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

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.

I walk down the sidewalk,
Past dull brick buildings scribbled with graffiti.
Even when we were together,
You acted like you couldn’t see me when I walked into a room,
And you didn’t take out your ear buds when I was talking to you.
I imagine a blade slicing through my neck,
Sliding cleanly through my solid, peachy skin
And then slipping through my trachea and arteries and cartilage.
I imagine this all happening very quick.
I pass by Macatelli’s and those pink tutus in the window that you made me wear for a laugh with your friends.
I went along with it just to make you smile.
I pick my way across the train tracks to get to the north side of town.
My green Nikes crunch over the cracked and gravely sidewalks.
Your mouth always folded down in a smirk whenever I read my poetry,
Saying they were all about ***
When you knew I just meant love.
I imagine the blade as it gets stopped short, caught on my spinal cord.
It carves through most of it,
Leaving my head to just kind of hang there by that one little shard of bone,
Dangling about my body like a grape on a vine.
I turn to go down Fifth Street,
Where you grabbed my *** last week and giggled as you kept walking.
I stood there frozen, terrified, as you twirled around to ******* the most poisonous kiss that ever floated through this air.
Even though we broke up months ago.
My head droops down onto my shoulder,
Unable to fully decapitate.
Through the few veins that are still attached,
The blood continues to pump.

Haven’t you done enough?
Oh, Charlotte Denver, won’t you just let me die.

Orange canoe leaves and castling roots
   and a potpourri of rocks and twigs and mosses
     hailed my pathway.
Fresh, white flowers mingled with their rusted sisters
upon the ground, like copper-splashed jasper.  
        The canoe leaves curled
as the white and rusted flowers tumbled through them
like toppled teacups and feathered, Victorian party hats.  
     Their christened sisters mirrored them among the boughs above
and talked loftily about the treetops
      as the fallen ones chattered amidst *******
      and the roots dividing the tables of their tea party—
unaware, and heedless, of how far they’d fallen.

Most mornings are spare,
Like the spaces between the branches of a spruce tree.
Most mornings are clearings in woods
And bare bark.
Most mornings sound of violins
And Torquil Campbell’s voice swooning in and out of Bach’s Suites,
Leaving you empty,
Hueing you in gray,
And sketching you, lightly, onto white notebook paper.