All I've ever gotten in love
Is can't.
"I can't be your lover."
"You can't just say that."
"You can't
Be like this."
"You can't
Love me."

Be my yes.
Be my of COURSE.

I have a dream
A very dear dream.
I've written of it for years
Over and over.
My dream
Is that someday
I will be sitting by a dim window
Looking down
On a city street in the rain
Cupping a mug of hot, sweet tea in my palms
And thinking how perfect everything is.
And someone
Someone lovely
Someone warm and safe and beautiful
She will rise from our sheets- ours,
And put her arms around me,
Say
"Come back to bed, love."
And I will lean into her and she will smile and life
Will finally be the way I always wished it could.
I dream
That someday
I will be making breakfast at the stove with a soft cat winding between my ankles
And from behind she will hug my waist, kiss my neck, steal a bite of food and make me forget
To take the kettle off the heat
And it will sing shrilly while we kiss
Good morning.
I want her voice to be what I fall asleep to,
Velvety in my mind and soft in my ear,
Her fingers tracing my collarbones and my arms draped around her hips.
I want
To get lost with her
In every foreign city
And laugh because nowhere is lost
And everywhere is home
Because we are each other's port in every storm
And each other's lighthouse to find our way back to safe waters.
My dream is to smile my life away
And spend my seconds not like hard earned dollars but like pennies tossed into fountains- every one a wish, a promise, a celebration.
Be my yes.
Be my home.
Be the first person
To tell me I am allowed to dream
To wish
To be
Everything I am.
Be the first
To want it,
And I will give you the entire world.
I will write your name on every napkin corner poem I leave in every cozy cafe,
I will carve it into every park bench I read on in the summer sun,
I will whisper it
To every star I see in the night sky.
Please,
I'm inviting you-
Be my home. Be my hope.
Be
My
Dream.

"I kissed a feminist once",
he says, face flushed blotchy, something heavy resting on his shoulders
maybe
“I kissed a feminist once,”
and everybody laughs
“she was cold as ice,” he says
and he doesn’t mention how I turned
warm beneath his fingers,
heated up like embers
and reduced his bed to flame and ashes
“God was she mean,” he says
but he hasn’t forgotten the time
I told him to be kind to himself, to
purge the poison from his veins and
scrape the smoke from his lungs
“I love you I love you I love you”
I said,
“please love yourself too”
“I kissed a feminist once,”
he says, to loud guffaws,
an elbow in his side
and he doesn’t say “her lips
were the softest thing to ever brush
my collar bone”
he doesn’t say “she made playlists in my mind”
or “she covered me like a blanket”
or “her teeth on my earlobe ripped me open and scattered me across the sheets of her twin bed”
he doesn’t say “I loved that
storm of a girl,
I loved her heavy at 4am I loved
her like pennies
at the bottom of a fountain
like memorized freckles
I loved her like depth perception
like opposable thumbs
I loved her I loved her I loved her”
and instead he shrugs
that heavy thing off his shoulders
and shrugs the feel of my lips
off his chest and he says,
“she was a crazy ***** anyway”
- Lily Cigale

It would be easier, I think,
if my nerves were not so jittery,
wriggling under my skin
like small electric shocks

every time I nervously approach
an unknown thing,
a child handed a glossy new toy.
Is this how it is meant to be?

So young, so young,
life full with gaudy possibilities
at the arrival of another birthday,
presents losing their allure,

the rattling mystery beneath the paper,
my sweet cluster of friends
revving off into the distance
and I am left to wonder

who will fill the white, sad gaps.
I see you, I remember.
I see you, I remember you too.
A lengthy list splattered with letters,

wiry and black like a belch of string.
There is only so much
one person can do
when their hands are ravaged

by a peculiar numbness,
when their syllables and sentences
begin to stick together,
form a blood-red thick lake.