Dreaming in increments
Maneuvering vitamin D
like stability can bend between hands
without breaking bones,
like muting sunshine with an unwashed sleeve.
I promised I’d call my best friend
To disrupt that fleshy carcass
Face shoved against cage
Thing that she’s going through.
I promised that the new year
Would be as shiny as I was afraid;
I guess it’s a break-up,
Like when I watched my stomach walk out on me
Exclaim that this is the last time
As my boyfriend foamed at the mouth
And all of his cells turned blue
I heard a bark somewhere under a far-away street light
And I knew that this is how it would be
At least for another year.

I hold walking a blind man across the street
and letting pen and paper meet in the middle of the same bar
after thirty days of limited communication
on an even pair of shoulders.
Brushing blush painted hands
down a body you've never seen in daylight
through a familiar dilation of pupils
but still a body you've seen with your fingertips
feigned with your mouth agape
as you've counted how many light-bulbs it would take
to fix every burnt out barbed wire
strung hair like fairy lights
across the least visited
lonely patches of human existence.
The starving man hand in hand with
each naked pedestrian
in a field made of all the synonyms
that have baked within your flesh
skipping across it
like dead bodies
cannot possibly ruin.

I swept the pink dirt from the grounds beneath
the apologetically heavy
saturated grass
pursed my lips and blew it
into the cloudy cushions of my blushing hands
then swallowed it all whole
one single gulp of its chalky séance
sliding down a dry kind of water slide
slipping itself around in its flamingo floatie
almost-falling from the grooves of my throat
spinning in the fuzzy nostalgia
of the circles it made around my feet this morning
one thousand times over
zooming speedily past the burnt oranges
and half-hearted blues
again and again
leaving crystal-clear pentagrams
in the split open wakes of dusk
all of these tiny little pleads
these gloomy promises
dissolving themselves into pale ashes
dipping their hair into a thick murk
taking flight with two feathery and forbidden
midnight arms
spread only to rebel against the wind
or maybe to hover
tower
One million feet—
above your scary-big shadows
small as ants from up here.

I am barely one millimeter tall
dragging my body limp across
the sidewalk and I try my best not to make eye contact any contact
with those glaring flashlights rising from the dead off their hard-helmeted heads
I'm still trying to keep mine twisted at one-hundred-eighty degrees
but stuck in the bulls-eye of a man-made hurricane    I wouldn't mind hearing a snapping neck any neck.

One of the hell-bent helmets removes itself to reveal a heavy-set sweating neck
the ******* a skateboard and I recoil synonymously at the sight of too many men too tall
it's seventy-five out but it's beginning to feel negative twenty degrees
I walk as quickly as my frost-gnawed legs allow me to move across
this soup line but they're feeding the wrong kind of hungry who wait for their ***** coins to flip heads
to see who goes first to play tackle-the-red-flags with little girls and the rules don't prohibit contact.

I can't imagine these helmets in human form not even when they ask for my number to keep in contact
I think of the time I was sent home for possessing tempting shoulders and a somehow sultry neck
all I see are claw machines and me, a come-here-doll, resisting the balance being ripped from my head
I forget about pacing myself on the ledge of this concrete just so I can stand tall
I hear the voice of an ex-friend who moved across
town tell me that you "just have to be smart", but you don't learn morals from earning degrees.

I'm thinking about the degree
of which it would mean if I were to reverse the prey predator roles and dare to make contact
blood sharing the same bed with safety sparks a flame across
my brain, I don't want to imagine trembling while holding this pocket knife over the apples of their necks
but I am a no choice girl because every time my mother calls she warns me that I'm not tall
enough to even chop the branches from their heads.

The fifth one in line yells something at me about giving head
silently I measure the trajectory of getting the hell out of this corner the exact angle the degree
what lie is there to tell that is tall
enough that they won't be able to see the panic beneath my contacts
I swat away the possibility of nearby lips staining bruises onto my neck
I keep the idea of my big-knuckled boyfriend like pepper-spray in my back pocket waiting at the street across.  

Hey *****, you seem a little cross
you shouldn't dress the way women dress to turn heads
one day you might make a man break his neck.
It finally began nearing seventy-five degrees
again as I fumbled through my contacts
dialed the first boy I knew, doubling as the tallest.  

I'm on the acceptance stage of mourning the fact that I'll never be tall enough to come across as mean when I come in contact
with non-human beings willing to burn holes in the back of girls heads at four-hundred degrees, who put their ****** trophies on the back-burner as long as it means getting some neck.

Dear,

A lot has changed in the last year and a half
since the day God decided to scoop you up from our ember-warm hometown
and swallow you whole about sixty years earlier than any of us would have ever prayed for.
We would have all given up our one gold-embellished chance to write the center-spread
ecstatically collected our own blood and sweat and knuckles met with writers-cramps
if that meant watching wrinkles sprout permanently across your forehead
roots of trees burying themselves into the grooves of your smile lines.
We would have sacrificed all that hard-earned pain
that stain issues one through four
and that old putrid-beige colored couch
that we hated so much but clandestinely found comfort in leaning our heavy heads on still
in the crook of its homely, familiar shoulder
thinking that we were Shakespeare's apprentices
through fluttering eyelids
creating clusters of words that had to have been New York Times worthy—we were sure
although we knew the furthest we could really go is the furthest your laugh could carry across a room
and that's still pretty far—we could all spit shake and swear—
because I can still hear it sometimes all the way down here
where each tendon in my body is capable of feeling solidity
where I am haunted by uhtceare, wondering if you're too cold
where halos don't exist outside of dreams
not even when the sun is a cracked egg and dripping onto tables, the roofs of cars
not even then is anything brighter than the whites of your lively eyes
and I think you'd like to know that we're still thinking about you
that I can't think about white anymore without thinking about the vulgarity of bathtubs
and your hate for poems that include contractions—I'm sorry I've let you down
but I think you'd like to know that I've finally stopped having nightmares
and even the thinnest-skinned of us all, you know which one,
has been able to convince himself that the embrace of the Earth
just isn't the place for you anymore
that you've already outgrown all of us at fifteen-years-old
and we're sorry for not believing sooner that poetry can save the world.

Within this sacred pulse of blood and pulp
there is more to be heard than a quiet throbbing
this beat after beat of humanity
the background noise of life.
My ear is pressed against his chest
but I hear song birds calling these steady cues home
migrating to the warmest places
until next time.
Biology flushing through his arteries is just a facade
for marching bands and parades place their feet to the ground with each beat
the elephant in your mouth
attempting to follow rhythmically
tripping over its own trunk
it knows what real music is
swallowed by the barrier of a fluctuating chest or not
wholesome is a sound loud enough
to shatter water-soaked ear drums.

We all question what hot blood would feel like
Running down our necks
Rusty stains shaped like an arched back spine
a lower case n all for nothing
taking the skull in your hand like a poison apple
watching as time speeds by
as history repeats itself
catching wind in fish nets
and lighting them on fire
to mimic that dead body trapped in the back of a truck scent
that plastic kind of I love you
wrapped up three times.