Sleek dark hair
Highlights of auburn, color of fall
Stern lips
A look of austerity in the dark russet eye
Skin lighter than my own
The smaller wrist
Large eyes
Faint deepening crow's feet
Nursing knowledge
Small, short, slight, petite, and strong
Maternal vanguard
Matriarchal
Beautiful and earthly
Scorpionic elusiveness
Her unused canvas
Frequent Homegoods purchased
Shifts decor in the livingroom like a Feng Shui practitioner
Laughs at the absurdity of modern horror movies
Smells like bath wash and too much perfume
Smells of my childhood
Smells of my innocence
Paperbacks of Hugo and Austen in boxes in the basement
Paperbacks of The Symposium and a biography of Marx in the basement
Secretly likes to cook
Culinary explorer
Gastronomically open
Culinary door opener
Very little circle of friends
Outspoken
Austerity on the small mouth
Austerity in the small mouth
Conviction in her voice
Soft graphite in her voice
Has a lisp sometimes
The slight overbite(?)
Immigrant parent
Unnaturalized citizen
Reminds me of fall
Reminds me of everything
Reminds me of very little at once
Life-teacher, one of many
Protective
Over-protective
Pushy
The way her hand moves on her tablet
The way her voice sounded during a lecture when I was a child
The way she used to hug
Closet full of shoes and clothes she rummages through when she's going out
Meticulous cleaner
The way her voice sounded when she tried to make sense of me
The way her voice sounds
...

Growing up, I was never trained to love Wonder Woman,
So when everyone threw her praise,
I knew I had to connect with her on my own.

I was never taught how to love her.

In the late hours, I found comfort in an
unmade bed, curled under her arm, over the curve in
her chest, slowly moving in from her shoulders.

She was raised hiding her heartstrings behind her ribs,
carrying an iron fist,
naturally trained to always protect emotion more than herself.

Bending structures and norms in society.

We always had the same gaps, yet somehow in other ways we
fit perfectly together.

Surrounded by others, we lived in a world on our own,

arms tangled like earbuds strewn across messy notes of pristine ideas.

Instead, we spent nights eating chocolate, playing cards, the background of
cliché yet novel sitcoms drawing us closer together.

Dissecting our hearts and minds in the early hours of the morning before
putting them back together and going back to another day.

See, we're never actually taught to love the people we seek to love more.
Here, I failed to understand how to connect, how to fuse two hearts together,

how to stop something right from going terribly wrong.

after some time
and some distance
it's safe to say that
i love you
like a best friend,
and i can't describe
the relief that brings me.

my heartbeat
doesn't feel so painful,
not anymore,
and i breathe
so much easier
now that i know
i'll never have to write
another heartbroken word about you
ever again.

god, i love you still,
i really, really do;
but it's so much easier now,
not struggling to swim
through raging waves
under the weight of
expectations and assumptions,
hesitation and guilt

it's so much easier
to be in love with you
with almost none of the romance
that went with it before,
and i really hope that
you're okay with that,
because you promised me:

"you're enough", you said.
and it took every ounce of courage
dredged up
from the marrow of these aching bones
to trust you,
to believe you,
to dare to allow that someone―
that you―
could love me
unconditionally.

The panther's blazing eyes scrutinize,
stare at him with an ambiguous interest,
her rough tongue licks him clean
when amorous longings finally ebb.

i hunch my shoulders even though i'm trying to straighten my spine
i'm standing alone at this bus stop; the morning is darker and colder
than me, somehow. i clench my teeth against a bitter wind and
try not to think about the way i barely notice the chill cutting through me.
there's a death grip around my ribs - i struggle to inhale properly
but sometimes i find myself breathing just enough to make a small dent on the air

the combined weight of my phone in the left pocket of my skinny jeans
and my hand gripping my wallet in the right pocket
has my waistband slipping below my hips, jeans just-barely holding on,
and the precariousness of their position - half falling, half hanging -
has me thinking that they fit me better than they seem to.
i relate to them more than i've related to anybody in a long time.

the sun is only just rising at the edge of the eastern sky,
casting an eerie winter glow over this ice-bitten village.
i like these early mornings, my fellow villagers,
the few that are out and about as early as i am,
ambling sleepily to their sunrise starts
and even though i drank my morning coffee, i'm drunk on my lust for sleep.

i blink my bleary eyes and blatantly stare at the old couple
cautiously hobbling over slippery cobblestone,
walking sticks in their outer hands and inner palms clasped
together. the way they grip each other tightly tells me
they trust each other not to let the other fall;
the rings on their fingers tell me they fell for each other a long time ago
and i wonder how many times they pulled each other down over the years

as i catch sight of my bus approaching, slow behind a nervous driver
i'm left thinking about people, and college, and life
how everything seems simultaneously meaningful and meaningless,
all for something - yet, really, kind of all for nothing.
i could walk away and go home, settle into my bed and let sleep pull me under
away from my thoughts, naked and no longer bound by a binder,
comfortable in my skin the way i can never be in public

i don't. i step on the bus, and flash my bus pass at the driver
climb the stairs to sit in the front chairs by the windows
watch life pass by as the engine rumbles into motion.
i'm painfully aware of the way my ribs protest when i slouch in my seat
and my bed tempts me once more as i yawn into my weather-chapped hand.
i don't. college calls, friends await. perhaps it's all pointless
sometimes that's what my philosophy class teaches me
but i'd much rather live it out and see

And now
I’m not so sure.
The field I plowed
Seems to be dying with the coming freeze.
I can’t tell if those sprouts are still growing
And my inexperienced eyes can’t tell if there’s frost on their leaves,
Or new buds

I would ask you,
Seeing as you planted the seeds.
I only tilled the soil,
But your steely gaze is off-putting
And I can’t even see you through all this fog.
I maimed the ground beneath me,
And you showered me with praise.
Now it looks to be bouncing back and
I don’t know if I want it to.
All that hard work for nothing,
Or at least it seems that way.

I shouldn’t have helped you rake the earth.
I shouldn’t have cared for it so much in the first place,
But I sold my land to you
On good faith that I would be compensated
And now
I’m not so sure that I will be.
I can’t tell if I should’ve watered that land
Or if I should keep killing it with my ***.

I’ll rev you like a Porsche
Pressurize the clutch then
ease on the equipped brake
enrolling the steering wheel

On the highway as we sing
Tuning choruses eccentrically
apply the mascara and smile
put my flock on, swing like Bowie

Craze up in seismic grooves
Shift to a self expression culture
be so extreme that you glitter
I’ll desire your ambiguousness

Unarguably, I’ll hold your hand
An evolved zeitgeist in revolution
squeeze their prejudiced little heads
replicate, experiment your persona