You are beautiful.

You have two strange knees

and a loud mouth

and short hair

and too much time on your hands.

You have told me all of these things

Now I tell them to myself.

I love you.

You'll make one hell of a poem.

One hell of a story.

You are mine.

You have told me all of these things.

Now I tell them to myself.

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.

Pretty Boy calls my body “Hourglass”
Funny, I’m not the one wasting my time.

(He got some things right, though. My body is not soft. My body is not fruit. My body is hard. My body takes its time.)

Pretty Boy wants a grain of sand; doesn’t care that he has to break the whole thing to get it.

While he’s at it, Pretty Boy takes more than he originally intended. Takes more than he was offered.

He Takes
and takes
and takes

and doesn’t give a ****.
He broke that too.

Now I’m all washed up in this lake of glass.
Well, it’s a good thing he likes long walks on the beach.
Or ***** as he calls it
“it,” of course, being me.

Pretty Boy knows exactly what not to say
to get me to sleep with him
Pretty Boy is confused
wants to know why I 'do not like' him.

Now I could tell Pretty Boy:

A. that I like girls
B. that I’m seeing someone
C. that I’m just not interested.
D. that I —-

But this is not multiple choice.
This is extended response.

One where I repeat the same thing

over
and over
and over

to all the Pretty Boys.

There was a stunning symbolism floating through the air that night.
We laughed about it without acknowledging it out loud,
Fumbling with lighters and glances cast downward.

I jumped a fence, in a dress, four hours past curfew.
You said, "You owe me an adventure, I saved your life today."
You had, and every day before that.

But never again since.

Like everything I love the most,
I too, wither among the frost.

It bites at my skin
flows cold through my veins
like hospital iv

They call it seasonal
They call it affective
They call it disorder.

I call it "aching for the warm."

I have always hated to see my breath linger in the chill

as if to see my own exhale
is to see my living
is to see my eventual end.

Too many things die when the snow falls

I pray that I will not be one of them.

I wanted bones.
I wanted stick thin wrists and jutting shoulder blades.
I wanted ribcage ladders leading to a faltering heart.

I wanted to die-
But I called it something else.
I called it perfect body.

I called it finally confident,
I called it happy and
They called it sick.

I challenged them with "willpower"
and they threw back "nine months to live if you keep this up."

Maybe we thought we were ironic.

Poor kids

throwing money on train tracks

to watch it flatten,

lose all value.

Sick kids

driving too fast and too far.

Tired kids

staying out too late.

Kids.

Talking through the hard parts.

The bad bits.

The most painful days.

We lived them all.

We were kids.

.

1. Love fully and without fear. Love is the most powerful verb you can teach to someone else.

2. Do not be passive. No one will give you a badge for standing down or sitting still.

3. Tea and Yoga are not for the faint of heart. People who can remain calm enough in times of peril to make a nice *** of Earl Grey are more powerful than you can even imagine. Yoga can and will kick your ***.

4. You do not have to be religious or even believe in God to appreciate the value of the Bible, or prayer.

5. There is no such thing as false hope. Your hopes and dreams and goals and deepest desires are all valid. No one can tell you otherwise unless you let them.

6. The only person who can truly love you entirely for who you are is yourself, so you had better do a good job of it.

7. If the letters you write always sound like apologies, do not send them. Take pictures and send those instead.

8. Do not let yourself be reduced to a set of numbers. You are so much more than careless red ink.

9. Abandonment is never beautiful. The only beauty is in the peace you may take from it.

10. Live fully and without fear.

I was always the atheist who capitalized the G.

The girl in the back of the choir wondering why we never sang about Her.

Fretting over Anne Frank's place in a Catholic heaven,

I left God like a lost childhood friend.

We had one too many arguments.

Differences, in opinion.

I found the lonely and built a cabin there.
Learned to live in it.
Decided I was better off with a roof over my head,
Even if some bad thoughts leak in when it rains.

I was never meant for compassion and sympathy;
It was recklessness that governed my silent reveries,
And it was love that made me stitch myself into them.
Thread by thread, growing ever louder, ultimately becoming too grand
For my thinning soul to bear.

It's one am and I'm laying out on my lawn because there is a small chance I'll see a meteor, and I am in no position to pass up a wish right now.

Because I've been wishing on stars and bones and praying and hoping to forget about you.

To forget that I loved you.
To forget what you did to me.
To forget how when I was with you, my pulse was so loud I would write melodies to the beat of my heart and let you play them for me.
Let you play them in all the right places.

You.
You were my
Brooding poet.
My midnight partner.
You were the hope I didn't know existed.

And it's nights like these I curse these **** city lights I used to love so much
before you came around.

Don't Stop.

Was the gentlest command that ever passed your lips.

My fingers danced across the keys,
Playing to the tempo of your scribbling pen.

We wrote a symphony that day,
Broken to the beat of our passionate hearts.

The arias of my poetry were never enough for you.
You had to hear them played in the form of

Chopin
Bach
Strauss

Anything you could write to.

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.

I've made you into pretty words.

Scrap metal.

Crumpled pages.

Ink Spilled.

You made me brilliant.

Permanent.

I suppose I made you permanent, too, but you never saw it that way.

Never looked at your own etchings and called them beautiful the way I did for you.

Your permanence was always in scars on my skin.

Graphite Queen Anne's Lace drawn in my sketchbooks.

My permanence was always poetry with you.

Lovely musings for hours about an afternoon alone.

You made the sunsets sound even nicer after they were gone.

You can't put poetry on a chain,

Shackled.

I ran too far from you to ever be held down.

But here you are

Scrap Metal

Hanging from my neck.

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.

My poems are not a safe place to be.
But despite the danger, you seem to linger here.
The rafters hang with stripped electrical cables
but this building has never been up to code.

I hope you have your helmet, dear -
for everything is falling down.
Look how the light shines through broken window -
you could almost mistake it for beauty.

You offer me a bucket of wet paint,
but there are no longer walls to wash.
They've all crumbled now.
The frames are all that's left.

They look like skeleton, you see.
Like prison bars or Greek columns.
Am I dungeon or am I Panthéon?
Tell the truth this time, my love.

No matter, I suppose.
We will fade to nothing soon -
You, my poems, and I.

You are a strike anywhere match.
But you have always burnt out much too fast -
Disappeared before I even had the chance to hold your glow.

You, with your beautiful flicker
out and in and in and out
of my life

You dear, sweet nothing.
Whispered passing in my bad ear
I could never quite make out your meaning.

You - filled to the brim with sulfur
with wood splinter
with flame -

You never answered my question.
Were you meant to burn out?
Or else ignite?

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.

I lost myself once-
Twice-
Once?
More times than I care to count.

I searched for my reality
In dark corners,
Zigzagging alleyways,
And the hearts of others.

I found nothing
But fear,
Pain,
And shame.

I avoided mirrors
And instead reflected on myself
I was there all along,
Waiting to be seen.

So…***.

I don't have it. People never seem entirely surprised by this, I don't know.
Maybe my tell is my general blushy-ness around any and all cute humans, or maybe it's the way I yelp when they hug me too hard…

But it's not for lack of trying.

You see,
I am an extremely intimate person until my skin gets involved.
Then I'm all turtles' shells and touch-me-nots, shrink away, shrink away, hide, be small, be tame, be timid.
Or else like a wild animal - claws sharp, bite back, all fight and flight and defense.

I don't have *** - *** has me. Caught by the throat, a deer in headlights, no way to get away, stuck.

Stuck in his basement, seven years old.
The magician next door tricked me and changed my meaning of the word magic forever.
Never again would I put my faith in illusions.

But now, there's this girl, and she is so beautiful -
When I look at her, I can't see straight.
But she is no illusion.

She tells me she wants to help me carry my baggage,
But I don't want to tell her my baggage is a body bag
And it's me inside-
Choking for air,
And I wish it was because she takes my breath away, but it's not.

But sometimes, she does take my breath away.
And when she does, I want to tell her
Everything.

I want to tell her that if she holds me
Close enough,
Long enough,
I won't dare shrink away.

I will grow into her until we are bursting together,
Until we are bold,
We are soft,
We are free,
We are
Everything-

I never imagined I could be
with another person.
So close,
together,
We could be more than magic.

He tells me that I will make one hell of a poem
One hell of a story

And he says it like a threat
Like this is the first time I will consider the literary value of my being

But he is sadly mistaken
Because he will never write as many love poems about me as I have written to myself

The summer I stopped reading his letters
I wrote myself a poem for every day that I was stronger without him

I wrote the vows for the holy matrimony of my two good thighs
I wrote the preface for every novel I may someday compose
I wrote love songs to the children I will never bear.

My poetry has known every part of me in ways he never could.

Even in my home, I no longer have a roof over my head. No more can I lay in bed listening to rain hitting the roof, pressing my ear against the cold, foggy window to hear the thunder.

Instead, above me, there are people.
People I have not met, who do not know me.
People who will never care to know my worries or fears or deepest desires.
They do not care that their footsteps douse out my raindrops.

They do not care about me.

I lie here drowning, sinking, into the storm, but never hear its din.

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.

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.

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.

Today

A girl with a whopping total of 1 year more

Life Experience than I

Scoffed

As my shaking voice said

“Sometimes you can't fix things with your parent.”

“Sometimes there is no relationship to improve there.”

“Sometimes those things can't be fixed.”

I bow my head as she tells me all it takes is one phone call a day

Playing back phone calls in my head

-HelloWhoIsIt?

Please stop

Please

This isn't fair to me

Please leave me be-

This girl is me; before the fear.

Before the fall,

Before the let down.

No begging passes her lips

She has known no threat

Contributes to my theory that smiling faces

cannot bruise.