i am sorry but my bones will always love you like hell, like it was war, like the world needs to end in the process, like the hand of god, taking you out of my ribs and now he needs to return it back where it rightfully belong. i will always love you, in godless sacrilege. i am sorry if i don’t know any other way.

i can never love you the way i claim — delicately and without violence. i remember hating flowers and broken seashells, and my grandmother, hand-sewing pastel dresses. deep down, my bones are raised on stories of ancient wars and biblical battles carried from memory to memory, a string of generational blunders — i am made of my father's bitterness and my mother's denial. so i will love you with corruptions and apologies, with bled-out  veins, giving in like an emptied river, with all the poems i have read and forgotten, and with everything that makes me finitely human.

It was a look in her eyes I'd never
seen in his-
Taken a bit off guard but
looking, as it is-
Respectfully, she's got respect but
don't know how to read a room
Respectfully, after a year she stopped making me feel desired
Broken finger, love still as tombs--

I miss that look in her eyes.
She became for me what he was.
Took me a bit off guard but
also built up over a year or two-
Respectfully, I wouldn't ****-talk her but also sometimes she was mean
Don't know, did she intend it?
Or are we all needlessly cruel things?

By the end I felt disgusting.
The beginning was sublime.
I read these poems and realize,
we did it right, and she was mine...
But I see now loving isn't always enough.
You have to work at it.
She tired of working.
I had to leave.

You were a poem I always wrote
You were aflame and I felt bad
She was a future yet unknown
“Us” was in view but not to have.
I didn’t know Her, nor myself
but I knew you, and then I was irrelevant.
It felt like a breakup
but up-close
I don’t know you and I
don’t know what we had.

until it becomes wretched
and primal.

They say to avoid epithets when referring to a person in writing
But you are all adjectives
All honey-eyed,
bright-smiled,
lithe-bodied,
deft-handed,
warm-freckl­ed,
soft-haired,
and most of all,
much-loved.

please
god please
come trace my collar with you lips and my freckles with you fingertips
because i miss the way you laughed along my neck
down that little indent in my palm
i want you to whisper to me
all we didn't get to say
as the night turns into the softest dawn

I love when I stumble across a
moment
where you know it’s one that will be encased in bubble wrap
Preserved with the jams and jellies
Coveted on the shelf
With all the good little memories I have with you
and the way your eyes crinkle when I laugh that particular way
so I smile
and remind myself to keep extra mason jars and bubble wrap
— just for such occasions