it's a bottomless pit of both
pride and tiresome duty,
knowing that you are the
glue keeping a family together.

i'm putting together a mixtape,
a lot like the ones you used to make for me.
and i'm working hard, choosing all the right songs:
ones that encompass our history, your leaving,
and every bitter thing we've been through.
as if it'll make a difference.
as if it'll bring you back.
as if i want you back
in the first place.

simple touches
make my nerve
ends crackle like
fallen powerlines
and remind me
that my body is
a hazard sign.

i've wrestled
with this burning
coin for a decade
now;

held over candlelight
by grandmothers and
teenage charlatans alike,
****** into the soft tissue
of my naive mouth.

find someone who adores you,
[OR]
find someone you adore.

such irony and tragedy
in the context of love:
the age old lament of one
without the other.

your logic is that of which
elegies are written from.

i'm spitting it out, but let
the scar tissue remain.

she has a way of making small things feel significant:

the way she taped her moving boxes together,
double stripped: she doesn't know if the first one
will hold; her white lighter superstition; the way her
skin was quick to bruise, even when you were gentle;
her broken teeth, the lost fillings you ran your tongue
over like your tires on her pockmarked street the first
and last times (and all the times in between) that you
drove to that bad side of town, where shoes swung
from power lines and women wept over the sticky red
bodies of sons and husbands and fathers but only spoke
in hushed, shamed spanish about their own blood loss.

in the end, there's nothing too significant about it: she has
trust issues that extend to duct tape and lighters; she bruises
like a peach; she has bad teeth because she was too poor to fix
them; her love dried up like the brazos in the texas summer.

i write more
about       boys   with
names      my      mind
scrabbles to remember
than   i  do  about  the
women    who    broke
their    backs   to   cast
my    bones   in   steel
and   teach   me    that
i  am  no  fragile thing

and i don't know what
that says about me.

i can't have a drink just to relax:
not anymore, not after you.
when thoughts of
you take root,
i better be
door-frame
gripping
drunk,
even if
it's 10
in the afternoon.

sometimes,
i think i could
be good for you:

press hot water bottles
to your aching jaw and
kiss the feeling back into
your sedated lips

pin myself beneath
the weight of your
medicated gaze and
tune my ears to
your slur.

it's true:
love never dies.
it's just easily lost
like a set of car keys
or a child in a supermarket.

flies in my honey,
ants in my bed.
the crucifix is crying:
jesus wants down.

in a real shy voice
that you never use
you asked me if i still
felt like i used to.

and i'm so sick
of all the ******* between us,
so i told you point blank, yes.
i'm not getting
any better.

first: the i’ll-follow-you-anywhere kind of new love. the swell of promise, of possibility; the beginning of a long walk through a dark town that you've never visited, the moment of accepting all you don't know, disregarding the unknown variables, and wanting to give it a shot anyway.  

compare to: i’ve followed you everywhere, and now i know how you sleep and what your blood looks like; i know you and i love you anyway.

ONE: STAY PRESENT

TWO: DON'T WASTE VALUABLE TIME BEING ANGRY

THREE: THE FEELING OF NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH IS HEAVIER THAN GRIEF

he is saltwater
breeze and blood
on your teeth:

he is the last word
spoken and the first
punch thrown.

he is the same tide
that would just as soon
kiss the shores of your back
as he would drag you
beneath the surface.

he is the no swimming
sign always ignored.

to apologize would be a bruise to your
pride, but  i love you emerges from a
tangle of teeth and wire, and for another
night i stay.

doubling the dosage
of anxiety medication
that isn't prescribed to me:
but it doesn't bother me
because it should be.

▲
i think
you only loved me
◀ because you thought ▶
i'd never love you
back.
▼

my first clear conviction
since i found jesus in louisiana:
i will not die. i will not let you **** me.

he will never not enjoy this:
dark eyes that feel as though they can lance through skin and blood and bone, all the way down into the cancers of his thoughts; warm breath on his cheek; fingertips scrabbling over his collarbone to bunch his shirt into a tight fist; the dizzying crack of his skull on drywall.

keep me suspended in that dark water fear:
that moment before assessing an injury,
where everything is unknown and dire
and hopeful all at once.

his sadness is like
a storm, and it's
tornado season
here in texas.

i want to drink a bottle of cough syrup,
i want to chase spirits into traffic,
i want to throw myself to the wolves.

you opened me up
like a cold case file: hoping to find
something that all the guys before
you missed; hoping to make connections
with fingers following color coded string,
tracing who i've become back to who
i used to be.

you made our bed an
interrogation room, took notes in the
hollow of my throat, the crease of my
thigh, the underside of my wrist.

to your credit,
you never quit. but in the end you
had to be taken off the case; all your
hard work reduced to footnotes for
the next fresh set of eyes.

floods dredge up old
bodies from the brazos.

spring is the season that
gives the river gentle
permission to release
its dead.

they found a human
torso in a garbage bag.
they found a father and
son washed up on the
banks.

thinking that an
i love you
after hurting me
is the same as an
apology is abusive
husband logic.

you taught me that
there is more than one way
to apologize in spanish, and
that meaning is often lost in
translation.

it sets my mind to wonder
which parts of you have been
willfully tucked away, like money
in our mattress, and what is
just lost in translation.