They lie in a shoebox in my room:
Faded dahlias, dried peonies, and dwindling marigolds.
Souvenirs
Of the dead and dear,
They rest within my garden morgue.

I see
The grape hyacinth
And recall the dream that I gave up on,
And remember the picnic with my dad
From the dandelion.

And from a frail and rusted rose
The words you said to me;
I like to watch dust dull its color
And time
Eat apart the leaves.

Stop straight hug me.
Love me like oil spilt on the street.  
Slide me up into you,
And drink my lips like midnight.
**** me softly,
Love me drear,
Glide me down from here.
*******,
Shh me,
Cradle me to bed,
Lullaby me in my head
When you’ve left and gone.
Ruffle me with your wind.
Darken me down with your up-
Over me presence
Looking down at silence
And open and space and still
And thrill.
Get me gone in you.
Drill me down with you.
Kiss me drear,
Fog me up,
Crack me down like a ***.
Dip me river,
Flower me feed and love,
Like a stop straight hug me love me,
Like an oil spilt, midnight lip-ed shhhhh.

My dandelion boy is the kind
That hangs on by thin, grey seeds.

Growing on the lip of each day’s cliff,  
My precariously-positioned 16-year-old leans.

He’s the kind that hangs on
By nothing more than breaths.

Amidst flowers born with all the right cells,
He just wants to be a normal kid.

What ruffles petals, pushes him,
And when their stems but bend,
He ends up broken.

My dandelion boy is the kind
That hangs on by dialysis and dreams.

The sun warms this high school junior,
But still, he only sleeps.

Ever since I can remember, Barbara has been coming to our home
With her poofy hair and her powdered cheeks, all in a cloud of pink perfume.
She would speak in the fragile, broken voice of a woman well beyond her years,
And Mother would beckon her cheerfully to sit at the table in our dining room.

With whatever coffee was in the *** and whatever Danish found,  
Mother would prepare the table and invite my older sister and I to gather round.
From noon to three they’d gab and chat and flip through the catalogues
That Barbara the Avon Lady had brought.

My sister and I would thumb through glossy, vibrant pages
Of blushes and eye shadows, eyeliners and mascaras.
But I, I would thumb quickly and tire even faster
At the conversation of the table that awaited me, inevitably, after.

With feigned interest, I would sit there a bit
And watch as my older sister would, more patiently, fake it.

I’d grab a cookie and then leave
Mother with her checkbook and her bitter black coffee,
Barbara with her perfume cloud and cheeks all porcelain powdery,
And my sister, with her blonde hair, which was just like mine,
But which tried, much harder to grow much faster.
Yes I would flounce away with my neck-length locks,
And go play with my younger brother.

Drop your words into my flesh.
Sink this anchor built of breath.

Drag through the gravel of my chest
This iron burden you’ve confessed.

Snap these veins and scrape these bones,
Catch on ribs, tear through soul.

Dig up nerves like rooted seaweed,
Snag on tissue, rip reality.

In the expanse from ribs to hipbones settle.
Rest your secret made of metal.

In the blood-stained sand overtop my spine
Your words are a weight of fifty thousand and nine.

Like anchors cut through the floor of the sea,
You slice my heart in blades of three.

How you carve me up with your sharp-edged lips,
You drag your razor through your wrists.

We are absinthe-soaked days.

We are mountain dew-drenched *******
And grass-stained t-shirts.

We pull spindly, spidery veins from the palms of our hands.
We let the cuts of the world kiss our lemon juice lips.

We flip off the moon
And say ******* to the skies.

We devour mermaids by night.

You separate my pages,
Lay me paper-down on the table,
And pull my covers together behind my back
So that I lay flat when you read.
My binding exposed,
You’re not surprised to see
I’m kept together by just a few, thin threads.

All this ink, and neither of us can get past the frailty of my physique.