It’s hard to be in a new place.
It’s hard to be somewhere where no one knows you well enough yet
to love you unconditionally.

And so you find yourself picking up love wherever you can find it
In whatever form it comes in.
You find yourself peeling love off the streets
and scratching around the inside of garbage cans for it.
You look for it at the bottom of a bottle
or in the recesses of a fridge.
You look for love in new clothes
and in long runs and your favorite songs
and in between a skinny boy’s legs
and in the compliments
of an old man at a bar.
You look for love in the texts of old friends
And in the worried calls from your mother
that you won’t return because you’re too busy trying to live and love your life where you are
But why is it so difficult.

You look for love in work
In mundane activity
to distract you from remembering that your heart is empty and isn’t it pathetic
Aren’t you so pathetic
That you checked to see if his car was in the driveway
Because if he’s home that means he left his door open for you to come in
But if he’s gone he didn’t even care enough to say goodbye.
And why do you let your love be carried off on the shoulders of a boy
Who pins it up on the fridge when you give it to him
but throws it in the trash when you leave
Who squeezed his arms around you in his bed last night and ignored you the whole next
day
Why do you search for love in the kisses of his parched lips
In the sound of rustling sheets like crunching leaves when he flips over onto you and runs
his hands up past your knees
and around your hips and up to your chest
Because it’s hard to be in a new place.
Where no one loves you yet.

And boys in particular are so eager to give that love in one very specific form
And girls are so eager to believe that that form encompasses the entirety of being loved.
So when you slide into his bed that first night you think wow someone loves me.
And it’s odd to you when he falls short in the other areas of love
like caring.
And we know we know we know we’re supposed to wait and not give ourselves away like
flyers on the street for the garage band performing Friday night
But it’s hard to be in a new place.

So I search for love in crevices and in alleys.
I find it more quickly there than in sunbeams and up in trees.
But I suppose it’s worth it to wait for sunbeam love and tree love and end of the branch
kind of love. Love from people who remember my birthday. Who ask how I am
because they really want to know.
Love isn’t compliments.
Or ***.
But it really is hard to be in a new place.
Because no one loves me here yet.

Let me sweat inside you
So you can feel my tension
Let me perspire through your skin
So you can feel my convulsing muscles
And my tired shaking limbs.

Let me sweat inside you
Let my efforts run down your face
Let me puddle up in your crevices
And soak your shirt like rain.

Let me sweat inside you
Let my anxiety push through your pores
So you know how it feels to live with you
After you held my hand and stroked my arm

After we climbed to the top of that building
After we jumped that tall locked fence
After you said come share your blankets
After I slipped inside your bed
After you bent my clothes off
After you said please let’s have ***

After you promised me a day at the park
Just the two of us that Sunday
After that second night together
And you said
Haven’t you ever heard of friends with benefits?
After you confused me.

Let me sweat inside you.
Feel my body twitch.
With the work it takes trying to ignore you
And wishing that you loved me
And wondering if you ever did.

Let me sweat inside you.

My first love was a sappy, scary thing
That fell out of the sky,
Wingless—
A wingless bird made out of the painted
Smearing of his lips
And the soft grazing of his hands
Along my back
And the kisses that felt like stars
Across my chest.

She tries to be a rainbow
But is a pencil-written note.
She tries to be a roar
But is the clearing of a throat.

She tries to be a hurricane
But is the beaded dew at dawn.
She tries to be red lipstick
But is SPF 4 lip balm.

She tries to be a wink
But is averted eyes.
She tries to be a roar
But ends up as a sigh.

She tries to be a flower garden
But is a single petal.
She tries to be gold jewelry
But feels like rusted metal.

She tries to be the ocean
But is the gravel on which it rests.
She tries to be a roar
But is a mumble under breath.

I don’t like how the skin below my eyes gets cold after I’ve cried and my tears have dried.

I don’t like how, when I listen to a sad song, my eyebrows scrunch together and touch the frame of my glasses, and I can feel the hairs bristling against it.

I don’t like how my mascara comes off in clumps and takes my eyelashes with it, and I see the white tips where they were rooted in that precious skin that rims our eyes.

I don’t like how the heart-shaped, helium balloons that my parents got me for Valentine’s day float at the top of my ceiling and look like demons crawling across the ceiling when the light’s off.

I don’t like how I can’t be all one color, so I buy skin-colored nail polish and skin-colored lipstick, so that if I can’t blend into anything, I can at least blend in with myself instead of being a walking commodity of incongruities.

I don’t like how I can’t just pull bones out of my body and give them to people.

I don’t like how I can’t walk into rooms and fill up every nook and cranny with myself. I don’t like how I can’t expand and crowd into all the air around me everywhere I go, so that I never have to walk into a space and feel emptiness or smallness, because that chair refuses to wrap itself around me and the floor doesn’t soak up between my toes and the ceiling fall down and cover me like a blanket.

You bear these blisters
And wear dry, blackened skin.
I take down my mane
And shake it out like a lion.
I take down my fire
And shake out the ashes.

Flowers whip at my cheeks
And thorns get stuck in my clothes.
I run fast down the hills.
My hair lights grasses and cloves.
I run fast before you.
My fire burns at your nose.

Through the overgrown meadow,
Embers lay on my path.
You run to get me
And take me back.
You run with a bucket of water
And take a pale for the ash.

Over my head you pour it,
And I shriek with searing pain.
I lay on the ground
And feel for my flame.
I lay at your feet
And feel only the coals I became.  

My searing skull, your blackened face,
You take me by the arm.  
You walk me back to your path,
A cement-paved sidewalk through a park.
You walk me out of the heat of the sun,  
To your shaded path where I’ll be safe from harm.

In the days of princes and jesters and coronations and queens
We humpty dumpties fell to the ground
As we let our walls break down beneath us
And we didn’t need all the kings’ horses and all the kings’ men
Because we put each other back together again
And sat there in our piles of rubble
And talked for hours about each ****** crumbled