He crushed her fortune cookies
one after another,
peeked into crevices
where the tender things lived,
plundered her secrets
like Godzilla out for an evening stroll,
leaving only flavorless dust
and damage in his wake.

Amazing and beautiful
not a flower or a tree
Much prettier than that
and only I can see

Loving and caring
right down to the core
Filling me with happiness
and so much more

Eyes are so stunning
cannot look away
Gorgeous and shining
all throughout the day

Here in your arms
is where I belong
The beating of your heart
is like a beautiful song

Left on my feet
Only to fall
Victim and finally
Enter in my heart

I** wish I wasn't
So fake

For we both call
And finally realize;
Know our mistakes
Even if we can’t handle pain

I'm restless like a low-class little nothing. Or a something. Or something, I don’t know. I tried to run away when I was twelve. I kicked puddles, ate a package of crackers, came home. I wish I could come home now. But he doesn’t kick puddles, he kicks the stairs loudly when he’s drunk and can’t walk up. He stains the mattress when he ****** the bed. He calls me from the gas station at 4 am saying “I love you baby, come pick me up.” And I shouldn’t, but I will. Will I? I will. And I really want to come home now, I miss the comfort of my warm bed and your soothing hands and would you make me tea when I am sick? I know I’m older, but let’s please forget. He fights and get cuts and scrapes and scabs and bleeds them onto me and I don’t think it’s gross. I think it’s gross when he tries to make love to me. and it hurts. We are not one, we are two. Making love, the term makes me laugh. It’s called *******, I think. It’s not like in the stories or the movies or the fantasies, *******. But this is what grownups do, right? Smoke cigarettes on street corners and don’t use condoms and eat ecstasy like aspirin and sweat and dance and collapse and come home and cry. Because they used to be the good girls, right? Was I a good one? Oh, no, I really want to come home now. Plane tickets are gold and he is too afraid to fly and too afraid to let go of my arm. The bruises are okay, I like the shape they make. It reminds me of a horror movie. I used to not be able to watch them, I was too young. You won’t be able to sleep, you’d say. But I can’t sleep now and I think I might still be too young. I want to come home now, can I please?

I think I loved you most the winter your heating was broken
And we’d stay inside all morning
Pretending to complain that we couldn’t get out of bed
Our clothes becoming little islands on the floor,
Ones that we could not quite find the courage to visit

Your hand stayed glued to my hip,
Your breath warming my shoulder
Like a long drag of whiskey
That kind that had a home so far away,
In a glass bottle on top of your refrigerator.
The one that would not be opened
Until that fateful day in February,
When everything went wrong

And on that unbearable night
When you joked that you’d freeze to death if I left you
There was a long silence
Like it might be true.

Now it’s warm enough
That I show too much skin when sitting in bars
And you avoid me like the plague,
Whispering in any girl’s ear that’s near to you
Every time you see me watching out of the corner of your eye

We should have stayed inside when the ice began to melt
Because I think
When those doors opened and we finally ventured outside
The world had changed,
And so had you and I.

I remember you standing
in the full and easy living.
wearing, that night, your slightest frock

a conspiracy of breath.
that collected, around your body,
like the murmuration  of tiny birds

a loose smothering
of soft luminous folds
smoldering like a dusky halo

the merest graze of weave.
a delicate trace of distance
that clouded the sound of flesh

the skirt fell like an ocean
or a breeze rippling the rain
onto the reach and flow of your limbs

Like an old unwritten story
from the dark earth and brimming sky
it whispered a forgotten language
in the rustle and sigh of dance

I'll sing of all the ways I miss you
and how this sorrow came to be
the verses, lies I should have whispered
the chorus, truths in harmony.

The melody will break the silence
and call your broken heart to me
to be repaired by love unyielding
to broken hymns in minor key.