I have written poems about you
with tears strung decoratively among my face.
I have composed sonnets with the taste of your mouth still stinging on my tongue.
I have vowed to you nothing less than everything I have, down to the core of my fragile bones
when my spine went missing till the very day I met you.
I have recited oaths I learned from the patterns in which you toss in bed.
I have spat heavy loud "I love you's" as if they were the only words I ever knew
and the last I could ever speak.

I believe that the sound of beauty lies somewhere loosely with the stars you've been holding in your eyes ever since you muttered that they were too hot to hang onto anymore, that fingers were slipping and the universe was too large, too cold anyway to fall in love over and over again with overlapping atmospheres.
Look at me with your lips.
Since when did we start kissing with our eyes, and why did it have to be me to soothe your wounds with my mouth.
I'm trying to find you somewhere in all the blood in my sink, more drowning than swimming, but all I'm getting at is that I should have loved you harder.
Tell me yourself then, why is it so hard to light a fire when the matches are 200 miles away?
You've always been my only light, my only primary source of survival, and without you I'm slowly leaving the place that was never really mine at all.
It started with the small of my back, that you should have been touching, that place on my shoulder that isn't quite right without being pushed against yours.
9 pm.
Not such romantic timing.
I'm always late with you anyway.
This time I'm splitting open my ears trying too hard to hear a scream that isn't there.
It ended with the numbing of my heart
where you should have been the whole time
where I'd never let you go.


(-a.r.)

Please wait
Help is on the way
cereal box bursting plastic seams
full to the brim
Help is on the way
too many high-sodium high-carbs      
everything that goes up must come down
everything gripped white-palmed hits this polished rock bottom
Help is on the way
is the backpack-bearing bearded man with dirt slathered across flip-flop bare feet not accepted in addition to cash?
See store for details.
I am afraid he will ask me
if I can spare some change but
I have to keep quarters for laundry
pods 25% off
wish I could give him deliverance, tell him
Help is on the way
Please wait
wish I could be a Pharmacists Who Care(s)
I just Pick Up, Go.
Did he fail to follow the instructions
on life
on pin-pad reverberates high-pitched privilege
I am one of the guilty ones
I look at him as if he were already expired
stuff my guilt in the bagging area
please keep all items in the bagging area
I want to leave this one out.
Where is my expiration date
am I only Good Thru a Beauty Guarantee am I only Good Thru 40% percent of my body am I only Good Thru what is seen on tv?
System processing
Please wait
Thank you for shopping

I rip my chest plates apart, the most rickety china you own.
I throw my heart on the ground because I can feel my love for you too heavily in the depths of my decaying bones.
You burn right through me and I let you sometimes.
I imagine the weight of you never being too much to leave me strength less, because I've watched your chest rise and fall like the world was making way for you in the remainder of its eternity, as if the galaxy decides to lose itself in the stars when you exhale fervor into the crook of my neck.
It isn't too much. I will never get enough.
I’m knocking at your door,
but instead of knuckles,
my heart is in my fist,
And I am beating against your chest.
You draw really well, and I hope you know I’d give you permission to make art on my skin.
I’ll be your canvas if you let me in.

I have found love hidden between the low valley's of your perfectly high fingers. Love that I thought was lost at sea, and would be much too drenched anyway to bother to be found.
I have found love in the dark universe beyond your mouth and with teeth like stars, I think your lips are mouthing "I love you too", like pearly gates, voice like velvet ropes, pulling them either closed or apart.
I can almost see your skin light up when I grace my fingertips against your bare chest.
Cold, yearning to be warmed, if only by one small hand. As if my fingertips are the keys to unlock years of quiet defiance.
Our hands fit perfectly, I think that means you have the key to me too.
You are so soft, so tender, I am afraid that if I beg to caress your delicate face, you just might melt below my warmth, but I am a puddle of melted snow competing with just brewed coffee, and eyes all the warmer.
Thank god, thank god, thank god.
I am frozen solid, and somehow, you've thawed me all out, and didn't just mop me up.
You are so beautiful. Sometimes I just want to sit with you in your car. Just look at you. I want it to rain hard against your windows, on your roof, and I want to kiss you even harder.
Want thunder and lightning to cower in the strength of our lips.
I will just listen to the rhythms of your breaths until I've figured you out.
Until I understand what makes you smile without even flinching.
Until I understand love.
If I could possibly be any closer to you than we are right now, I'd be a glacier, transformed into faint summer rain.
I'd pour and pour and pour, if I could wither away with you.
"Won't you just hold me, just don't say a word."
Suddenly it is a desert in here
and my ice cube walls are coming down quickly.
You are less an inferno, more a kindling fire, to a shivering soul.
You are the only one who would never burn me down.
Thank you for being my only source of heat.

A thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail
takes at least five months.
In five months:
a fetus is the size of a papaya,
a small home has been fully renovated,
2,450 dollars in rent is paid if you live with three people,
Swahili has been learned incompletely,
the grief of a dead high school teacher is finished,
a person sinks in, gets comfortable,
the planet has turned its back,
Loestrin has travelled out of the system—
who’s to say it’s not just like the Appalachian.

I’d like to make a rope out of my hair
tie it from Georgia to Maine
sail a two-pound apology all the way down
to make up for the places my body will never make it
because five months of footwork
is too long to stop nurturing a life
that is not worth living anyway
but this way
I don’t have to lose.

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.

A plastic spoon trembles the way something so ashen should
sustaining the weight of a mountain of coffee grains
pointlessly arching a stiff back until its head can grace the cold counter
to evenly distribute the pressure of Everest
or to satisfy itself with the snapping of an artificial spine
like if it couldn’t be a knife it didn’t want to be anything
like she was born hungry and I was born an empty plate.
I contemplate how the smell of dirt and coffee ring in your nostrils the same way
thick and Earthy
like last night
digging up the soil and leaving it to bake beneath our fingernails.
She pours me a cup as if I’m staying for much longer
and despite the milky fog
I gulp the liquid in my mouth and let it boil between my teeth
smiling the whole time.

I try to remember this bed and how her skin blends right in
how coffee stains and blood stains and bleach can all hum in unison here
and the springs laugh every time she tells a joke
and her tank-top trails off her shoulder longingly
like it’s just seen something opalescent skirt around the corner of the room.
She dips her fingers into my hair briefly
asks what time my flight leaves again
asks if I can stay
and I notice how close the ceiling is
with its top hat and wand
to severing my chest in two
so that half of me can walk out
and half of me can stay.

We drag each other to the door
once half passed five is blinking red in our faces
screaming at us from every clock in the room
and how dare I take the time still
to leave lipstick on the side of her face,
in case she forgets,
with the sunrise rushing me out,
but when she lets the door open
and the air welcomes itself in,
chomping at nothing,
I don’t let go of her hand.

We give our weight to the ancient decay of this familial brick building
the blades of our razor shoulders just barely grazing it
all as a part of our clever façade of ice cold leaned back sunglasses on our heads attitude
cool radiating off of the sparse, tattered patches in our jeans
the walls still warm from the sweltering July heat
the moon watching us quietly, red in the face
the night still simmering in seventy degrees
smelling of dust and trash cans and our extra-large cerulean slushies.
She sets down her roller skates to divulge the little treasure she had been hiding in her pocket.
Do you want to try one? My mom let me have a pack.
In this uncertain instance, I decide that cool is greater than safe,
as I chew my lip and dart my head around every corner
to ensure that disapproval isn’t lurking somewhere in the dark.
I gradually slip one out of its snug packet with a shaky embrace
twirl it between my fingers as I watch her light one on fire
uttering and stuttering: are you sure we should be doing this?
attentive to the way the tiny embers glow and dance off the tip each time she flicks it with her chipped nails
the smoke turning pink from the neon sign that flashes above our heads
and I’m not sure if I’m sick with anxiety or sick with chemical vapor
as we cough until our stomachs are empty
and the street in front of our feet become drenched in blue.

We would both end up watering our roots just to see how far they could grow
how many miles they would stretch even from the dry dirt of our little Southern street
then drown them so that they would rot and forgetting would be easier.
She would end up in Washington state
where she would wear out her bright yellow rainboots
and I would end up surfing the wind of the Midwest
and we wondered how we could have gotten here
how our miniscule seeds could have blossomed into trees big enough to cast shadows.
After adulthood had kept us apart at more than an arm’s length for a few weeks
she would call me on the phone at one a.m.:
I think I found the one
her voice fluctuating like the sound waves of a child finding their first Easter egg
I would kick my feet up choking on my laughter and letting my tears have free range like we were twelve again
when we would sing our own rendition of “Chapel of Love” in Mrs. Peters’ class everyday
our biggest worry then would be tying our satin bows in our hair just right.
We would talk until dawn
until we would drift off into the dark of sleep
the white noise of the other end of the line still breathing into our ears
dreaming of pixie sticks.

The sound of her body collapses onto the floor
as if she forgot how to fly
waking both of her parents as one treks the speed of God up the stairs
and she wishes the fall would have snapped her neck
that the flush of death washed over a face didn’t have to look so gruesome.
Before she could re-tie the noose into its perfect donut with slick and hurried fingers
her dad flings the door open and you’d think he left a hole in the wall
or a hole in her chest in the way he says
what the **** do you think you’re doing free-falling along with the thick saliva
foaming from his lips that were swollen with sleep
although he hasn’t slept since.
The first time she did it, she apologized
but this time she was only sorry for unstable ladders.  

At recess that day
I drew lilies on my hand with her sparkly pen and I realized later that I had lost it
as if it had grown shovels for arms and buried itself at the bottom of the sandbox.
I shriveled up my tiny face and spewed tears all over my dress,
I hadn’t known a greater tragedy,
but she said she liked the lilies on my hand better than her pen anyway
as the ink bled and into sweat and faded into something watered-down pink and abstract
she wrapped a medicinal arm around my shoulder and told me it was okay
that everything was going to be okay.

I might be the only one who wonders what it would look like if daises transpired from your heart to your mouth.
If thunderstorms stop pouring from your eye sockets long enough to wonder if sunsets know what they’re competing with
if tides are aware of what they’re up against
in a world this large and with only one you
“What’s your favorite place on Earth?”
And lately I've been answering with wherever you are.
Earth has never been my favorite place anyway
and if all lips could kiss like we think they should
puddles would be lakes of pink and red and your teeth that I can’t seem to give up.
Tight skin and warm hands spare me a lie
when tongues drift into steps you never knew the language to before.
If I don't believe in heaven
and if young love is aimless
you are doing a **** good job.
I think that birds sing in the morning as soon as you open your eyes and I relate to them
I can only hope to be the flight of wings you hear in your dreams
I can only attempt to let this paper take shape of you.

Before I begin, I need you to know, that if I could, I'd love your body in oceans.
I'd let you wash over me.
I'd leave meteors on your body and scars that you wish you could make tattoos.
With every stroke of your thumb against my cheek I am withering.
You are dusting away at a face that could be smiling if only we could sit in silence.
I am not much for speaking, not one for touching.
If all we accomplish is looking at each other, that may be my biggest achievement.
If my lips could crash into yours, if 400 degrees could melt them together and then settle under the bridge of heaven, I would say yes.
I would kiss your neck like it was my last meal.
Feel your skin like it's going extinct.
Inhale the scent of your clothes as if they may burn to ashes.
But I am not going anywhere without you.
Everything we've discovered together might as well be lies
as pretty as the eyes you witness the world through.
Time is up.
I've never been good at endings.

I wonder how long it would take for my father to notice the cuts on my body or for my mother to notice that I sleep too much and when I do,
dreams don't come out right they come out left and sort of backwards or inside out or black and white they are never grey,
but always real.
My dreams show up in my reality and I can't wonder too long because 321LIGHTS

It's gone.

I wonder how long it would take for his touch to infect these pages
and leave stains that soak through to where he last grazed my scars.
I Don't Know If He Did.
But I think he did.
I remember the way they felt,
and I remember imagining what they felt like to him.
Maybe like acid.
Probably like 3 long years of looking at me like thin fragile shattering finger bones,
or the spine of all the books he never read.
Then why do his palms feel like a remedy
I haven't found out about yet.

Shooting up out of my skin again like these slick trees
Rich gold spewing from my fingernails
From seed to out in the open air
I’ve never been this close to the sun before
It’s amazing to think
What the brushing away
Of a little dirt can do
When condensed to astrology’s standards
Big enough to get lost in
Rigged enough to get stuck on
if you define the birds-eye view of a mountain
as being shoulder to shoulder
yet heads miles apart
of running from an avalanche
burning a trail through snow
just to please both devils.
I think I’ve loved hard enough
To keep two hearts beating
Even after being incinerated
And operated on once more,
I swear I could still make them shine.

My best side has always been colder without you right next to me.
I've always kept both my palms empty in case you ever wanted to hold a place you can comfortably call home
just in case you like the parking spaces for your heart more vacant, than simply empty.
But there has been no time for space ever since meeting you became my only vision, my only dream in this truthful illusion I've pet-named, life.
Somewhere within the darkest hours, between 1 and 3, honesty reveals it's shy face.
That is when I accept,
that my heart resides with you.
Because with you, is the only time that it accepts to beat.
I'd be a lair if I said that even amidst sunlight, I do not find room for two.
Laying next to you in bed
decaying while smiling into each others eyes, has become my only goal.
And you must know:
Falling asleep to the sound of sirens as loud as a million little laughs echoed from your deep, deep chest, is quieter when my own mouth is there to consume the noise; always my favorite desert, and your specialty.
I will be there to engrave your smile lines into my memory, whether you like it or not.
Like breaks in pavements that line busy streets
the ones you see every morning on your way to work, tempting you to turn around
but you don't dare break your mothers back.
And I am so, so sorry.
Love is no longer a choice, and anyone who's ever had one, has not ever taken one glimpse, at you.
They have never tasted sugar, without anything occupying their tongues.
I want a tattoo, an, "Until death do us part", not an, until the so called permanent fades.
Sinking my knees in quick sand for you to see,
love is something I always define with the few simple letters that spell out: "You."
"Only you."
"You are all."
You are it.
I just don't want you to be the blink of my eye.
I will not give up, until your lava hands are coursing my skin to unconsciousness
until erosion cannot talk back to us.

You, you are wonderful, spilled across pages of wonderful.
You, you have been torn sheets scattered across white crisp blankets longing to be accompanied.
You, you are hope tied strictly around index fingers.
You are a carefully sealed envelope thrown carelessly into mailboxes empty with everything but void.
You are precisely applied lipstick smeared on pursed lips,
nervous the red will smudge off your skin and become permanent on someone else.
Scared that, even if you kiss other people, the red will always stay.

I have found that I, am all but shorelines and beach waves and sandy toes and yours.
I am poised fingers stacked inbetween one another,
strategically trying not to place a hand on yours.

She puckers her lips like they sting
from kissing strangers with cuts,
smoke melting out of her pouty-mouthed O’s
the window it escaped from
either cherry at the cheeks
or consuming the air
until it soured
like a bad storm of slate
clouding almost everything,
in hindsight,
before ground coffee black and hazy brake lights type rain  
once my eyes turned into a two-sided mirror,
and I became a new element,
and as much as I wish I could have been quartz,
as much as I wish it was beautiful,

-

It’s been thirty-six hours since I’ve slept,
the little black specks that decorate my life
blue lighting up my face
that is otherwise a broken bulb
at 200 kilowatts  
reminding me that I haven’t learned a **** thing
from laying here for five hours
but I haven’t learned a **** thing
from letting my blood pulse in my ears
and fishing for a breath
either.

I want to undress for you.
I want to discard the clothes from my body piece by piece and show you the warmth that lives under my skin for you.
I want to prove to you with every ounce of sunlight you've put in me, that each step my heart takes is only to get closer to yours.
I want to strip for you.
I want to strip myself of every impurity and lay myself in front of you, vulnerably, left with nothing else but every little trace of every memory of your lips having touched my body.
You are planted into every part of me.
I hope that you never stop growing.
I hope that one day I can learn to sprout into something that is as beautiful as the way you look at me.

When the thought of missing you hurts worse than being stricken in bed with your hands behind your back and a stomach full of an anxious history, filled with a marked up calendar of therapy dates,
that is when I will miss you the most.
The thought of missing you is pumping heavy venom into my heart.
Thinking of you like this, with an empty mind, prompts me to think of what it will be like, two years from now
when I am still stuck laying in that same
grieving
position.
I cannot move without you,
and I cannot bear to imagine my days and my darks without you holding my hand and guiding my blind ways.
Because what am I without the love of my life?
And exactly how many miles apart are our fingertips before they can touch?
When I roll over in the dead of night,
I expect to find your naked body to hold,
but all I discover grasping is another layer of bed sheet.
I miss you with a vengeance.
I miss you so bad, all I can taste is blood in my food.
And you are not even gone yet.

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.

He is next to you
and he is real
and you have never felt skin so warm.

You've never been held like you were really meant to be here and you've never held yourself and you're afraid because never have you ever felt so in place never have you known a home like this and in the backseat of his car and while it's cold,
never have you felt so alive.

And skin on skin has never felt so alike and his inhales and his exhales have never been anything but the world's greatest mystery or a rising and setting sun or a room filled with nothing but moonlight that you've been dying to solve since the day you heard his laugh boom and boom in your brain like an avalanche ready to melt ready to **** ready to resonate forever in that bright part of you for the rest of heaven knows how long and I guess that means until we make love again.

His body: the entirety of every single spec of his being, is praying grounds.
And I will worship every spectrum of the all reasons I love him until I can tell you just what I mean through every word I say, without blinking an eye, without breaking a sweat, by only accomplishing the impossible.

And when you find that you love someone else, more than you love yourself, please realize, that that, is not love.
You are only halfway there, and you are not caught in his repertoire of thunder
of thrashing lacking oxygen under layers and layers of the ocean and wanting nothing more than to be side by side
until you find that you are in love with yourself too.
Until you can stand still in a tsunami and still speak the words, "I am not there yet, but I am okay."

He is beauty sealed in flawless flaws and even these I fantasize about.
All of which I can recall like the back of my hand but I know his better
and I want you to know I think I love you more than anybody has loved anybody and I will
always,
as tenderly as I can,
when our dreams come true of soft light through white bed sheets highlighting the patches of hair on your face that you hate so much and your lack of a six pack,

Know that you are lacking nothing.

Because you are everything.

You are every last droplet of beautiful in this world
you are every single ounce of hope that lies deep within me
you are so much of the sweet that I want so badly to grasp in the throbbing palms of my loving hands
needy, only for you,
and I would not have you any other way.

I want you just as you are, as purely as I can have you, for as long as I can.
I want to make you know that you are, in every form, the most entirely breath taking human being that has ever graced this existence of ours.

In a vow to you:
May my pulse never run cold.

When I have bad days,
it’s written all over
the wrinkles in my forehead
the folds around my frowns
all reading in glossy black ink:
“desperate to be dead very soon”
and I try not to think about
the way deer get caught in head lights
with dead expressions
a bulbous streak of white
like a firefly hitting a bull’s eye
like lightening striking God into hearts
and their soft brown irises.

When good days arise out of the comfort of the dust
I try to think of the way tall wheat
hovers over fields like awkward pearlescent angels
or fairy lights
and I love that alignment of the two universes
like it was the birth of the first thing that ever mattered to me
and the cobalt butterflies meet me in the middle,
the center of my stomach,
and I open my hands
and make a little space for you.

My hand has forgotten how to fall into bed with pen again
after the tenth year in a row of seeing a lake in the middle of road
it throws itself down in a thud
to plant half-moon flowers all down the avenue of tight flesh
but it had to learn how to walk again
or at least beg its way through the thick of the dirt
after this pyretic dry spell
that lasted longer than they'd agreed.

They used to share a queen
treated all dingy apartment flooring
like royalty
and my right hand
took the right side
closest to the window
then changed its mind when it rained for a week straight
and everything for three miles was grey,
the chaos settled between black and white,
and all that scares me,
because when my stomach does knots
it's only infinity
and when it flips
it goes ******* nuts
and you were so bored you started counting specks of sunlight,
each meant something big,
like the end of the sting in your step
while all of the opal-winged embers
that turned my fingers gold to the bone
were snuffed out under the rubber madness of my shoe
left me with just blue and stiff and lonely
missing that the quiet creaking in each knuckle
when my stomach empties itself out on the desk in front of me
and I decide I have nothing good to say.

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.

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 always save the best for last and I dream words that spell out your name in my sleep
I think that's why I always wake up with my chest numb
It's exhausted its bones trying to save the nimble thing behind it that pulls at every string attached to our lives
Looking for someone worth the ache
Trying to find someone worth breaking for.

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.