible
Most days I eat three meals and don’t think about it
Some days I break apart sticks of gum
Dividing 5 calories
Into a full days meal

Some days I want to be skinny
More than I want to be happy
And most days I realized how ****** up that sounds
But sometimes I miss the shipwreck that filled my hollow bones
Sinking organs with no hope against the water I fed them

I have always been hard to love
But am quick to fall in love
My father called me tree hugger growing up
Because I have always cared deeply
for everything living
Expect for myself

All the boys that broke my heart
Said I was too hard to open
All I heard was that I’m not pretty enough to work for
Maybe that’s been the truth all along

Now I break my own heart to save them from trying
It hurts less if I’m the one pulling the trigger
So I tell people I just haven’t found the one yet
When I know deep down I’m a lock that never had a key
Nobody will ever fit me perfectly
And I need to start accepting that

It’s been a year of falling in love with you / for a brief moment in time you looked at me / and saw a galaxy inside of me / but like the night sky / morning came and suddenly / I was too bright to look at for too long /

I don’t remember what it’s like / not to love you / it’s become a part of my daily routine / loving you is as natural to me / as brushing my teeth / or combing my hair / my love for you is a muscle memory / and forgetting how to love you / feels an awful lot like unlearning how to ride a bicycle /

I need to learn to look at you / and not see the sun / I built up my identity around loving you / and now I have nothing left / I need to grow again / from a seed to a flower / you used to make me bloom / but now I need to find a new way / to survive when the sun isn’t out /

I never thought of the smiths as romantic before I met you
But one day you laughed and daisies sprouted in my chest
Now I can’t stop listening to Morrissey

At nineteen I broke my own heart
You mended it with kindness
And as we rang in the new year I bloomed for you

Within nine months I was a flower garden
But then September came
My flowers died from the cold
Meanwhile you were growing flowers in another girl’s garden
And I was too blind to see you never planted any in mine at all

There is a boy in my life
that reminds me of how it feels
to be hopeful

Emerald eyes and freckles on his cheeks
I yearn to trace like constellations
find the Big Dipper amongst his cheekbones
each time I look at him
I can wish upon shooting stars
—my very own Astraeus

His laughter feels like a March breeze
the first bloom of flowers
and sunshine on bare shoulders
he puts Mother Nature to shame
the embodiment of spring
unaware of the beauty he holds
inside of him

When he touches me flowers grow
from the darkest corners of my mind
my ribs sprout daisies
tulips grow in my lungs
and with every breath I take
gardens bloom

My sunshine boy I want to show you
just how important you are—
without you there would be no spring
and the world would forget
how healing it is
to feel the grass beneath their feet
after months of being trapped
inside their minds

I often joke about my mental health. Every time someone asks me if I’m okay I respond with something witty without thinking. My body’s natural instinct is to make a situation lighter to protect myself. If I laugh I can’t cry, if I laugh to the point of gasping for air then maybe my body will confuse it for a sob and my chest will stop feeling like it’s filling up with water instead of oxygen. I was never taught how to swim so on rough days when I start drowning I can’t do anything but flail. So far I’ve managed to keep my head above water but what happens when my legs and arms get tired? Who’s going to throw me a line and pull me out of the water? Most of the time I feel lonely on land but when I’m drowning I realize just how empty the ocean can be. When I was four my mother left my sister in charge of me. I walked into the pool without my water wings and almost drowned. A crowd of adults surrounded the water but it was my sister that jumped in to save me. It was in that moment that the world showed its true colours. An eight year old risked her life to save me and my mother barely made a fuss. That was the last time anyone ever saw me drowning. I no longer have my sister to jump in and save me. Over the years her sights have switched to someone new and life has caught me yet again unaccompanied. I don’t have any water wings to keep me afloat so I just keep thrashing and choking and praying to god someone will see me going under. But what if this time nobody ever does?

I still know how you take your coffee
And how you prefer baths
But your legs are too long to sit comfortably
You’re all long limbs and bones
Soft skin and freckles

I remember falling in love through a computer screen
Watching your hair grow out  
As we grew apart

Sixteen was magic for me
I met you and never went back
Even now I remember the curves of your back
And the night of our first date
Ice cream in May never felt more right

You still have my sweater
I still have forgotten hair ties
And your dads hat from a few summers ago
I can’t let go of you completely
You have a piece of me forever
And I don’t want it back
I just want to see you again
So I can thank you for loving me
When nobody else could

I think I fall in love with the idea of people more than I fall in love with the real them. I have no idea if the girl with auburn hair and pretty blue eyes paints under the stars but I can vividly see her doing it and a part of me falls in love with a version of her that likely doesn’t exist. My best friends brother is just a guy with a love for Studio Ghibli movies and a knack for making people laugh. This doesn’t stop me from imagining the long nights we’d spend on his couch discussing Morrisey. I don’t know how to differentiate heart from mind, poet from person. I often question if I’ll ever be able to love someone without painting them in a light they don’t belong in. Is this how it will always be? Questioning every feeling I have, analyzing whether I love someone for the person they really are or if I’ve written them into the poem I want them to be. How do I know that my feelings are genuine when I have a habit of turning every person I meet into a love poem?

At nineteen I allowed myself
To break my own heart
How silly I was to believe little girls could fall in love
But then you were there

When you tried to talk to me I couldn’t speak
Anytime I tried daisies bloomed out of my mouth

On New Year’s Day you became a gardener
You plucked away the green vines that grew from my tongue
Soon after there was a flower patch inside of my ribs

But charity love only lasts for so long
Eventually you’ll grow tired of grooming someone else’s garden
I mistook friendship for love
The look in your eyes was never longing
Now my flowers are wilting

When flowers die they decompose
Becoming the foundation for new life
By sacrificing themselves to winter
They pave the path to growth

You made me a flower garden
This winter I will let myself die
and when spring comes I will bloom again
I’ve never been so thankful to be broken

I have always been weary
of putting names in my poems
in fear that I will never be able to take
my confessions back
but when is a good day to tell you
that I have loved you in every lifetime

In the past we were entangled in each other

One life we were shooting stars
another we laid lazily in fields of wildflowers
a love too strong to explain through words
so we didn’t speak
instead you embodied the beauty of spring
a way to remind us of those April days
when nothing existed outside of each other

We hid our love behind buttercups and daisies
maybe that’s why I love to bring you flowers
to feel the flicker of a spark we shared
in a lifetime so long ago

In another lifetime we read quietly together
over coffee in smoky French cafe’s
we underlined passages
that we would read each other in secret
our love withstanding a time
when it was criminal to look at one another
with the type of love we shared

I don’t know if I have ever loved you loudly
there are no muscle memories
of me shouting your name from rooftops
or unapologetically holding your hand
without fear of repercussions
—even now I don’t know how to form the words
“I love you”
without looking around to see who’s listening
even after all this time I love you in secret
I still can’t put your name in my poems
but i promise in one of our lifetimes
I’ll write your name in every poem
and tell you that I’m in love with you out loud
someday the words
won’t feel stuck in my throat
but I hope that’s in a lifetime sooner than later

It’s been five months since you left
which means it’s been nearly half a year
of waiting for you to come back
which is to say that if my heartbreak
were a baby
it would be the size of a papaya
which means nothing
except now I want to cry
at the grocery store
which means I can’t escape you
even in the produce aisle
and I don’t know how to
stop wishing you were with me
all the time

On our first date you told me
you wanted a girl who you could have fun
grocery shopping with
except now I feel sad everywhere
and I’m no fun anywhere
which is probably why you left me
in the first place

Now I spend my nights wondering if
you found a girl with sunshine in her cheeks
and I wonder if she’s brave enough
to sing in the car with you
and maybe she dances in the
produce aisle in the same spot
I stand crying over fruits
and I’m thinking that’s probably
why you left me
not because I cry in public
but because in my mind there was always
someone better
someone more alive
more beautiful
and you got bored of reassuring me
that I was worthy of your time

You begged me to save you
So I cracked myself open
I unzipped my skin and stepped out of my body
I allowed you to inhabit me, use me for shelter
I’ve always been the person people climb into when they need to be saved

The worst part of swallowing you whole was the stomach ache
You were too much for my body to handle
Soon after you abandoned me in the middle of the night  

The hardest part was trying to fit back into my skin again
You stretched it out and now it’ll forever feel too big
My body is a hand me down I’ll never fully fill out
It’s been five years but I still feel like a thief in a strangers house
Unsure if I’ll ever get to come home