You know what is heart wrenchingly terrible?
Not the fact we don’t talk anymore
[Though I’ve gotten quite used to the silence]
Not the fact that your backseat will no longer look forward to my visits
[There’s nothing like skin against skin and fog against windows]
Not the fact that my sheets have slowly lost your scent
[I screamed at my mother for washing my sheets the Tuesday after you decided to leave]
Although all of those thoughts are horrible
The worst is
I’m forgetting the color of your eyes

Don't fall in love with that somebody
He'll take you to parks, coffee shops, & to the ocean shore
He'll kiss you & lift you up with an embrace
At the most unexpected time in the most beautiful places
So you can never go back to those places without tasting a mouthful of him
He'll wreck you in the most lovely way possible
& now you'll know why storms were named after people

do you ever wonder
about the difference between
looking at something
and the hallucination created
when looking past it?
if you look at your hand
it's all you can see
but if you look past your hand
there are now two of them
sometimes it's hard for me
to remember which is real
it gets me thinking
about how my father
used to wake me up
in the morning by rubbing
his stubble across my face
i spent my 11th birthday
under the assumption
that he might come back
if i drank his aftershave
like maybe if i could turn blue
if i could be his favorite color
on our bathroom floor
he would forget why he left
the paramedics were all sobing
as they pumped memories
out of my stomach
i coughed up the day the post-it note with your new address on it
burned a hole in our refrigerator
coughed up the day
the divorce papers came
and my mother
took a baseball bat to the mailbox
i've been choking on the splinters
for 17 years
it's been 17 years
since the last dinner plate
exploded on our dining room wall
17 years since my mother
started accidentally setting your place at the dinner table
17 years since italian night
at the restaurant on the corner
where the juke box
spat tired music
and like so many other things
it stopped working when you left
i guess it's no coincidence
since the juke box went quiet
that the cds in my car
only skip on "i miss you"
i've been hemorrhaging memories
for so long
and now that i'm looking back
i can no longer tell
the mirage from the truth
sometimes i swear
you showed up to my graduation
and last time
i was at your apartment
i can't remember
if the imprints of my hands
are in clay hanging on your wall
or if they were left in the mud
the day god had the audacity
to let it rain
or maybe it's like the time
i saw someone crying on a bridge
now that i think about it
i can't remember if it was me

i bet even after all this time
that if my chest were to
ache with emptiness enough
like it used to i could go to your house
and find the outline of our bodies
on your dark blue bed sheets
i have spent the last year
both trying to run from you
and find you at the same time
but i left everything i knew
about falling in love
on that mattress and
it's still settling there
like dust and
all i can do is write about you
until it comes back to me,
or by some kind of miracle,
you decide to.

it is the beautiful subtleties of persons to which i turn when my heart is most troubled and dripping down my organs like wax:

1. the young man with the leather jacket
and big headphones
when he did me a tiny half-smile
and promptly looked at the sidewalk cracks
(eye contact makes me nervous too)

2. "Larry, you **** close to running into a lady, scoot"
(because a little girl in a backpack
matters to a big farmer in overalls)

3. when the lady with the cats and crooked teeth gave me her first strawberry

4. courtesy laughs for Professor John

5. the old lady at the park (every morning at 9:00) who lets her dog
really
stop and smell the flowers

6. the hug from the smelly, long haired boy
whose car i backed up into
"it's no big deal," he said
(and a girl who didn't like being embraced, loved being embraced)

when the world sinks its teeth into my neck
beautiful unnamed faces flash into my mind
and my atmosphere is clean
and i am brimming with gratitude

i