Your blood is the same as his, but the skin
on your cheeks could never compare. The dirt
underneath your fingernails will always be cleaner
than the dirt underneath his, but the rain moaning
outside of my window will always remind me of him.
“I didn’t feel anything, I mean, did you?”
will always hurt more than
“We have to let go of each other.”
My lips trembled and managed to whimper,
“Well, yeah,” as my ribcage exhaled a foggy disdain onto my own ghost.
Sitting on cement and a pillow, sitting on my tongue,
sitting on broken leaves and autumn rain,
sitting on a curved backbone that I thought no man could ever love,
I waited to go home.
I waited for you to love me.
I waited for an eyelash.
I waited for months with wind in my veins and blood in my lungs
for a fortune cookie to read my mind and teach me how to say ”love”
in Chinese.
Then you left, and I stayed, and ecstasy stuffed his tongue down my throat
for a month that felt like a year.
I sat in your home when you weren’t there, I sat on summer rainstorms, and I sat
on a broken backbone, waiting for you to love me.

I call me
Heartless
You call me
Darling.
I don’t know
where things will
start to make sense
again and I don’t know
if I really want them to.
The golden shutters
sitting on my windowpane
are getting bored without
a show––
reckless wonders underneath
threadless fabrics.
The liquid lovely hiding
in my drawer
wants me to drown myself
in her numb flesh and lonely
giggles and sad hiccups.
I call you
broken
but what am I?

I.
The moons of every planet
seem to live on your face
like they don’t know that your skin
isn't the Milky Way galaxy;
spiraling light-years
of 400 billion stars.
Devoid of oxygen.
But your skin is the Milky Way–
where the space between stars is filled
with the interstellar medium
of your cheeks.
And the nebulae themselves
have been pulled out of your lungs.

II.
It’s the nighttime,
dripping from your eyelashes,
and it’s the sunlight learning
the curves of your face
again and again.
It’s the myriad of planets
that have yet to be discovered.

III.
They call beauty spots “lunares”
and I call you my moon.
But every morning,
you are still there
as the sun rises.
And you are still there
as it falls.

"Sting
when the colony is
endangered.
Collect pollen
absent-mindedly.
Start heading dangerously fast
towards extinction."

I think I will always
want you.
Some nights
I dream of tasting
the honey in your mouth;
the pollen in your hair
falling into my hands.

Cliff side
misty-eyed
blurry vision
and covered in sand.
I don't know why you stayed that night
to see me
seeing you,
and read the words of someone who understands
us
better than we do.

The ocean is alive,
even in the dark.
And where we stood, our cold feet
were too afraid to even
wonder
what is alive
in the midnight waters
in your arms
in my hands
in this moment
in your car, and in the streets
where cold feet stumble
over the fear
that the ocean is alive
and colder hands
don't know what to do with themselves.