you had your pulse on the line, it went straight and then up north.
Hang up the phone if you're not going to say it.
I have open wounds from where the bullet hit
and chest pains from the phone calls.
I think we were running a hospital rather than a relationship,
maybe we're the casualties of a war breakout
because when we broke up,
i cracked my ribs under street lamps
in Florida
and my heart on tables in the class room.
You were burned into my poems like a forest fire
and I promise, there's no putting this one out.
And if I can't tell if this is love or just an airport terminal,
who's to say it's a fight in the first place?
We can't swim the ******* ocean without one of us drowning
and odds are, the other will be holding us down.
But we are not anchors, love, we are only
the after thought of someone who has been through this before.
We are faulted and we are not ashamed.
No, we are not ashamed that we are broken and we will remain this way.
Keep your hand up if you're ready to fall because you've already broken us down once,
let me do it again
and again and again
until we both know that this is only the airport terminal talking
and we have no room to say anything.

i don't know how
one million things get
broken all at once and i don't know how to fix
them either so please don't ask me
why i hate the sound of knuckles cracking
or why i can't sit still.

i identify as the sound of eyes closing and the breathing
i heard over the phone with my ex-girlfriend when we still
admitted we loved each other.
i don't take it back but i still wish i could.
i am someone who will repeat words without a trigger warning attached to them
like **** or dumb or sorry
and i will never stop apologizing for the things i say
when i am a woman and i don't care if you see me that way.

i have to understand that i cannot be two things at once,
i am either with it or without it
and i remember how you talked to me like we were
nervous and shaking and we were, i promise.
we were probably the closest thing to the fastest movements on earth,
we were probably in space too.

i don't know what i'm talking about,
all i know is that i am getting my wisdom teeth taken out in the morning
and i will be just fine,
thank you for asking.
i know that i will hold you in the future and
that's for **** sure.

you have to understand
that death sexually identifies as the
homewrecker in every relationship
and when i was 15,
i did not know what i homewrecker was
but i knew how many veins
you could see on her hand
and how many times she blinked while looking at me
and the number of freckles on her thighs.
i knew that she looked like nothing death wanted
to sleep with.

i don't tell you
i love you
because it's not like that.
it's like you're a million
different stars
and it's going to take a while
to create constellations.
like that; exactly.

We made marks on our bodies
like iron to paper,
we burned with the ashes of sunlight and all the little things
you used to tell me at night,
I remember waking up so often just to hear your siren voice
and when the wind broke, it broke for good.
We were lovers, we were angels, we were nothing more than cracked jars
on coffee tables.
I know that we broke our spines bending over backwards for this one,
I know we hurt our wrists in the process,
I know we didn't make it but I promise you, we can rebuild what we broke.

You left and you flooded my veins,
I saw a hole in your heart, I saw my face in there somewhere
and I said lover, open your doors,
I'll break this down for you.
But it's closing and I can see the gaps healing perfectly,
I will rip the the flesh from my bones to keep you from recovering.
Somewhere I exist, somewhere my name is in your chest.
I saw you stitch it up and over again in the morning,
the water was in your hands.
We came with a shoval to burry our guilt in the dirt and
we leave in shapes of  broken glass,
I can fix this.

I hold my vows between my teeth,
look at them hanging.
I will rewrite them over until I have covered every inch of your skin.
Distance took a part of me and sailed in across the ocean,
I will write these vows to touch what I have not felt.
The water is dripping from your hands,
look what you've done to our lungs,
You've been screaming at the roadside,
I saw the tar in your blood.

But keep my name inside your throat
and let it sink into your skin,
I will reach inside and grab it when
you are draped in love from him.  

I loved you, it was etched into the trees,
I heard your voice inside the smoke
and caught your breath between the breeze.

I burned my fingertips writing this one.

I'm not sure how much of you I know yet.
I know that 75% of you is a river
while the remaining 25% of you remains unknown.
I am making you sound like a science text book.

The other day, I called you music, and flowers,
and everything else I could think of that
would grab your lips and make them curve upward
to smile.

I'm not good at writing poems for people
who have made my veins into a swimming pool
to backstroke through.
I'm not used to being warm like this.

I know that we can sometimes be identical and sometimes,
it's hard to convince you that you're breathing
but let me put it this way,
you are hurricane Katrina, the shredded buildings,
the ceramic plate my mother made for me through the aftermath.
When I was 15, it was hanging on the wall and fell
from a thunderclap. Yellow, with my name on it.
I have called you baby on an estimate of four times a day
and we are trying to fix it.

We will slow dance in the living room and
we will not notice the windows whistling
but what you do not know it sounds like a storm
but love, I hear you name through the cracks in the doors
when the rain sets in.

I haven't said much already.
Hurricanes are awful and you think you're more like the
sound the sky makes when it's upset.
But everyone likes the name Katrina anyway.
Metaphors don't get me anywhere but listen,
hold me like I am the only building you do not want to destroy.