I hope whenever you see Queen Anne's Lace growing wild, you think of holding my hand and laughing and smiles.
I hope when you walk past that barbed wire fence with the dead plants intertwined with it, you remember how achingly beautiful I thought it was.
I hope you remember how long I spent taking pictures.
I hope you remember how you always threatened to keep walking - but never did.
I hope whenever you see someone with the same battle scars as me, you bite your tongue.
I hope instead, you give them a little faith - the kind you gave me every day.
I hope you think of me - sometimes, at least - when you pick up a pencil and begin writing one of those beautiful poems.
I hope you never forget me saying how much I hated the eerie darkness just after sunset, and how I still walked with you every evening that summer, through the twilight.
I hope you never forget the first time I said "I love you." It was short and passing and it took you aback. A lot of the things I said were short and passing and took you aback, but they were always true. Always.

I taught myself, at a very young age, just how important the heart is.
I memorized exactly where it was in my chest,
Putting my hand there as often as possible,
As if to ask, “Are you alright in there?”

As I got older, I wanted to feel more.
I ripped my heart out and stitched it onto my sleeve.
I handed it to careless boys who dropped it and squeezed it too hard when they were mad.
I stole my heart back from them, and put it in a secret box.

I locked the box, and hid it under my bed, never letting anyone touch it again.
Waiting for the day when someone will silently hand me a key,
nodding, as if to say, “It’s safe now.”
I lie awake now, praying for that moment, and beneath my bed, I swear

My heart beats louder than ever.

K.A.

The Queen Anne’s Lace bloomed early this summer.
Last year, it was late, the last of it not dying until the snow fell.
We too faded as winter came, wilting until we couldn't survive any longer.
You said it first, out of anger – telling me all the reasons I had become distant and cold.

All you wanted was a distraction, a reason,
But I was too anxious for that, tearing myself into pieces to give to you as presents.
You said you only pretended to be angry, but I knew from experience –
There was rage in your heart.

You said something else that night that echoes in my mind to this day
Each time I set pen to paper with you in mind, it is there, too.
“It’s going to make one hell of a poem.
One hell of a story.”

K.A.

The magician's basement was no more glamorous than my own.
Old couches, an untouched television.
One corner, however, holds some curiosities.
Loaded dice, trick decks, handkerchiefs.
Handcuffs, matches, rope, knives.

But his handcuffs hold no illusion, only my thin wrists.
They are hard and cold like any other pair
digging in, no escape.

There was no magic.

He offers to show me a trick.
How easy, I think now, it must be
to fool a seven year old girl.

I was tricked.

He told me once that magicians love the dark.
The black, he said, keeps their secrets hidden.
He told me to close my eyes,
and when I could finally open them,
there was no more light.

He hid me in the dark with the rest of his secrets, the rest of his tricks.

K.A.

I made it no secret to you that I grew up next door to a magician.
I was in love with everything he did, made it my mission to memorize it all.
So I played our love like a trick deck, a loaded die.
I thought I knew every illusion.

One day, he showed me a trick based in science.
You blow a candle out, let the red ember die, and just as the smoke starts rising from the wick, you hold an unlit match in it.

You see, the Magician explained to me, the smoke is still combustible. The fire is dead, but its possibility lingers in the smoky aftermath – a flame is lit once more where it was thought to be gone.

Our smoke never lifted after our flame flickered to its death.

With passing time, it rises and falls in waves around us – Our day walking the beach, our moments at the hidden creek, our midnight on the lake, our smoke has always been water, drowning, pulling me down until I can no longer see the surface.

Or else it is fire, burning red hot, scorching my skin until the burn lingers so I dare not forget where you have left your mark.

And the smoke around us is so thick, choking me with the possibility, and I am scared of what it means.
Scared of the flame, of the drowning, of the tricks.

K.A.

Sometimes I sit in bed listening to The 1975 and reading Tennessee Williams
Sometimes I walk in the rain to go get an iced chai latte and wear my favorite boots
Sometimes I hold my own hand and sleep on my stomach and pretend there's a ******* lab at the end of my bed.
Sometimes I miss you.
Like happy heartbreak
Forgotten goodbyes
One last sigh before the hug is over
Words exchanged
Glances given
something suppressed
neither knows what

But then it's too late
Because I'm here
too far
And soon you'll be even farther

Both of us figuring out everything we talked about
on long walks
on Thursday mornings
in the dark
on the patio
too late,
too early

too late.

K.A.

You were the most important poem I ever read.
I didn't have to pretend to understand you
like Emerson
But I memorized you all the same,
like Frost.

Writing poems about poetry
Is problematic, you see.

Poetry is subjective
Changes with every person

Poetry doesn't always stick with you
but sometimes you can't get it out of your head.

Sometimes you want nothing more than for the poem to end
to have never read it

Others you read and re-read and wish you could read it once more
for the first time.

You were the hardest poem I ever read.
I didn't pretend to like all of you
like Whitman
But I loved you all the same
like Dickinson.

You were my favorite poem I ever read.

K.A.