Dancing on the blades of scissors I
Long for the crest of my years; for the tide of my love to make
      Shore in thee arms
Of an unwitting stranger,
Waiting, without knowing why.
The silver thread of his thrumming pulse
     Too fierce a cry for my liking.

I feel some new urge, and tender.
Through my bones, tempered
But by what? My past? Men say that,
Sometimes, while they drink.
Making fun of those boys they walk past on the street,
Who look too much like they looked,
And they say,  𝑁𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛
Never again will I fall in love,
Like I fell in love with her.
My future then,
That I see in my derams,
Where my arms are wrapped around him.
And his hair is long,
And his body is warm,
And his voice has a soft lilt in saying,
𝐼'𝑚 𝑔𝑙𝑎𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝐼 𝑚𝑒𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢;
As if we weren't in bed together,
Someplace where it always rains.

To get the scent of my suffering deep
In my nostrils and hold it
Like rosewater perfume.
To forgive my mother, someday.
I get a new urge, and tender,
Pulling apart at the seams.
There is the seed of it,
Glimmering, hopeful,
Lost not in the dying embers of
Waking up lonely,
In such a faltering world.

Could I not love you,
Just for today?
Could I want not one honey-milk ounce
Of the skin peeking through
Your loose jacket?

Could I hate you for not saying,
Take it from me, you look cold;
Or love you somehow yet more for the way
That you've noticed I love being cold?

I stare down
Quick.
I float in the rush of her waters.
Love lies grave and reaches,
Up, with fingernails crusted.
Nail beds charred from age old smoke;
Salt rubbed high in the wounds.

All of the old love
Lies here.

Salt in the wind and her tangles
Flipped over one shoulder,
Just the way I used to like.
How can it have been three years?
In between rows of bottles,
Runtimes ticking low on the screen,
We ate take-out on the floor
And dreamed long dreams with no name.
I swayed right up to the banks of her,
Pawed at the brine and the silt.

Like the Red Sea,
She parted.

Laid me down,
Soft.
We floated in each other’s waters.
The seagulls’ wings carried our voices.
As we lapped at the tears,
So forlorn.
They tasted of bitter;
Of who she had loved before me.
I don’t want to leave you, she told me.
You don’t know the person I am.
Her lips opened wide when she said it,
And her arms came around to embrace.

There, in her waters,
I burned.

To be rebuilt in the shape of her goddess;
Oh, what have I done to deserve
Her kind, lovely smiles?
The iodine touch of her
Smooth fingers, pale,
Tracing the lines of my fear?
I think about her,

The way that she looked,
That morning.

Slipping out of the door
With our love at her back and the promise
Of the bright morning,
Blood singing clear in her veins.
I love you, she told me that morning.
I’ll see you when I get home.
She put the keys in the ignition,
And danced with me, one more time,
Inside the domed palace that gleamed there -
There, inside of her mind.

She was buried with salt
In her mane.

So why did you leave me
Behind?

A man picks a flower and calls it his
Woman.
Watching not the petals as they
Wither their way into dust.

Forgive me,
I ask, as I knock at your door.
For our differences.
For the cruel things that I've said to you.

Forgive me,
For being your daughter.
For not being that well enough.

Forgive me for chasing my happy,
My premonition of leaving you
To your own devices.
To find myself, new, in the fall.
That ghost of a spirit who swears that she loves you,
But only comes home at Thanksgiving.

Forgive her.

Forgive her for lying to you,
For saving her skin because she thought that you would be proud.
She is sorry
That every day she made you spend hours alone,
Languishing in your own spiral,
And then, coming home, went downstairs;
Not to talk to you of her life,
Or of all that she wanted to do
With those eighteen years that you gave her.
In eighteen more years,
You'll have given her thirty-six,
It will tighten her to you,
Draw it in desperate colors.

Because that was the age when you picked her out
Of the shopfront inside of your mind, said
Lord, give me this one,
Give me a daughter to love.
And wrapped her up in one pretty bow,
Of one dark, slightly raised freckle,
That lies on the back of my hand
And forgives you.
For all of those failings you told me,
Once, that you had.

Forgive me,
For thinking about myself,
More than I thought about you.

Forgive me for being a young person,
Lost in my love, in my pain;
In the shows I watched on television,
And the music that I listened to.
Instead of my schoolwork and daring to dream.
To live up to the girl that you saw in your prophecy visions,
When I was but five minutes old.

Forgive me,
For saying bad words and sneaking away,
Without telling you where I had gone.
Don't you see that I'm telling you now?

Forgive me, I say, and I'm here at your doorstep.
How is it that you look the same to me now,
As when I was only seven,
And didn't know how long you'd lived,
In a country with separate words?

Forgive me, I say, and you stop me there.
What is there, you ask, to forgive?

Love, let me grow on you.
Feel into me, and exchange
That closeness I yearn for.
That hallowed embrace, which first I observed,
Inside of my parents eyes,
And which for many years before I
Was a glimmer.
Let me be something to you.
Enough, at least, that life
For you, might be as much
And holy as it is to just be near;
So promised in your gentle, lilting smiles
Amid those fleeting moments I call mine.

In aubergine,
And my kind wanting lies,
The rise and fall of feet, a formula's delta,
That I once called 'who I am'.
In thumping heartbeat and trembling fingers,
The graceless clumsy of nerve to embrace,
That fierceness seen once in the mirror.
There for a second, or less than a second,
Just before blinking my eyes.

In letting them choke on my lashes,
I steeled myself for the reveal;
Saw what I'd always believed of myself,
Named her too much of a burden.
A slick thief of my mother's love,
That canted towards disappointment.
Something called falsely pretty,
Instead of more accurate words,
Like a sly and foolish imposter,
An amateur of imitation,
Masked as a girl with pride.

I traced every deceit,
A cord, or a rune, on her body.
Twisting words that fell off her tongue,
As easy as catching a snowflake.
Those ones where she claimed she was smart,
And deserved to be cared for, somehow;
Pressed into her elbow's hollow,
The dips and the swells of her shallow crests,
And the unearned keel of her hair.

Standing there, wishing for someone, anyone
Real to approach her and rend,
Down the walls of her cowardly fortress,
Exposing all of her nothing,
And petty shoplifting;
Leave her there at the apex,
Of all that she was and could not be,
To drown inside the hot blackness of oil,
And what she perceived to be justice.
Not thinking, for all her lost, learned logic,
That these thoughts, too, could be lies.