I want a million pictures of the moment I'm kissing your cheek
to see what I look like in love,
and I want to see their faces flinch
just a little at the red sparks
popping and jumping between us

I want your black curly hair on my pillow cases and
in between my fingers while you're driving up
and down hills, face brightened by the city lights in the distance
that make you quiet and lean over the steering wheel in awe

I want to wake up with you on the pull-out in your parents'
living room, to the rushing sound of the ocean you grew up on,
biking up and down the coast,
your freckled nose and collection of memories just a little smaller

I want to sing you to sleep every night,
but not as badly as I want to watch you play guitar,
fingers remembering, listening,
I know you can tell when it sounds beautiful
and see the scarlet flames licking
up my neck and ears when I hear it too

I want to hear you say "hello, Little One" to toddlers
swinging their arms and grinning at your soft warmth
every day of my life

I want to dance with you, dead tired, half naked in the quiet
early hours of the morning

I've never been afraid of you and I never will be

I love you and no distance will change my mind

I want you and as we grow up together I'll only want you more

my baby girl:
both your mother and you are 22-year-old women
at some cinematic cosmic intersection in nonlinear time

brushing our teeth in public bathrooms,
falling asleep next to fat men in the 37th window seat on planes,
slowly calling home less and less often as we finally
learn to tell the difference between cooked and raw chicken,
wishing we were much younger or much older--
just please, God, not this messy, half-baked, 3am drunken monster in-between

I don't know who your father is,
but I may have an idea -- my boy is no
Hallmark movie star but he stayed with me
in my college one-bedroom for two weeks to
give me medicine and baths when I
couldn't breathe without pain,
he always calls and he always comes back, which is
much more than I can say for most men.
and I know that he'd do the same for you,
which is why I wouldn't be surprised if we married

anything borne of my being will certainly have
a sailor's mouth and a fire in her belly,
and I won't apologize for that, but I will apologize for the
men you scare away with the boy-cut, shoulder muscles, and 6-inch blade in your pant-pocket--
even with tails between their legs they make me crazy,
crazy because they tell me
the womb that will bear you makes me weak,
makes me a doll, a pretty little thing,
and I let them
convince me that you, the existence of you, is my failure to neuter myself numb,
to be great,
my white flag, my conviction and the disintegration of my
mask of competence

if you are reading this,
my daughter,
you must instead be my greatest victory,
proof of my strength and my sacrifice, my selflessness,
proof that the men in this world have no knowledge of us,
and every person that I have been in my life
is now for you, is part of you, and has loved you.
I love you with bearing grease underneath my fingernails,
mud in my mouth, and a 6-inch blade on my hip,
I love you with daisy chains on my wrists singing showtunes
at a bonfire by the lake.
I love you in heartbreak and in pain,
I love you in fury, and in comfort,
I love you in the safe embrace of the man who may later be your father
and I love you with the love my mother has for me

we will both be gone at some other intersection in time
but the love I have for you transcends our mortality,
and is already etched into something beautiful and beyond

my bones that have now carried worlds
are frankensteined bits of shells and shrapnel glued
together with calcium paste
and slathered in blue dye
to make everything look new---

I was so whole.

I have now already fractured
in every predictable place,
re-engineered and retrofitted my consciousness with
seismic dampers
and levees

and I am so strong, now.

how does it feel to know that it was you who broke me?
there is no one---
not even you could do what you did to me
again

and it feels good to be a god but mostly infuriating
to think of the fragile thing I used to be
for you, when you knew me.

I haven't seen a waterfall in 4 years,
my re-grafted skin has lost all its electric-sensitivity
and my heart still pumps blood but I reforged my arteries into metal,
which keeps me alive better than before but I
don't remember the last time I
felt anything.

someone took a pair of scissors to the sky today,
the way the light burst through a sliced-open seam in the storm clouds,
the city across the lake still in a fog and the water
in a tantrum

you are all chocolate curls and puppy dog eyes,
family fireplace warmth,
lips magnetized to my skin and transparent smiles,
and she's quiet in silver revelatory haze--

in this quantum-split universe I've been
living in the wrong halves, in the storms, and even I
would have rather been left for dead
again

but your palms make me angry that I ever
trained myself to swallow rain,
convinced I could make dresses out of fog--
I am angry that I wanted anything besides you,

and I love you,
the way you glow with fervent comfort,
dripping in sunlight

I still find myself summoning you

even after I have been numbed and dulled and
painted greyscale,
the crawlspace between my bones and skin filled with spent ashes...

my stomach has learned to fold origami butterflies when she
feels like reminiscing,
missing when her floors weren't littered in corpses...

I still find myself summoning you

when I think that I have found a potent lighter fluid,
just to check that he still isn't enough,
and remember that I am still underwater...

I still find myself summoning you

playing your music, singing your songs in the voice that used to sing with you, and I am envious of it as it follows the melody from a memory I exhumed tonight because
it sounds like it remembers you better than I do,

but in the end I am glad I am forgetting you
even though it will never be my choice to let go
because perhaps one day I won't remember
what it was like to sing with you,
and I won't even notice I'm
underwater

through my apartment wall I can hear my neighbor writing on a chalkboard,
only a couple of scratches every night,
and I think he must be making tally marks:
another block of time passed stacked on all other passed time, segmented for ease of reference or glorification or
erasure...

there are cobwebs inside the gaps of my joints --
I am 21 and I have been kissed and I have
tripped and fallen and burned myself on hot metal and
drunk too much sobbing from the alcohol sloshing inside my organs and dissolving holes in my soft tissue and I have
tried Christian novels when I felt aimless and lonely and
been undressed by people I don't speak to anymore and
my body is a haphazard concoction of chemicals,
some ash and some poison accumulating already
into something irreversible...

my body and my mind is a sandbox I've been ******* with in pitch black, hoping a fistful that I throw one day will at least hit a light switch,
and I must have packed a pile of sand too high because now she misses you,
all her concavities ache for you... and
I'm not sure she knows who she misses, in particular,
just that she used to have a hand to hold in the dark,
and that she doesn't anymore.

the sunwarmed stone singes the long-dormant nerves in my adult fingers and suddenly I
remember what pear trees used to smell like in June,
as backyard swing rope burns emerge on my inner thighs underneath my slacks
and sweat cooled by dusk on the back of my neck.

the heat accumulated over years of summers
is my loss of virginity too, and I realize now that pear trees
in August smell like ***,
like sweat and shame.

there is a handful of jolly ranchers and pack of cigarettes
on his bedside table,
to which, afterwards, he says, "take what you want"
and I wish that I could as freely as he took me,
but I am no longer angry at men for this because
I know I could just as easily have done the same.

we all have to decay somehow,
after the pleasure like candy we take from each other
and **** out of the earth to consume in glut,
and after suffocating each other with our selfishness --
what more appropriate fate than sugar and smoke?

so hesitantly I take one of each to his balcony and do my penance,
and hear him come up behind me to take my hips into his palms
and when I feel sick I think about my mother's pear tree,
despite its history and crimes still flowering every spring.

I want to exist in a way that floods my capillaries with
the silver sparkling sea foam that erupts out of the sky-colored lake
and fizzles out like I do,
like I will.

take me with you,
seagulls and woman in bohemian jewelry
and billowing brown—

I want to exist in a way that I will never.

until my palms can absorb crocuses,
crumble into sand and soil for them to grow networks of roots
in my bloodstream, I will cry by the water
and every time

I see men with white beards and squinted blue eyes riding bicycles,
years swirling behind them as they pass because
they already know how to live,
how to accumulate life distilled from tumult.

it is too much for my drying throat to hear the orchestra
without being able to drink its dripping scarlet passion,
to nourish myself with it,

but I could not live without the smell of music.

I don’t know what I came to do here,
so take me with you,
ocean and seagulls and bohemian woman and old men on bicycles with secrets, and
take me with you, violins, in a way that you cannot,
nor that I can even describe to you.

I have a body with purple crushed fingernails,
with burn scars and with joints secured by bolts.
I find soot and oil behind my knees
and in the creases of my sunburnt elbows,
and I tuck it underneath my tongue for nourishment,
paint black the fleshy bottom of my mouth.

In the daylight we work,
in the moonlight we drink and stumble to bed spinning.
We wash our hands in gasoline
and our faces with dirt and kiss our women goodnight.

But coated in whiskey and grime and spit from the mouths of mechanics and truckers and anyone else who wanted me,
my tongue is drunk and slowed but still refuses to forget what it is.
I am, unfortunately, a body that courses with concertos of amber glowing cobblestone and morning sunlight sparkling blue and sprawling green vineyards and everything unmarred and more vivid than life,
and my tongue knows I can only love things that taste like music.

we're all the same, aren't we?
beaming rainwater-soaked prayers through our windows into the cloudy cold twilight or the red morning,

reading underneath creamy lampshade light,
teakettle steam fogging up our wooden cabinet doors,
twinkling kitchen high hats like tiny constellations in a cosmos of homes...

I know that I am not alone in the way the boy sitting in the restaurant window shifted his weight onto his left leg and tucked it underneath him,
in how the girl in white sneakers hopped over the puddle in the sidewalk,
in coathooks and shoeracks and umbrellas and rubber boots,
in the things we have made to protect and aid ourselves against the rawness of the earth.

and I miss your home, your rusty pans in the sink and rough gray towels, your irish butter and frozen burritos in the fridge and nothing else,

but there are so many lives and so many mornings shared among them to comfort me; I am not alone--
we are all missing homes, love, and I am better knowing that I am only feeling what I am supposed to.

You and I would stand in front of my bathroom mirror and
just hold each other, naked, acquainting ourselves
with the strange, biblical union of joints and hair
and skin and crevices and curves that we make
together...

Fingerpainting reverently on your chest,
I'd kiss your freckled shoulder, eyeing your reflection as it melted,
falling for me again-- and you'd
tell me in return
that my eyes are beautiful, and that they are green,
just like yours.
They are brown, I'd say, and
laugh and
leave
you to
confront only yourself
in my mirror.

Every day that I stand again
in front of my mirror alone--
a similar but emptier amalgamation of joints and curves--
I could swear that my eyes
look a little bit paler...
like if I
point my nose up to the high hat on my ceiling,
with the fluorescent light spilling into them
the color could certainly pass
as the same green in your eyes and
I wonder,
and I hope

that being wrong all this time
doesn't mean I was wrong about you, too.

When we have stood, cold and raw, cracked open, underneath
the waterfall of time for long enough that
it doesn't burn our skin quite so much
anymore,
I hope that you can repair the heart I
tried to break as gently as I could.

I hope that you find a girl who has always wanted to
name her baby Cody,
who can ski like a demon and
take her liquor like a cowboy and
lives for Silverados and Colorado sunsets.

I hope that when you remember my laugh,
it doesn't sound quite so pretty as hers, and that
when you scoop her up from behind,
it will feel like you are doing it for the first time.

But when she sees you cry and
says she's so grateful to have a boy who knows how,
I hope you are reminded of all the love I gave
to help you learn.
When she hugs you and thanks you for listening,
I hope you remember the time I spent listening to you,
teaching you what it means to be heard.

The way that I love you is not a fake, flimsy kind of love that
floated away when I left you--- no,
I want your girl to be all the comfort and safety and warmth and devotion that I could never be to you...

And if she isn't,
I hope that she reminds you of me
enough to make you leave before
she breaks you again.

darling, I can still chart the precise geometry of your nose,
count the number of freckles underneath your thin green eyes,
delineate the lifecycle of the stubble on your cheeks,
and all I want is to come back home to you...

aren't you going to miss
the way I could slip your belt out from under you
with my eyes still swimming in yours
while you lay down, hot and panting in the dark?

who will caress your naked chest as tenderly as I have,
slide her hand up your shirt the way that makes you shiver
and kiss you everywhere like gentle rainfall,
warm and soft and fervent like poetry?

who will bandage the fall wounds
on your torn up knees and elbows
and wash your 22-year-old body like a baby in the bathtub
when you're so drunk and tired you cannot stand?

who will stroke your hair as you sleep with one leg bent in her bed and
scratch the back of your neck and
hold you close to calm your racing heartbeat and
remember the pills you take at night and where you keep your contact lenses and all your family stories and buy you Tylenol and your favorite Gatorade when you're sick and never,
ever,
ever leave
you the way that
I did
?

that morning, I was woken up by the beating of your chest
against mine.
it was faster and that meant you were awake,
my love, my darling,
you were
awake and thinking and moving again,
no longer just your soft, comfortable, sleeping body,
and I cried in your arms because I knew that
it was time to leave home.

Tell me who this child is––
this Boy King of Cinnamon Orange Forest,
glowing rosy and regal in late October light––

christened by Pennsylvania Sun with freckles dotting
his tiny scrunched-up nose,
and streaks of shiny golden-blonde in his pin-straight russet-brown hair...

Toothless Prince of Red Cheeks and Knuckles,
with eyes pressed closed in firecracker laughter,

when did you last cry?

Can you see the black grease stains on your calloused working palms when you are 15 years older and taller and bigger and rougher and a thousand miles away from here?
Can you feel the boots on your feet and contact lenses in your eyes and splitting pain in your shins and fire in your voice and knots of glorious rage and obsession and passion in your stomach and

can you feel my fingers
in yours,
loving you –– tiny toothless sunkissed you ––
and all of you for always?

Did your heart always know who you are?

Our little collegetown is a jungle tonight,
with the deafening, staticky drone of locusts constituting
its own kind of warm gravity,

sidewalks drenched and carpeted with a rotting mess of
blood-red maple leaves, and

thousands of spiders the size of human eyes, glaring
down from the dead-center of their backlit, dew-drizzled webs.

I always thought that I'd never be loved enough.

In crafting anthologies on the angles of my favorite noses,
I pretended I didn't want someone else’s protractor on my own,
and prepared for a life sentence as the uncharted geometer,
the invisible painter, the secret poet,
the immortalizer, rather than the immortalized.

I find myself, now, to be a poem––
your poem––
etched into the curvature of your jungle-green eyes.

But walking home in our jungle tonight, I feel sick.
Your ears distort my hesitant laughter
into a dissonant, deafening euphoria, and

when I lay my head on your heated chest, I can feel the blood
gushing underneath your skin,
surging through your veins, storming, drowning
you, and I feel sick because all this love you pump for me--
all this love you are drowning in--
only rots in my guilty stomach...

When my memory is watching me
with her thousands of glaring eyes,
she will always mourn the breaking of a beautiful heart.

Before I left to walk to your music show in the courtyard,
I slipped the knife my boyfriend gave me into my dress pocket.
It was heavy enough to weigh down half the outfit, and
radiated something putrid or dissonant in that crowd
of flowers and sandals and paint and honey-chamomile
for the entire duration, but
I needed a reminder of who I am now.

Being near you at all was already a betrayal of myself
because now I guess I'm playing his type: the ******* girl--
the stereotype-smasher-badass-***** girl--
calling her a "girl" isn't even fair
because she chopped enough of her hair
to be Wyoming's worst "******" nightmare,
and she wears work boots and flannels and scars,
(and sweatshirts to cover my secret scrawny arms--)
She’s a piece-of-machinery girl,
a rachet-and-wrenched-myself-together girl,

and it took so ******* long for me to forge a metal exoskeleton
hard enough to smother this stupid gushy heart.

Because a heart only compromises the real **** I have to do in the real world--
not your fantasy world where no one has a job but
slurping your excess passion alone is somehow enough to sustain, and
the men sweep bundles of wild violets-- shooting straight out of the New York City pavement--
into their hands as gifts, and
their women smile and flip their Pantene-commercial hair in slow-motion, and
together the lovers paint poetry onto each other's chests in the dark, and
your long-expired promise of that love-- of your dream--
that you had me believing
still plunges deeper into my stomach than I ever planned it to and it feels like a white-hot
knife splitting me open from throat to bladder--

You came out to hug me when the show ended.
I walked home crying a hydraulic expulsion of the final remnants
of my old, foreclosed heart.
Then he was right there waiting for me at home, and it was so easy
to pretend.

last night I dreamt that I kissed you,
Mr. Too-Tough-to-Care,
fumbling over grease-stained t-shirts and hair
to find your tungsten-scorched neck,
slipping my slotted fingers onto your left ear
and charging my palm with your heat.

last night I dreamt that I kissed you,
Mr. Beer-is-My-Therapy,
I kissed your ***** nose, sharp and pointed,
prominent, belligerent––
a power symbol––
but it's always the first on your face to flush pink when
I talk back to you––

on saturday when I ****** up the car and nearly
gave you a heart attack, Mr. I-Ain’t-No-Little-*****, you
held my hand with the same
concealed desperation––

I know because you were looking at me
when you instinctively–– against the will of your mechanical masquerade––
forced your sweaty fingers
into the unsuspecting
pockets between mine.

Mr. Brake-Fluid-Doesn’t-Bother-Me
froze...
the honey seeping through the pores in my skin
must have been even more corrosive because,
Mr. Romance-is-for-*******,
you were paralyzed,
like you suddenly realized you’d become
the target of your own jokes––
your heart's powered by something much softer than gears––

news flash, Mr. Too-Tough-to-Care:
you're just as unsalvageable as I am.

I keep close watch of the scars on my body,
making sure that their stories don't liquidate and seep out
like blood when I'm not looking,
that they don't fade and discolor before I remember
who I am without them.
I'm afraid of letting them vanish before
you let yours vanish too.

So I stare pigment into the blisters on my right palm and I
still remember
the first time you held it,
at Six Flags when we were both high on funnelcake and the fumes of late summer mixed with bus fuel and sweat.

I do the same to my shoulder,
where yours would always be after I missed the midnight shuttle
and trudged home with a scarf up to my eyelashes
in the nearly horizontal snow.

And to my ears, because
I'd always have more work to do,
and you'd carry your stereo to my room and play
that song you stained so thoroughly with your voice that
I can't bear to listen to it
anymore.

I spend the most time re-burning the skin around my eyes
to precisely the degree that you did when you brushed the tears
from under them,
and that I did later when
I scratched away at the same flesh because you weren't there
to do it anymore.

I keep close watch of what I never thought would
turn into memories,
making sure that our story doesn't liquidate and trickle away
when I'm not looking,
that it doesn't fade and discolor before I forget
who I was when I knew you.
I'm afraid, too, that you've already long
forgotten.

There was suddenly sun spilling all over,
and suddenly hyacinths everywhere.
I have watched everything change so slowly
that nothing ever seemed to move at all,
and in my obstinate blindness, I didn't notice
that the ground had thawed, never mind that it had begun
to bleed spring.

I have never seen spring.
In all honesty, I have never lived
in any sort of weather –
only the starched, air-conditioned bedroom
in my parents' sickeningly stereotypical suburban concoction
of a house, where nothing –
not the dusty closed blinds or even
a blade of grass – ever moved at all.

Here, there are magnolia trees that move,
swaying in soft rhythm.
They have peeled themselves like vinyl stickers off
the backs of my windowpanes, and they really are
alive. I know because they wave to me
in flurries of dip-dyed pink petals –
like a good diaphragm-laugh,
or maybe like a good cry.

I have never laughed,
or cried.
But I cry at everything now –
now that I see it is all alive.
It must be what happens when you start living
alone – growing pains –
I imagine the hyacinths must get growing pains, too,
from exploding like purple fireworks
out of the frozen soil in
no time at all.

I liked the way you and
your crisscrossed legs sat on
my middle-school-ignorant
navy-blue and daisy-patterned comforter,
watching,
hearing,

the way your fingers crept
towards the neck of my ukulele
while the magnetized look in your eyes drew mine and
my own fingers fell
slack in divine-driven intrigue,

the way you and
your eyes
full of quiet study and wisdom, like
worship, like
your respect of this instrument as not wood but as
hundreds of years of polished amber-tinted history
has earned you ownership, and it
does.

you and
your fingers then
spun aching minor chords, like
worship, like
somehow, in the sparkling incensed-violet melody you
spilled all over
me in my righteous nihilism

you and
your body became an
offering, and
the wood

burned my fingertips when you
handed it back to me, ashamed and awe-stricken, like
worship, like
your life is an offering, and even

when I found the notes you played
(on this instrument that is not mine)
200 days and 200 nights after I knew you and
your legs sitting on my bed and
your multidimensional fingers,
worshipping,

no matter what I tell myself, I
am not a believer in beyond, and
pretending to pray just reeks of
my own mortality.

my diet as a young, unsuspecting girl consisted mainly
of the saccharin that crystallized in between
the glowing, smiling teeth of Disney princesses,
and the artificial-like aftertaste that
coated the walls of my mouth,
enchanting me with fantasies of formulaic love –

level-headed, perfunctory love that
feels like knowing the color of
your dress complements some manicured uniform
waiting offscreen until the waltz your costumes are programmed
to perform, indifferent
(as you are)
to the bodies
that fill them.

so I painted myself monochromatic,
spending my days planning, calculating,
and trusting, wondering
why it seemed that other girls never got too hungry,
(living as they did only on sugar highs),
or bored of the one color they had chosen to become, to wait inside,
but starving was easier than searching for
(or, god forbid, finding)
what I knew I was missing ––

"you are a passionate person,"
he says to me,
truth spilling through my rotting teeth into my shriveled belly,
all rich and creamy-like, as if
he doesn't know what the inside of my mouth
should taste like, as if
his mouth doesn't know
how hungry I am ––

I know
that passionate people
spend their days feasting.
they lie underneath black starry skies
and spoon their own moonlight-infused tears into
each other's mouths, and chew crunchy, fizzling morsels of poetry
along with fistfuls of shadow-drenched notebook paper, and
guzzle violet-tinged philosophy and insomnia until sunrise, but

still, unfortunately, love is what sustains us.

passionate people
are no better at surviving than Disney princesses, but
their bellies are too big and their palates too sophisticated
for light, sugary, level-headed love ––

so, in our wild, potent love, we cram ourselves with
these decadent and deliciously painful things,
and when time and distance and gravity make us still
ache with hunger, we swallow fire the colors of our lovers' eyes and
we burn like kaleidoscopic beacons,
smiling.

I know Father B came to our class more times than you can count, and
denounced all those mortal sins with a firm pointed finger and
one big bulging eye that glared at you in your stiff collared shirt and preppy plaid kilt while he spoke, as if
a white lie or one slice of pizza too many would
send a divine bolt of lightning straight through your chest or
a note home to your parents.

but I left the house once,
and there are some things no one else will tell you.

first of all,
when you tell a lie or eat too much pizza,
all you get is a nasty stomachache,
which feels a bit like a punishment, but you get another chance
and next time, you tell the truth and
eat just enough to fill your belly.

you don't lose any vision at all if you ******* and
people do it
a lot.

speaking of,
***
happens outside of marriage.

actually, I might be so bold as to say that MOST ***
happens
outside of marriage.

sometimes, people have ***
with people they don't love.

people marry people they don't love, too,
or grow into love or
fall out of it just as easily.

and sometimes people love people
they are not having *** with.

you can love someone so much that it physically hurts,
and you will put your tear-stained hand to your aching chest and understand exactly where the phrase "broken heart" comes from.

and sometimes you won't know
how you feel about other people or
about anything, really.

people aren't just bad or good like that –
there are some bad people,
and there are some good people, but
most people
are just lost and
lonely, and
looking for someone who will be the answer to the giant, crying
questions they have curved themselves into.
they read books and go to bars and get promotions and
wear framed glasses and make appointments and call their lawyers and buy apartments and make resumes and get married and divorced all like they know what they're doing, but
most of the time,
they are just taking shots in the dark, and
trying not to feel guilty about
the people they hurt
along the way...

you live under a rock now, and
one day suddenly it'll feel like you've exploded out and
into a hellhole, and honestly,
as far as I can tell,
there are no secrets to life carved into some mountain somewhere, or
arranged in the patterns of your veins, or
even written in a giant bible, but
the one redeeming quality of life is that we can
suffer together.

we're all tired and directionless, but
two warm calloused palms fit together so much better than you think,
and waffle fries taste like heaven at 1 in the morning with friends,
and staying up all night talking with someone and finding out they are just as tired and directionless as you are
makes you realize all of a sudden–– like
seeing the faraway glimmer of two little headlights
on a dark empty highway––
that it's okay.
and
you may be more lost than you can even tell, but
at least you know now
that you're not alone.

Embalmed in textured navy fabric space,
we float in vacuum silence, orbiting like stars.

With outstretched finger solar flares, we bridge
the space between us, puzzle over charts
and physics, piece together what we are–

in blazing convex eyes like mirrored spheres,
reflections question why they'd been afraid …

We curled up in our function’s minima,
derived the strongest force we'd ever seen
before. We hadn't considered, I'll admit,

because it seemed just so farfetched– absurd–
a conscious variable, god, or of the sort,

by whom our stellar glory was produced,
allowed, controlled. Because what universe–
inanimate and gloomy hunk of void–

destroys with prejudice, unless it minds
whose theories rest on hope and lovely lies?

there is nothing quite like being with you ...

sitting cross-legged on your warm crumpled comforter in dim amber light
with hunched backs against the white stone wall,
silently working to piece each other together,
merging thoughts and shoulders,
falling into each other's gravity and orbiting like stars–
we couldn't figure out
how to get any closer ...

we lived in shoeboxes then,
in ***** laundry and ramen-flavored freedom,
the soundtrack in our background
shuffled steps and muffled laughter through thin walls,
pencil scratches and elevator dings,
wooden doors and heavy coats,
cars in the snow rushing by our open windows,
hot cocoa, creaking bedsprings, and
singing–

I have been listening for the music in the things here–
I have searched in comforters, in stone walls,
in laundry and ramen,
in slippers and open mouths and pencils and elevators and doors and coats and cars and snow and windows and chocolate and bedsprings and everyday I try to remember something else I can dissect:
some texture, some melody, some pattern, some rhythm
where you might exist too,
but your music
is nowhere else.

we live in big empty houses now,
in hardwood floors and toothpaste-flavored loneliness.
I can still hear our shoeboxes
and feel the pull of our gravity
somewhere
fading ...

All this war and yet, there is nothing I would rather be.

I have grown to appreciate,
            as a nonpartisan–
            a silent sommelier–
the subtle earthy notes of irony with which
my deflated ego scolds my hollow spine.

I know my own hypocrisy, my instability, my naivete.

I have been raised in the midst of myself–
I carved and nailed these philosophies together to make trellises
around which my elastic grapevine limbs have learned
to wrap and coil and hoist themselves toward the sun.

I have built myself,
and I, alone, tend to my vineyard.

There are distortions in these wooden lattices,
and there are seasons when the grapes grow sour
or the vines do not flower
at all,
but the crop is resilient and the wood does not break,
and there is enough sunshine here
in the summertime to sustain
and to yield something complexly beautiful because it has been weak,
and it has known the cold.

I have built myself,
and I, alone, tend to my vineyard.

There are plots of land far more fertile than this one,
foundational structures far sturdier and more symmetrical,
grapes far sweeter and more robust of flavor,
but there is no wine I would rather have flood my veins;
there is nothing I would rather be.

With plastic crown atop his head
and draped in splendid royal red,

he arched his back and struck a pose
to loud applause from costume rows:

the pilgrims bowed and paid respects,
all masks and hats his new subjects,

the ghouls and ghosts saluted too,
and, standing tall, he liked the view.

When spinning 'round to win more cheers
from Mother who must be in tears

to see her son no longer small–
but as a lord, a god, of all,

he found that he was there alone
and where she'd gone he did not know.

Forgetting all his lofty dreams,
he felt unraveled at the seams–

the costumes then all came alive,
with teeth and blood and crazy eyes.

The king who once was lord of all,
lay crying, sobbing, feeling small.

A hand then pressed upon his back–
his mom had found the royal rack,

and wiping tears from burning eyes,
he wished he'd trusted his disguise.

if it wasn't for that pretty head ...

staring into my dark, lonely mirror, i feel my body
devour itself – my organs
twist and wring their tissue into thick dark vines—
capillaries converting into tangled leaf clusters on
two heaving baobabs,
the stomach flattening into a rotting jungle floor,
and without seeds or a plan or an objection,
an ecosystem erupts,
growing by night—

not the science textbook kind,
with turquoise estuaries and mangrove trees
and perfect clouds like pulled white taffy, no—

the water there is tar, pooling
at the tip of the cranium and
oozing through the brain
like a slimy pink grate, raining
over the dead and the deathless alike,
making misshapen monuments
out of pain.

the body is silent
as its inner kingdom declines,
and because it is a shell it
becomes preserved,
a petrified relic
of its old glory.

if it wasn't for that pretty head
with those bouncy brown curls,
that pale, almost blue-tinted skin and
your innocent doe eyes glaring into their own headlights like they didn't deliberately design the nightmare that lurks and grows behind them, like they never notice the sticky burning tears collecting in their corners, like they really might
miss their reflection
if it was gone ...

The poets
have staked a claim.
They are not always the type to decide
or declare such things, but
on the matter of the Season of Beautiful Death,
they have unanimously put their dissociated feet down––
Autumn belongs to the poets.

They plant their feet like roots and stand
with limbs like bent branches in half-hesitant salutation of
the low-hanging sun,
and of the wind that smells dangerously
like the citrus-salty sweat on the sternums of
lovers who have long forgotten them,
like smears of strawberry sunset-stained tears on
sticky steering wheel leather,
like caramel-amber irises that they could only then taste by
licking the syrup off the cursive characters
in their own love poems.

Here, now,
with these stacks of decades still decaying in the corners
of our ugly, cluttered crowns,
this is our ritual:
squinting up at the lavender-blue sky, we
concede that we are still broken – (alive, but dying) –
and reinitiate ourselves
as poets.

We breathe in this different kind of death, this
​beautiful
death –
our sticky strawberry reds and caramel ambers displayed like artwork on
these glorious twisted giants –
and we can
pretend we
believe that we
and our heartbreak,
too, are beautiful.

And we look on with aching solidarity
as they burst
into a fireworks display
of a funeral.

yet i stand again alone and cold
watching
an onslaught of angry wet bullets
pummel my peanut-shaped torso

if every midnight a new ghost
was born to loop again through my day
all my naked peanut-shaped torsos
would be standing here
too
all my red veiny feet burning a hole
through the white ceramic floor
and thousands of the same absent brown eyes
watching
– only a few
seeing

all my fingertips work in sync
rubbing face cream into
millions of layers of sticky skin
as our gurgling stomachs tie themselves into knots
and we record in our dejected minds like abused children
shivering in the corner of our skulls

the sickening feeling of
being both
perpetrator and victim

the alarm clock
in my childhood bedroom
has always been
fast by a minute or 2

every month or so i
realign the last digit
with Apple's universal truth

and every month it
slips
out of sync
again

it must be off by such a small fraction
of a second
i tried to calculate it once
0.00001 some-odd something
one brick so minimally out of place
causing the gradual collapse of a skyscraper

i havent found the energy lately
to practice this ritual
and today

my old clock
is fast by 3 minutes
neon green bars flickering silently
marching on
announcing fates to the unwilling and
making
rash judgements

there was nothing i planned to do
with those 3 minutes
and i knew it was
justified in its conviction

but i
realigned the last digit
and watched for 3 minutes
the green flickering rhythmically against
the black screen
climbing minute by minute
finalizing again
my execution

she finds that time is not linear
in the gospel-like gold and amber
that glaze the green poplar leaves
in her suburban summer evenings

what is she left to be?
she with a warrior's heart
but with legs in tired atrophy

at dusk the water ripples with silver-toned echoes
whispering mythical adventures and heroes
and the words churn and boil in her mythical blood
"I would rather be ashes than dust!"

what is she left to be?
she with a warrior's heart
but with legs in tired atrophy

every night still she stargazes through her ceiling
a coward's tears on her cheeks slowly peeling
courage like corn husks from her ancient soul
leaving her core shivering in the dust and dusty cold

what is she left to be?
she with a warrior's heart
freezes
with legs in tired atrophy

My loneliness makes me taste like toothpaste
because over the course of my shame-polluted day,
regrets pile up like grime in my gums, and she
likes to pretend,
(hundreds of miles deep into the night),
that brushing my teeth for an extra two minutes or so
renders me finally clean, and
forgotten.

She makes me use the peppermint that stings, because
it’s easier for me to picture the rotten remains of my
ugly, fumbled words losing their sticky grip
on the insides of my cheeks,
dissolving in fizzles and bubbles and fire as if in
flavored acid.

My loneliness tastes like hair and
skin pulled taut over bent knees
because she imagines that her set of
tired, unwanted bones fit together
like an awkward origami cocoon enclosing,
(shrinking)
my repulsive, obtrusive body.

And she folds around me
despite the sharp, stabbing aches
in my curved spine and knotted appendages
because we have learned that her skeleton
is the only thing that will protect
me.

the next day the rumors had already stained the walls
            red as the shame on your freckled cheeks

everyone knew what you had done

the words passed around like morning coffee
            poured half-n-half with frothy nervous laughter
            snickers and side glances

"cassie kissed a girl with blue hair in the parking lot of glory days"

they must have been watching you
seen you in the moment you wanted to protect from them the most
             to bury deep inside your guilty heart

but you were their entertainment at glory days instead
            the perfect accompaniment
            for their 1am pancakes and gossip
emma glanced out the window
            and in the dim amber light of the parking lot she spotted you
                        and your girl with blue hair next to your car
            watched her take your shaking hand
                        caress your cheekbone
and they all laughed at their perfectly-timed sideshow
            laughed at the love you couldnt help but feel
shrieked shamelessly
            syrupy mouths full of pancake
            when you lifted her bowed head and kissed her gently
they were taking notes of every movement for school tomorrow

as i watched them break you apart
i hoped so badly that you didnt notice them there
            that you didnt see them pointing from the window
            that you didnt know they were selling pieces of you
            that you didnt hear them laughing
            that they would all forget

and if you knew i hope they couldnt take your pride away
            that you would always remember it as just
            you and your girl with blue hair
            in the parking lot of glory days

despite that the body of a poet is shaped like a question mark        

every poet has the answer to one question
            as if she were born with the words
                        already engraved into her forearms
                        crafted by an ineffable power
                                    – whether divinity or demon
                                    she does not know or particularly mind –

"why do you write?"

i guess
            my indecipherable forearms and
            the way that my fingers
                        then curl to match the curve of my spine
make me
            not a poet

just a fugitive
            running because it is the only thing i know how to do
            and because i wont survive the night if i dont
            
and yet
the further i go
and the more ive seen

the clearer it seems to me
            that everyone who writes
            is just running

i started going to therapy when i
felt my legs buckling
under the weight of my heart

when
i knew that
it had become so drenched and
dripping with guilt and longing that i
couldnt possibly carry it
anymore

even still
morning felt like
            sharp red stings
                        in the papery skin stretched over my
                        temples and eyelids
            and tasted like salt and secrets in a thick paste
                        on my lips and tongue

even still
day always left me with
            imprints of bathroom floor tiles
                        on my throbbing forehead
            stains from your raspberry laughter
                        in my ears
            and fresh wounds from your dagger eyes
                        penetrated deep into the concave surface of my sternum
                        i couldnt help it that my scars were in cursive
                        and read like poetry

even still
at night
            i cried because my head wouldnt forget
                        those dream-colored moments with you
            i cried because every day your eyes told me that you had
            i cried because your laughter tasted like you never knew
            i cried because my heart swelled heavier every day
                        and my arms
were getting tired

i stopped going to therapy when
in my white dress and
            t-bar high heels you said you liked that one time
i drove myself home
            after graduation

when
with a straight face and dry eyes
i knew id never see you again
and my heart
would never need
any more carrying

I fell for you all late summer steam and dark humid rain,
            electrically charged fingertips and cursive smiles.
I didn’t even open my eyes in the deep to
            see and mourn what I had lost ...

The moment you balanced your feet next to mine on the curb and
            bowed your head
            to hear the absentminded showtune
                        on my breath like whiskey,
            whispering to me in my tapered silence that you
wanted to hear me sing,
            with earnest like opened peach halves so raw and sweet
            that my voice obeyed
                        before I had the chance to decide ...

The breath you took when I whipped around
            in my bus seat to offer you a pink polka-dotted grin,
and the delighted children we became in our anticipation,
            all crossed stars and side glances savored like chocolate truffles
                        too thick and syrupy to devour whole ...

I fell for you all sweaty foreheads and damp pavement,
            full palms and knotted stomachs –
I always knew that my concavity had a counterpart.

But then the ache in my lungs when,
            with bellies full of Dippin Dots and funnelcake,
            retinas imprinted with neon orange lights,
            throats scratchy from belting and laughing,
            your hand burning my thigh in the dark and
            my head on your shoulder,
you rested your head
            on mine
            too,
            hard and heavy,
                        straining my neck, and

girls are told that they will be
            held and carried,
but love is not gilded or glittered,
            not a pedestal or throne,
            not a carnival or sweaty palms,
            not plastic smiles or chocolate truffles,
            not whiskey or shared melodies sung quietly in the rain.

I fell in love with you that night,
            nothing but hard, heavy heads on bony, tired shoulders.

i woke up this morning
to an “I LOVE YOU”
text in all caps
sent at 2:29am

no “for...” or
“when...” or
“because...”

unwarranted
but unequivocal

in my foggy morning headspace i
searched through the events of yesterday
looking for things i might have done that you’re thanking me for—
i didn’t hold you while you cried or
feel your burning forehead or
fold your laundry—
there must be something i did recently
to prompt your adamant and abrupt declaration or
confession

an immediate reason
for loving me
because surely there must be
a reason or

you must have texted the wrong number
and this was meant for someone else
someone more
deserving
someone who does not have to work to warrant love—
especially the kind
that explodes like a firework out of the soul at 2:29 in the morning or

maybe you were drunk
you must have been
you love everyone when you’re wasted
i hope you were because

i can’t take your love if it isn’t conditional
that would mean that i
well that i’m good enough
and that everything i’ve suffered to
paint worth onto my teeth and tongue
never worked or ever meant anything

i guess my question is
what makes people move?
            what thought
            what spark
            what breath
                        in what language
straightens the bones in their knees and tightens the tendons in their legs like
            strings in wooden puppets
up
            down
up
            down
push
            ­off
lift
            up
step
down

how

do they decide
            where to go?
how
do they know
            it is right?
is it
what they are told?

do they ever make
decisions that are their own?

            i think if
that were true


no one would ever move


all paralyzed
            stuck
            in the pitch on the stairs

calculating
            visualizing
                     ­   optimizing
            philosophizing
ourselves

in circles
            in spirals
                        like drills
                        into the cold wet ground