you have entered the realm of life after separation.
gone are the daisies she tucked behind your ears. it’s autumn now.
you are getting older. your boots are heavy and your chest is heavier.
you were given something gleaming, but it isn’t yours,
anymore. you seethe in your own ache.
this is your first silver october. the blushing leaves have gone greyscale,
like an i love lucy rerun. they evoke a stab of grief between your lungs.
you have to rewrite the story of your life now,
go forward knowing that everything after will be somehow
lesser than her. no person will reach into you the way she did.
you are a lost girl. resignation is all you have left,
resignation and streets bitter with dead leaves, streets where you run and shout
a silent prayer of loss.
but then:
but then.
you are reciting a poem for a room of people and your words
belong to your body now. a deep glow has fallen over everything,
right onto a girl you’ve only seen once before.
front row. face open. taking in what you are saying,
your retrospective sorrow, with a particular kind of attentiveness
you have needed all along.
everyone is listening, but she is hearing you.
in that moment, when you are raw and earnest,
you think that perhaps there’s something different about
this one. how even when you are done, she still seems to be
hearing all the words you cannot say.
and then:
and then.
spring is thrusting its way out of cold dirt
and you are twisting and breathing and this girl,
this girl, she is one million ******* shades of red. all you can do is
look at her without turning away, as if you could do such a thing
even if you tried. maybe this is how rembrandt felt
when painting night watch.
full of thick, rich burning too immense for language to hold.
this girl, this girl in the midst of life after. this girl so good
she’s put meaning back into the messy coming of spring.
you have learned not to trust. not to believe.
to love with a window open, a hand on the door,
in case of incineration, ready to run.
but this girl, says your heart,
says the peachy light bleeding onto her lips and nose,
this girl is not like those who came before her.
you’ve been a stranger to yourself for so long, but this girl
is reintroducing the two of you, rubbing you raw with longing.
do you understand, you want to say to her,
how stunning you are.
standing there like that. in your sincerity and laughter, as it weren’t
breath snatching to witness. as if it were commonplace,
unexceptional. as if you weren’t the tenderest work of art.
do you.
Jun 9, 2017
Jun 9, 2017 at 12:43 AM UTC
i. the 1st week is the rapid hemostasis. the fabric of your body clutching itself together, rushing to staunch the bleeding. you breathe and oxygen settles in your chest like needles. you are so tired. you, in your continent of pain, will never be enough of anything for anyone. you burn softly as your cells scuttle to repair the damage. you burn in silence.
ii. the 2nd week is the inflammation. the itching and swelling of flesh. the fingers you move over your own body, holding your hips quiet. your **** is no longer a **** but a rumpled and puffy city, a strange piece of art, a crime scene after the police have left where everyone is sweeping up shattered glass. someone’s murmuring a poem of soul and death over the radio. it might be you. everyone is shouting and the radio is getting louder and the crime scene is turning into an emergency room and the doctors are flying around in their yellow haste and there is no oasis, no peace, no open window, until the automatic hospital doors part with a groan and she is there, and you realize you are about to be saved.
iii. the 3rd week is the proliferation and migration. she tells you to remove the gravel from your body before you grow a new skin. so you do, you pull it out with black tweezers and it makes you scream until you are raw and humble. you watch as you mend yourself, sped up, like a tiger lily caught on long-form camera, bursting to life. someone says the words love and breaking and heal. someone says i will take you and i will carry you. is it you or her? does it matter? your skin is rearranging itself. you are pangea, splitting and reattaching to new places. it should be violent, but it isn’t. she’s calling you in from the cold and you go to her, scabbed up and scabbed over, unable to close your eyes. she takes up your whole field of vision. her lips, her nose. her irises, where you find god and every angel. the only sin here is the distance between the two of you. which you are closing. by the minute. by the second. by the breath.
iv. the 4th week is the angiogenesis. the development of new veins and ligaments. the deeply complicated process of creating new paths for blood to flow. the beating of your heart when she rests her hand on your knee and leaves it there. your tectonic feelings. the way you look for her in a crowd. the sudden daylight.
v. the 5th week is the reepithelialization. a big, funny word that sends heat all through you. it asks questions. like: when you broke, did you know you would stop bleeding? when you lay prone in a pool of your own carnage, did you know that Good And Beautiful still belonged to you? that even in that crushing agony, she would come to you, and, with her seamstress hands and surgeon heart, put you back together? did you know that the light was never out of reach? that the walls around you were cardboard, not cement? that she would destroy them gently, then draw you from the wreckage? and still see you whole, even with all your throbbing fissures, the parts of you that just can’t add up? did you?
vi. the 6th week is the synthesis. your wound has gone. it’s a tuesday and you are watching her walk to class. it’s dizzying, the way she moves, the way she walks. she doesn’t know you’re there and you would like to keep it that way, because you are a naturalist observing something rare and exquisite, and you do not want to scare her away. she’s the white-hot sphere of the sun in the sky, and with your woundless self, you take her in. you can feel it, when you look at her—the spin of the earth / clouds sliding into other hemispheres / the swarm of your blood cells and pathogens / the aging of trees / airplane turbulence / earthquakes in places you will never see / lava cooling in the ocean / the rings we grow on our hearts—you can feel all of it. she’s turning the corner now, hair ignited. you are in love with her and you don’t want her to be late. she is so beautiful, even though you can’t see her anymore. she’s the last of her kind.
Jun 9, 2017
Jun 9, 2017 at 12:41 AM UTC
(athena)
the sweaty, jacked-up summer is approaching quick
fired from the mouth of april
like a bullet from a handgun
(aphrodite)
we are fast, beautiful
***** like gasoline on someone’s palm
***** like fences that hold gardens of shredded tires
***** like blood dried on the sidewalk in the shape of a
tightened fist
(athena)
***** sneakers and ***** hair
(aphrodite)
with shampoo that never got washed all the way out
(athena)
***** because of how we love
(aphrodite)
sharp-beautiful-longing!
(athena)
with our hands on other girls’ knees and thighs
like birds out of their cage
or the statue of liberty punching her light
into a sky that holds as much desire
as it holds stars
(aphrodite)
nameless-bursting-burning!
(athena)
rough and sweet and fresh from hell
crawling to emancipation
just wanting to love
just wanting to live
(aphrodite)
just wanting to move her hair out of her face
with our thumbs
(athena)
asking to be allowed to want
what we are not supposed to have
(aphrodite)
quivering
(athena)
hot and sweaty like little kids under the covers
with a flashlight reading
harold and the purple crayon
(aphrodite)
but there is no flashlight this time
(athena)
and no picture book
Jun 9, 2017
Jun 9, 2017 at 12:40 AM UTC
1. your mother asks you to
make her breakfast
2. she has lived your life
two and a half times over
she knows everything about the world
and you know nothing
is what she tells you
when she is bending you backward with her voice
when she is loud and searing and immediate
an avalanche woman bringing boulders
to her feet
3. your mother takes up space
she attracts
she magnetizes
you are fighting your way out of her orbit
but it is hard
you perform elliptical rotations
around her and count the seconds
between your words and her rage
it is a bittersweet spectacle
beautiful in its torment
like watching a dying star absorb itself:
this huge white brilliance, this ricocheting sound,
the tears there is no gravity
to catch
4. you look at your mother
the way she mirrors you in reverse
her laugh is your laugh
but not your laugh
her hair hits her left collarbone
the way yours does your right
her pain is blue like yours
but hers is navy and yours looks like a blue iris
when light cuts through it
like the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg
surveying you as you excavate your feelings
all-knowing in their grief
5. your mother is you and she is not-you
so peel the grapefruit and cut it in half
plate the eggs
bring it all to her with coffee
the way she likes it
cream, no sugar
6. forgive her
even though
Jun 9, 2017
Jun 9, 2017 at 12:37 AM UTC
i have been a TV screen since the day i was born.
all static and scrambling dots, flipping channels,
frenzied with feeling, wringing myself inside out
for audiences who do not notice i am in the room.
i am a TV screen and i have been dark for so long.
but turn me on now and the world will see you,
your eyes, your elbows, your desperately beautiful
force projected onto me like billboard love.
the Broadway of my body covered in your face.
we gleam together. the two of us bending our prisms
until they make a new color, your pixels
pressing into my skin like the first sun
of a new year. like the air we breathe
after coming up, up
from the deep
Jun 9, 2017
Jun 9, 2017 at 12:32 AM UTC
i do not write love letters often. i am not good at them.
my words are clumsy and ill-fitting. i live in superlatives,
exhaling exclamations, loving at high altitude, among the
cloud vapor and wind, where the sun burns so hard it
bathes everything in holy white. but it is not enough for you.
i drop the pen and pick it up and begin again. i stop and start
and stop and start and try to tell you. what you do.
how you live in my lungs and brain tissue and belly.
how you are flammable. how you Glow.
the things i don’t know how to say: they run wild in me.
they squirm. they tell me to tell you that i was alone
on the face of the moon until you dropped from the sky
and showed me something more. until you ran with me
down craters and up dunes. until i fell in love with you
while moon dust settled on our skin like glitter.
i asked you to bring me back with you, and you did.
your lunar flares quivered to life and we ascended,
watching that frozen american flag until it was beyond us.
we kissed on a backdrop of dark matter and i touched
your face in wonder. we kissed and the universe
bent before us. and to watch that happen.
to watch it happen brought a strange, warm pain
that split me in two.
two, as in our hands holding. holding, as in what you do
to my heart. heart, as in this brave drum-beating muscle.
muscle, as what it has taken for us to survive.
survive, as in what you teach me to do each time you breathe.
breathe, as in what i cannot do when i see you coming.
coming, as in breathless. breathless, as in my body.
body, as in rising. rising, as in love. love, as in everything.
everything, as in you.
Jun 9, 2017
Jun 9, 2017 at 12:32 AM UTC
*Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it*
- Richard Siken
there are two facts upon which you ground your love:
1. you are damaged
2. they are going to leave
you do not come screeching out of your mother’s body believing this about yourself
you learn how
over time
over minutes and months
over years
you meet people and take them into yourself
wrap them in your chest so deeply
you know they will never escape.
they may exit your life
walk away,
go where you can’t find them;
but not the presence of them
the core of them
the feeling of them inside of you
beating and glowing and sighing
like a heart
not that. that will stay. you’ll make it stay
you’ll teach yourself to grip onto those final remnants
the way a dying person grips onto breath
you will hold and hold and hold
not letting go, not knowing how to
you’ll grow a well of absence inside yourself
and nurture it into a great and incredible yearning:
this hall of memories within you
these faces you cannot forget
you will call it grief. you will call it
mine
the girl who shows you the truth is
ballet and brilliance
you watch her sideways on the bus
where she sits with her mother,
face swathed in light,
profile outlined in radiance
like the ring of a solar eclipse
and you have only been around the sun
nine times
but god,
the quiet, uncomplicated
beauty of her,
the straightforwardness of
her warmth—
she is the first person to whom
you are not biologically linked who sees
something more in you
she notices your fire and tends to it
until it becomes a towering
blaze
but the last night you see her
you are sure you are going to die
caught in the seats of theater
in front of a stage on which
this girl dances
like she has nothing left to give
but love
and an utter lack of
fear
the last night you see her
she embraces you
and her hair is curled
and her lashes are lined
and her lips are rosy
and you could scream out with what you
feel
but cannot explain
the last night you see her
the elevator doors close
between the two of you,
splicing your longing,
sending you off onto your own
barren continent
the last night you see her
you learn that you love
and people leave
and that the people you love leave
and that this is a truth you almost
cannot bear
[*how to turn my grief into something
powerful
how not to equate my longing with something
flawed, something ugly
how to
rise again
how to
survive*]
these are the things you ask yourself now
when you are naked and alone in your loss
these are the questions you stay alive to answer
because yes, you are damaged
and people leave
but that is not everything there is to
this filthy-heavenly existence
you cannot seem to
escape
you carry your sorrow like an old handbag
but you are growing tired of its weight
preparing to incinerate it and spread the ashes
the way you spread your devotion:
bravely, and now,
without remorse
you are learning that you are damaged
and wonderful, scarred
and sacred
bruised
and divine
they are going to leave
but you will go on in spite of it
you will go on because this is
all you have
you and your heart
and your overwhelming forward momentum
your love
Jan 11, 2017
Jan 11, 2017 at 1:45 PM UTC
i. Like a building on fire, you appeared in my path. You were what all burning things are, hot and radiant, crackling with a force I cannot name. You were a comet speeding to earth, a malfunctioning two-stage rocket. I watched as you turned yourself inside out, as you were absorbed by the sky, as you detonated yourself in an act of destruction so powerful it created collateral art. I watched as you gave yourself up to ash. I was there.
ii. When a building is on fire, the first human instinct is to run away. But I ran toward you. I ran toward you, because I knew what things might be tucked within you. I ran toward you, because your heart deserved to pulled from the wreckage. I ran toward you, because I was not afraid, because I have been a burning building and I remember what it was like to be trapped inside myself, dissolving in the heat and the pain, toxic and dehumanized. I remember. So I ran toward you while everyone else ran in the opposite direction, and I put my hands on your windows, and I entered you.
iii. You were trembling in those flames, those flames I swept aside like curtains, looking for the salvageable. You were sad and raw and red and wonderful, surrounding me with your swollen hopes, bleeding words of venom and gentleness, a dichotomy of throbbing remorse. You blew out window panes and shook down doors. You shattered the roof, sent furniture tumbling. You howled at a moonless night, you agonized gloriously.
iv. I watched the pieces of you fly. The Tuesday night Hennessy, the poets you tried to understand, the I-am-not-scaredness of you, the pressure of your angry palms smacking the table, the movement of your legs, the ache of your voice, the bravado of your soul, all sent scrambling like grains of sand. I watched you contort, watched you turn quiet and strange, watched you forget things I still remember, things I cannot forget: the color of our laughter, the finding of trust, the promises you failed to keep, the dissolution of the invincible. I watched as you were, for one incredulous moment, so beautiful I couldn’t breathe. I stood at the core of you while you collapsed around me. I wept for you in ways I have wept for no one.
v. Like a building on fire, you appeared in my path. You ended the way all burning things do, falling, skeletal, to earth. Desperate. Brilliant. Gone.
Dec 10, 2016
Dec 10, 2016 at 4:12 PM UTC
There is nothing but love, and now. Nothing but places that ring out memories, memories of learning to lose, memories of us. There is nothing but heartbeat and heartache. Nothing but night sky. Nothing but the gleam of our spirits, their sheer capacity to keep opening themselves against all odds. Nothing but soft eyes and warm hands. Nothing but breathless winter snatching our oxygen and making us taste of ice and courage. Nothing but risk.
There is nothing here but ecstasy and boredom and wonder, nothing but watching her watch the moon, nothing but light. Nothing but mistakes and forgiveness, tender uncertainty. Nothing but the accepting of what is. Nothing but stars falling overhead, and us lifting our hands to catch them. Nothing but resistance, war, the ache for justice; nothing but our poetry burning these walls down, nothing but chain link fences and snow.
Nothing but creation, nothing but sunrise, nothing but nervous first kisses shared in the back of a city bus, nothing but mouths moving together. Nothing but reverence, guns, a god we don’t believe in, the children making snow angels in the park. Nothing but breathing together, laughter and bare feet. Another day, another hour. Nothing but the revolving of Earth, the splitting of cells, these fears we nurse in the darkness, the loss we have chosen to accept.
Nothing but our longing, our need, our dying, our letting go; nothing but nakedness, this human vulnerability, the trust we give to others, the thunder of our feelings, the words we cry out; nothing but our souls rising and falling and growing and moving and touching and aching and knowing and leaving and loving and becoming.
There is nothing but this.
Nov 25, 2016
Nov 25, 2016 at 6:50 PM UTC
i. What I mean to say is, I’m sorry. I’m sorry everything’s changed. I’m sorry my bones are dark with mourning and need, sorry I don’t feel the way I used to, sorry the light doesn’t catch in my eyes. When I was 17, I’d lie in the grass near my house and watch the sky with such wonder, it’s astonishing I didn’t implode on the spot. I was so full. Where did she go; that marvel, that gleam? I miss her terribly.
ii. What I mean to say is, what am I doing? I’m split. A part of me is hanging on so hard to the past I think I’ll die if I let go, but a part of me wants to cut those years off like a rotten leg—pretend I only just came into being, that I have always been like this. I’ve carried so much shame with me all my life, but I’m just realizing it now. Or, maybe I’m finally realizing how not okay it is. How somewhere along the line I stopped believing it was alright to call myself Writer or Poet or Author or Warrior or Brave, just because I wasn’t doing those things well enough. I read great literature so I’d have something to aspire to, fueled by the hot, strange beauty, but in doing so, I burned myself. I began to feel like an imposter among my own words. I gave up Writer and Poet and Author and Warrior and Brave, because they just weren’t mine enough. I let them belong to others. I became a spectator to myself.
iii. What I mean to say is, it’s a hard world. There are beautiful things, yes, moments that catch me off guard and stun me with love, but they seem to grow further and further apart. Nothing is easy. What use are those once beloved flowery words and strung-out phrases of effulgence, which now make me squirm with embarrassment? I don’t write like a child anymore. I write like someone who’s worn out, someone who just wants to slip off her shoes and rest for a while. I am trying to be okay with that. I’m trying to accept the lostness. I’m trying to exist, somehow, in this jumble of souls. I’m trying to figure out my place in it all. I used to know everything, but I don’t know anything anymore.
iv.What I mean to say is, life isn’t romantic. The human heart isn’t romantic. Romance isn’t romantic. The poets were right when they said blood was never beautiful, it was just red. I want to spin you a story of angels and upsurge and glow, but I can’t. I can’t be silver. I cannot be delicate. I can’t breathe lilacs or moonbeams, when what I really need to breathe is oxygen, right down to my belly where my soul has clenched itself tight. I cannot live like poetry, though I tear myself apart trying. I can’t.
v. What I mean to say is, I’m Still Here. Even though it feels like I’m not. Even though I go home and wash the dishes and stand in the dark watching the skyline under its field of stars while this gnawing, unfillable pit within me writhes to be heard. I’m still here, writing these flawed sentences, wondering at the meaning of everything. The world isn’t familiar anymore, and neither am I, but I still have some things. I have my voice. My resilience. A body that sobs and laughs. Love. Clouds and water and comets and bees. The sky. The earth. All of it.
Jul 26, 2016
Jul 26, 2016 at 11:25 AM UTC