you taught me to peel my own layers
like oranges, abolishing my own comfort until my skin is raw and fresh, until the scent of selfish solitude is in the air you breathe.

once bare, I must forget the ache
of loss and grieve in silence as the desert sun taunts me with
the color I've just shed.

my eyes will always know your face.
it is a face of a man with yellow eyes,
a gun inside his pocket;
ready to pull the trigger once the war inside him commences.

gone are the days of peeling oranges.
it is time for me to peel suns.

The only love I've ever known are
the scars on my mother's back,
painted in the colors of nightfall and
dawn, breaking into an immortal blue.

I can only imagine seeing the world
through her worn eyes;
coming home to a pair of ***** hands
and two mouths to feed,
falling asleep to what sounded like forgiveness.

And so when you offered your bare shoulders to me,
I learned how to love like a blind man—
my hands stretching out into the dark horizon beyond my lids, fingers clawing
their way out of the black and into the blue.

This is an apology.

For the nights you grasped my wrists
as I tried to paint you in colors you did
not need, for the times my fists fought
their way into your chest because
I only saw you in black and white,
for burying our hands in soil,
for feeding you words until your throat
was filled with the consequences of my inabilities,
for not belonging to you,
for not belonging to me.

Sometimes my body fails to remember
that my feet are my own
and that the ocean is going to be fine without my surrender
and that you do not need to break to touch me
and that i am my mother's daughter
but i am not her clone.

I am thinking of sitting in front of a broken window and wishing the sun away. The light has left selfish marks on my skin and they meet each other despite my malevolence. I was never one to grow out of my fatalities.

Often, I lie awake in a bed that feels
foreign enough to be called home and
feel the dark circles under my eyes
spread out until my hands arise to gather the dark night in my palms and
squeeze the silver out of a black ball.

The talons are reaching out for my chest, aching just to graze the abnormality under my dark blue skin. I am a wilting white rose in a field of sunflowers and they are all waiting for the last petal to fall.

My travels always start with a cup of you,
soaked in the sighs of the morning rain, treading water in the lake of our sheets.

Sometimes they end with you behind the door,
the words crawling out of your mouth—
a thunderstorm of
unwritten paragraphs about how often my head and knees meet.

Sometimes they end with a bottle and a stick of defeated silence—
you and your fallacious fingers,
you and your absolute mouth,
you, you, you.

Most times they end with the moon wrapped in our helpless embrace,
its light a different flavor.

And even then, I do not choose to let go.

i.
The streets are empty, love.
I can almost find myself between alleys, searching for your hand amidst all this hell.
The lights have exploded and I am wondering how good it must feel to burn out.
My chest still has claw marks.
Do you remember?
Do you remember?

ii.
The air is still, baby.
I can almost drown without you in it.
Your words are all I hear
as I scratch at my lungs in the darkness.

iii.
My tongue is dry, sweetheart.
I can almost taste you.
The ropes are tight and snakes are around my ankles,
I can't shake them off.

iv.
The dark is strangling me, honey.
I'm almost there
It wants me,
it wants me
I don't know if my eyes are closed
or open
I am burning out
I am still searching.

the walls are tight around you
blameless, insufficient

the inside is a storm of all sorts,
cold and quivering with oblivious benevolence

the outside is warm
and yet my arms itch to curl around
the blameless insufficiency that is so desperately engraved on your skin