There’s a sway to the way you move
darling, like pieces falling into puzzled
places, a song in your hips and a soul in your
breast, in your chest, on your
mind;
Let the color roll on out of you, like the
waves that emptied you at home, like the
flare of your skirt and laugh in your
throat, like the vibration of your ribs when you
sing;
Your clothes are just as much skin as they are
salvation, as they are an invitation, incantation,
invocation, of all the ways you lift your body towards
the sun; towards the sky;
To the fairest;
To the wave of your body, to the pieces you’re
missing, to the way you love like motion is
emotion, like freedom is a right, like there is
nothing you can’t do while your heart is still
beating;
To your confidence, your eloquence, the way your
eyelashes fall against your cheeks, how you make
love like a thunderstorm, drink tea like
meditation, dance like honey, laugh like spring is
coming;
To the one who lives and flows and
sings, the one who wears flowers in her
hair, the one who speaks of the end like it’s
the beginning and never learned how to
stop;
Raise a glass;
Break the plinth;
You need no apple to prove your worth.
Nov 15, 2015
Nov 15, 2015 at 12:01 AM UTC
I wrote this five times over because it wouldn't come out quite right. Because I’m tired, and there’s nothing I can hear but the silent chatter of my mind on repeat, screaming at me to be better than I am (better than I can be).
In January, we slept in the same bed and I dreamed of kissing you, of taking your hand in mine and pulling you close and never letting go. I followed you around like a lost puppy as you talked about nothing but home.
In February, I was told to wait and left to wonder and doubt and dream. My thoughts swirled until I convinced myself that there was nothing between us but my arms reaching out for you as you turned away (not out of spite, but because you didn’t know).
Felicity, you call me Serenity but I am by far the best at convincing myself that I am unloved, and by far the worst at thinking that I’m worth loving. Felicity, you have been extraordinary from the day I met you, a cacophony of color and beauty that shocked me and entranced me. You are all that I want curled around me at night; you are beautiful and wonderful and mine.
Felicity, most times I am not quite there. I am in the past or the future or the could-have-beens. I am not always whole. I am not whole. It’s hard, for me, to give the entirety of myself when I have trouble finding it, when it’s rotten and breaking and lonely and hiding.
I’m afraid of the dark and blue cheese. I don’t like hypocrites or the way I act when I feel like I can’t breathe. My mouth is bitter from too much coffee, my mind is buzzing from too much worry, my hands are empty because I can hold nothing without it slipping away from me in the end (it was never there in the first place). But you- you are a certainty, and I don’t know if I want to cry but I do know that I want to hold you forever and kiss you a hundred times until you know that you’re worth more than should be possible.
In January, the ball dropped over Erie Bay and I looked past the stumbling drunkards to see you, cheeks pink with cold, and wondered what it would be like to be brave. Now it’s November, and I backspace the ending words to each goodnight text and think about the very same thing. There's sugar in the edges of your fabric, darling, chalk dust kicked up along the road, and I am better when you smile; I am home.
Nov 8, 2015
Nov 8, 2015 at 12:40 AM UTC
The flames in her lonely eyes
ignite flowers in her wake;
bright blooms twist in a wreath
to crown a queen, though
she’d rather her footsteps be
encircled with love;
Her footprints fill with pearl water,
pinky finger hooked with mine;
I can feel the love she doesn’t know
she has flow through her veins
and from her smile into my sighs;
I miss walking beside her,
fiery water licking our toes;
but she’s become so afraid
she can’t trust in me
or her compass to guide us home;
We follow lanterns hung from treetops
make a path where we’ve not gone
with pixie dust trails
and fairy garden archways
and the second star to the right;
Straight on ‘till dawn.
Jul 11, 2015
Jul 11, 2015 at 7:23 PM UTC
I lie facedown on the tallest tree branch, hair bleeding into greenish-brown wood that tastes like dark rain. I reach my hand up and curl it, ring finger to thumb, just within my sightline. My fingers feel soft against each other, slick with moss and the places between the bark that glisten with last night’s rain. The circle I form with my hand fits perfectly around the edge of sunlight melting over the horizon and I stare until my eyes begin to burn.
My grandmother once told me that the cure for anything could always be found somewhere in the world. “It might not be five minutes away,” she had said, pinching tea into bags that had gentle embroidery along the edges. “But it’s out there. Be careful what you give away to find it.”
I close my eyes. Open them. Smile at an aphid making a home for itself on a twig near the sun between my fingers. I like this silence before my house and my friends wake and take away the light. I like the cadence to the world, the light between my fingers, the water against my cheek and the rhythm of my heart slowing down. I put down roots with the old oak tree, drinking in the medicine of the mineral rain.
Jul 11, 2015
Jul 11, 2015 at 7:23 PM UTC
Well you know boy, if you play the earth in a game of loaded dice you'll find out real quick that it don't roll so great on empty gravel with all them melting icecaps shiftin' the balance.
And you know girl, the dealer's gonna say "Your loss, my gain," and give the ****** dice right back to you, melting poles and all. "Try a stretch of universe full of cheaper stars if you wanna get rid of that ****
And kid you'll take that dice and pay the price because all the guns they say they have ain't gonna stop the world from goin' bad real fast as that dealer smirks and says "Not much time left 'till it's gone. Not much time at all."
Jun 16, 2015
Jun 16, 2015 at 12:46 AM UTC
"This is nothing," she says (like nothing is the touch of her lips or kisses of freckles or anything she says with her eyes that I'll miss when she turns away).
"It never was anything," I say (like never is the day I first met her and was swept under the current under the water under the sheets under her skin)
So we go now (so it goes, going, gone) our separate ways-
In a parking lot at midnight (asphalt gravestones and keys in our hands and does it say something about us (about me) that we're safer walking home alone in the dark than we ever were with inches between our hands).
No one ever told us we shouldn't try to make ourselves two of a kind but it's too late now (we meshed the parts that hurt and the buzzing of the streetlights reminds me of her and the way she looked at 2am when I first realized that she no longer made me smile)
Jun 16, 2015
Jun 16, 2015 at 12:39 AM UTC
He took the ribbon and let it fall down with the water, thundering along the current into a cove that his veins couldn't reach, burrowing into the salt-laden cracks. There's sugar in the edges of your fabric darling but that doesn't mean you'll ever mesh with the night sky, no matter how high you climb on your ladder made of UV Light or birthday candles (it falls to pieces beneath you either way). I remember the way he used to write letters because it's scratched into the desk beneath my forty-two empty notebooks, simmering in the silence.
I sit on the floor to write the ends of words because that feels more like making a home.
Did you know (you always know) that once upon a time I was made of pixie dust and dragon fire and lonely midnights with ghosts on the rooftops. Did you know (I don't think you do) that I'm afraid I no longer know how to get lost in that place, that I am an erosion, so prone to cuts on my wrists and bruises under my eyes that I'm no longer worthy enough to fit there.
It hurts not to tell them so but it hurts them to know so. Do you see, do you see? There's a mirror that says she does but my vision's unreliable (so they say so they say. I lost my glasses again).
My, but I missed the ache in my knees that speaks of too many nights spent lying awake doing everything. They hurt more now that I'm doing it (everything) to avoid nothing (nothing at all) think nothing of me thinking of you because if you knew, it would never be the same and I never want to miss you more than I already do so it's nothing. I promise, I promise, I always promise.
He stood at the edge of the falls for the longest time, and nothing happened but the rising sun and whispers from the druids bending their trees. They wanted to walk away away away but roots are hard to break once you no longer hate the soil. Then he took the ribbon and drew it back up again, frayed and wet and (not the same) said "Go back to who I wanted you to be. This isn't what I created."
(No, you held the end of it all. The current did the rest.)
May 31, 2015
May 31, 2015 at 4:15 AM UTC
The old man chip chip chipped away at the star, orange peel shavings pooling 'round his feet like molasses. He looked at me and sighed out ****** drifting towards me through a wall of undecided fruit trees. "Sometimes," his hair murmured at me, "you learn that gray's the only color." He paused. And paused further. And the not-pause became silence.
I picked at the Stairway to Heaven with my eyes till it turned black and blue. "What about your fireworks then?"
He cut himself on the chipping knife and the not-pause was more. "Other times," he disjointed, hand dripping copper taste in with the orange slices, "We paint over the gray and forget."
I lit the fuse and blew up the sky, streaking it with sparks of gold. The clouds smell like molasses and rain and all I can see is gray.
May 8, 2015
May 8, 2015 at 5:47 PM UTC
I dreamed (once) (twice) that there were flowers on your hands, a corsage mismatched with tattered jeans. I asked who had given it to you (wink wink nudge nudge who’s the lucky one) and you said that it was me (I’m the lucky one?). There were vines growing from your veins like I had infused something beautiful into your skin. Like I had something that beautiful to give.
You smiled at me as we walked down the road, past tornados of chalk dust and children playing hopscotch with flashlights to see by. I wanted to hook my fingers in your belt loop and hold you against me, press my face into your neck and giggle into your ear as we stumbled our way down the street (I’m in love with you).
Somewhere along the way we found a salt shaker full of diamonds that burned hot like stars and we shook them out and stomped them into the asphalt, grinding down a path that lifted behind our steps, ghosting off into the atmosphere. And then we ran out of salt. And then I found some in your eyelashes. And then you kissed me.
And it wasn’t real.
I’m told you had a crush on me. I’ve convinced myself it’s not true (and I miss what I never had). I wish I could pave a street full of starlight with you, but all I’ll get is a smile at my tired eyes (which is close enough and warm, warm, warm). I’d like to fly with you, to see the world you’ve stayed in and loved so, to make you blush again and smile and laugh (you're beautiful).
You think that I don’t love you. I don’t know if you love me. I wish that you would, I wish that it was me that you say you are so in love with, that you want to fly away with and live forever young.
(There are words written on my arm that I'll never say, never sing. Not unless you ask. I'm kind of a coward).
It’s 12 am and I should be asleep but all I can think about is chalk dusted streets and the echo of your smile (warm and mine (I wish I wish)) and the reminder of how you said that you didn't think you'd ever fall in love.
(Just my luck that the most beautiful girl in the world is in love with someone else. Just my luck that I can't be that someone. Just my luck that I'm a coward)
(Just my luck that I quite like being in love)
Apr 27, 2015
Apr 27, 2015 at 11:51 PM UTC
You're in the clattered traintracks
And the static on my phone
I know you've found your heaven
But you're always welcome home
Apr 27, 2015
Apr 27, 2015 at 11:24 PM UTC