twelve days before her nineteenth birthday
the green-eyed one returns.
the girl who burns waits in silence,
hatred ready and eager at the edge of her fingertips.
he dares to tell her “I love you still.”

she doesn’t bother to remind herself that she too loved him once
before she takes her sweet time to tear him apart.
on that night she relishes the guilt in his voice
when she reminds him how she cried
until the tears dried
and the pain stole her breath away too.
he abandoned her,
saying it was the best for both of them
when it was really just the best for him.
if she was cruel
she would call him a coward.

she turns her back on that copper love
flower seeking sunlight elsewhere.
she finds it in herself one day,
not in the arms of another,
the strength to best her Everest.

daughter of the water drowns now
in a sea of her own making.
bitter, never, ever sweet.
she admonishes herself, steel-jawed, fists tight at her side.
“foolish songbird,
duped by the rhapsody of a sugared mouth.”

with lungs weeping, begging for air, she knows:
those dulcet four months had been copper.
true gold did not rust with time,
did not melt before a meager flame,
felt not the chill of winter.
she had loved her prince
with the fire of reckless, unlearned youth--
the first love she had always dreamed of.
even so,
the knives beneath her feet,
his lukewarm uncertainty,
were another mountain
she could not carry,
would not cross.

wielding that arctic flame of a heart,
she stumbles into a pair of mesmerizing green eyes.
she has never liked honey
but has a sweet tooth for his prophecies anyway.
and he says it first, a magic spell,
calls her at midnight and whispers softly
“I love you”.

she buys a couple's necklace set, a tether, a leash,
gives him the golden puzzle piece
and keeps the silver heart with a hole in it
even though one day he runs away
with the last gold of her heart,
like she feared he would.
his eyes were moss.
parasitic beauty.

the dark haze,
the void he left behind,
does not hurt.
the other boys made her cry, but she has no tears for this.
this wound does not ache,
does not fester. a different malady,
it ***** the warmth from her smiles,
the mirth from her laughter
a drought of emotion.
she spins the razor-blade between her index and middle fingers
and wishes she was strong enough to die.

the spring rises from the horizon soon enough,
dancing along the dry amber plains of the neighborhoods, painting their lawns green
a new beginning, from an unwilling ending.
quietly she descends into the dark,
fingers twined together in prayer,
offering herself to the night,
offering no resistance against the silence
stifling her lungs and heart.

five months pass and so do the bodies.
fearlessness carried by resentment.
she downloads Tinder in an attempt to keep her heart burning.
it is the wrong flame but she brings home wood anyway.

it is said that a mermaid’s flesh grants immortality
and the songbird of the sea feels it.
greedy, soulless fingers roaming,
reaping.
they don’t stick around long enough
for her to remember their names,
just the smell of liquor and latex.
their false warmth does not defrost her heart
so she wilts. fish out of water.

for a while she can no longer look in the mirror.
all she can see is the girl who burns,
borne on that horrible moment of anger,
daughter of the water turned inferno
a match struck wrong.

sarcastic and seventeen, she was satisfied
with laughter and rainless mornings.
fingers stained gold with marker ink,
hours spent rolling on the cold floor after school.
when the hard work in the artwork was too much
they danced across the freshly polished floors,
skating on dusty socks
howling outdated love ballads.
and one day a boy with hooded eyes walks in
and joins their after-hours circle.

he calls her beautiful.
the blaze on her cheeks says her heart believes him.
his arms are thin, too, saplings, budding flowers.
his laugh is the joy of summer come two seasons early.
“I’ll never leave you,” he says,
sewing her eyes shut with infatuation.
one late November night they spend lying
on the cold, black cement of the basketball courts
he tells her he’s talking to someone
she knows isn’t her.

in Room 13B she sits in his lap
each word falls like a petal until the last one hits the floor
and she knows with a horrible certainty:
“he loves me not.”
heart gray with ash,
burned out and tired,
she relapses into red again, swears she’ll never trust again
as the cold, indifferent metal sinks into her arm.

his last words to her are an apology text she never opens.
alight with resentment,
she tapes the razor to the bottom of her desk
and cloaks herself with cold blue flame. rage.

ironically, the last thing she ever says to him is “thank you”.

fifteen and foolish,
she thought she found love
in a twig of a boy
with eyes the color of dirt.

he called her his best friend
said he loved her [as a friend]
when she offered him her heart in December.
she wished he would say these things aloud.
but it is too easy and simple to make honeyed promises
behind the screen of a phone.

two weeks later the new boy caresses her closest friend,
tucking black hair dyed purple
(she wished it wasn’t her favorite color)
behind blushing ears. the trench between them
ensures she will never be embraced
by those thin arms or
skinny promises again.

she breathed noxious air as a child,
toxic, roiling poison. clouds of malevolent vapor
choking mediocrity to death.
there was no joy
without flawlessness.

both her parents are wanderers,
dreamers called to the land of endless potential,
born in the East beneath swaying coconut leaves
and the fragrant papaya tree
and the looming shadow that is poverty.
“We had it worse,” they remind her,
raising the mountain even higher
every time she dares to think she’s reached the top.
her father used to sell gum on the sidewalk
and her sister ate nothing but soy sauce and rice
all beneath the blistering, humid heat of the tropics.

when her 8th grade teacher tells the class
to write nice notes to each other
the only thing her friends see
is her 10/10 math workbook
and not her.
she is just their cheat sheet
and their notebook.
she crumples the notes with shaking fists.
what is expected is not impressive.
“good job” is the same as “do it again”.

she carries their words on her shoulders.
titanic stones, breaking bones,
“you are not enough.”
she reminds herself that the stars waver too
on the night her father strikes her across the face
for the first and only time
and bitter bile scorches her tongue.
hideous insults would spiral from her pink lips
if she still had a voice.

anger is not smoke,
does not move with the winds of change.
so she carves red lines into her wrist, new gills
to breathe out the pain,
vents for the poison.
her only lifeline.
when she turned thirteen
she sat on the worn curb dotted with old gum
and watched the sun set on her youth.