before we fell silent
you said, “I am going to die”
and I couldn't tell if you were being serious
and maybe you couldn’t either
and with each cigarette
those fumbling fingers tore from the box
your eyes flashed
jagged streaks of shame

and now that silence seems endless
because you are in Kentucky
and you’ve blown everything
on making sure the feeling never went away

and your dog died two weeks ago
in your new L.A. flat,
his discarded bones nestled upon a stained grey mattress,
and gnats and flies crawl over his
accusatory eyes
and blood-tinged matted fur,
and the stone mouth drips a
yellow stench that seeps through
the newly wooded floor,
and there he dies,
again and again
still,
raw,
indignant,
because you cannot go home
and look death in the face

and your drum set plays without you now
the awesome thuds still reverberate
through the earth’s worn plaster walls
and abandoned mahogany cabinets
and also in your room with the upside-down bed
and in crowded subway cars and passenger planes
and in the dusty basement where we once
made you drink the whole thing down, then hushed you up
with blank towels and sedatives,
and the sound is deafening

I can't
Decide
Whether to stay
Or to leave you
Bright eyed and naked gleaming faced
And breathless in
The white tiled room
Flueroscent lights burn brighter when
You're bored out of your
******* mind
No regrets
No looking back just turn
And walk away
****** handed
Aghast faced
Shock dismay
Me
I can't be swayed
Either way
I am livestock
Paralyzed and frazzled
In perpetual panic
And no one can save me

I can't
Decide
What to do with my eyes
When you streak across linoleum to
Kick over the garbage can
When you tell me I look tired
What can I say?
We line up like soldiers
I tell you things on a post it note
I put my hand on your shoulder
Awkward comfort
Where to draw the line?
I say it'll be ok
Mom and Dad problems are not ours to bear
But I am the adult here
Isn't that insane?

You're only nine and I can still gape into
The blackened flames in your eyes
I cannot let that extinguish
Please my precious babies don't
Give up oh! let me plant the seeds of self worth in your self consciousness
Ah, no
I can't
Walk away

I can't
Decide
If it will be today
Or some tomorrow that
I'll just crack up and die
You tell me things will get better
I promise, and so
I swallow my heart and drink the panic back down
Too much to feel too much to regurgitate

I teach.

I do not miss the brown faces of sun-dried Marlboro men or the mall, or the
Empty soccer field or those lonely black streets that echoed weary
Footsteps or our faded green awning nor do I miss the smell
Of your fifth floor apartment or how my knees would
Tremble and disintegrate and I do not miss your
Taste anymore or that your lips were large and
Soft and swallowed me because I’ve
Concluded there was no choice but
To leave our pile of muddy
Laundry and bloodstained
Sheets in a dusty barren
Apartment on the lower
East side where
***-filled brains
And metal poles
Collide

in* feels
underwhelming but
out feels
distant and
peaking towards the whiteness feels
a little too much
like your hands on my back and looks
like your bared teeth damp face and hungry eyes hurting for me so the
aftermath feels
a little less
like throbbing pain while
before feels
like a
dream.

I never recovered when you told me goodbye
I just told myself the person I loved had died
I still think of you when I am alone in my bed
I still drink, eat and smoke things to cloud up my head
My heart still feels too heavy to gaze at your face
That'd take me too deep to an unsettled place
I'm too sore from your grasp to even know how it goes
With someone else, the seed fits but still never grows
I still name you my captor, I'm never quite free
From your desperate ache,
broken ways,
and how somehow
you
occupied
me

It unraveled slowly
turned us into
broken lamps and upturned end tables

My birth equaled the demise of all his pretenses
They dissolved in the spaces behind walls
They filled the cracks of the yellowed plaster

Once I was small enough to hide there too
Concealing myself among the decay made sense
When ugly truths burst forth they swallowed us
I cowered unseen and thus forgiven
A silent witness to my own life
I wish now I could do the same

stumbling bowlegged through the last subway car,
loose-fit black rags bandaging frail limbs,
face twisted in a permanent scowl,
matted grey hair jutting from a flaky scalp,
she jangles her paper cup of coins
each flail of the arm a sharp crescendo;
I flinch.

She extends her hand with a gaze that says: pity me;
I cannot look. I don’t want anything to stir in me,
my own pain is already too heavy,

but --

here they are: spoiled thoughts wafting over me like the waves
of her robust stench: warmth
between my thighs,
tattoos
bounding up thick muscular arms that aim at me in such earnest that my disillusionment melts away, and I am paralyzed
by the lure of pheromones and the smell of skin
which doesn’t quite leave you after you leave him.

And then truth clangs hard in my chest:

but her bones are made of steel!
So who am I to look away?
Maybe if something were to crash into me,
I’d pulverize
into
dust.

I see the back of his head waiting for me
at the entrance,
his hair spread thick with gel
a scar trickling down his left eyebrow,
and I stand silent.

Two roads down, you sit by yourself,
blanketed in burnt-orange light,
dagger hair freshly trimmed.

I am south,
climbing into his car, which gasps,
suffocating in empty bottles,
loose papers, the rags of existence.

Meanwhile, you watch bodies wordlessly
flash across white screens,
surrounded by your
amber-glass army,
waiting for no one.

He breathes out words
with closed ears;
a tender staleness invades the space
between our seats.

I know he is searching for me,
but he reeks of
danger and indecision
and so
I choose.
I choose to run.

He leaves
a perpetual question mark

Closes a gap
opens a new one

Buries me
In burning drags
And powder

I am a pawn, a
Vague magnet

Easing myself
Between the
Lines
I expect to
Fill

When I think of those nights we spent together,
damp with sweat on your unmade bed,
I shudder in disgust.
You are a stranger to me,
as is the person I was when I was with you.

I’m not sure why you’ve come here.
I am staring at the patterns on the ceiling.
You ask me what I’m looking at.
I feel irrationally angry
and I snap at you to just shut up
because I know you don’t see what I see.

Suddenly I feel heavier.
I turn to face the vents on the wall to my left.
The menacing sharp horizontal lines droop down slightly at both ends.
I don’t like the way they are looking at me.

You are nineteen,
and I am watching you deteriorate.
Your eyes are a shadowed mockery
of themselves.

I tell you,
There is fire in my head.
My hands are turning to ice,
and that pinecone is green and furry.
I think it lives.
But you don't believe me.

And we walk among speeding cars,
trying to figure out how to cross streets and how to
close spaces that never stay glued shut
like silver elevators stuck.

It used to be that your heart
beat so hard against my back
that I couldn’t sleep,
but I didn’t mind.
I liked the way the scruff of your chin felt
against my shoulder blades.

And I’m sorry for all those times I kissed you and never meant it.
And I’m sorry for all those times I did.

So why is my shadow lying there on wet grass
if I’ve already left and gone home?

Sea drop sea shell eyes
I reckon she's for the taking
Sells her body while it's
Broken open

What if
everything got all crunched together?
We’d go deaf from all the noise
blind from all the light
our organs would burst and flatten against each other
everything condensed
into one small round ball
and the only ones to survive
(not even the ants, for they are too delicate)
would be the tiny little atoms in the air

All of our atoms, floating around
like pure elements,
unbroken
unfazed
by all the diseases of the world
the disasters
the heat
the freeze and the condensation
everything that has ever wrecked
and ravaged our earth
and the world would begin anew.

What if
in every breath you take you’re inhaling everything else that has ever existed?
the rough dirt patches on the surface of the earth,
the ozone,
the warm UV rays,
the cheese that has broken off of the moon?

What if
the blood of Adam and Eve
is in your glass of orange juice?
or
the prehistoric stony eyes of a dinosaur
hides in your pup's timid glare?

And what if
every water molecule contains every
feces that has ever existed
and has been swept inside of you?

for love in other
people to forget
our own
emptiness.

the stones were loud
bright and brilliant
greens blues purples clears and whites
affixed with personalities
each reminiscent of a singular identity
smoothed by boundless currents
once warring above them and
gentrified by silent
woozy sand

i sealed the stones
in small white envelopes
each bearing a name
in inky looped letters
i taped them beneath your desks
told you they were magic and
you believed me
so they were

What is worth recalling of yourself before the age of eighteen?

You could mention, briefly,
the various rises and falls and manias and
melodramas cured with forties of Old English
in various public restrooms and upturned furniture
pieces and feigned illnesses and ringing eardrums and
refurbished tractor parts and secret purchases of
gigantic reptiles and alternate personalities and
obsessive yet unnecessary rituals and
self-inflicted sacrifices
all of which
invisibly
governed
you

You could picture, vaguely,
a youth enmeshed in greenery and
the swelling chorus of cracked wails from
dust-faced vagabonds who, in your memory
are somehow perpetually draped in scarlet
and earthy patches of torn fabric
and of course
the unmistakably
poisonous
stench of
need

But in this moment
these topics
seem irrelevant

I picture myself crushing
an orange, star-shaped pill.
Pressing a bit into your palm as we exit your RV.
"I probably shouldn't," you hesitate,
but I press on.
"Just try a little. You'll like it. I promise."
So we taxi away,
lacing sticky fingers around each other
and plastic cups of beer.

We lean into electrifying music
that sounds like an emergency room or an ongoing migraine,
but the tremors feed us.
You pluck a styrofoam light saber off the ground and hand it to me.
I watch its blues melting into greens dripping into reds and orange-yellows and it is the most beautiful thing in the world.

You claim you don't feel It,
shrugging all cool and nonchalant.
So what’s with your magnetic gaze,
or the way your trembling fingertips trace my lips?
Why are we tangled up like this, all wordless and gooey?
And what about your pupils—the way they are filling up your eyes?

“Well,” you concede.
“It just makes me want to have *** with you.”
But it’s more than that!
Every moment vibrates with magic!
And all I want is you
and the sensation of skin
against bare skin
and to be enveloped in that warmth again.
I relish the blurring of our lines,
the way I can’t tell when my trip ends or yours begins.

And in the hours that creep towards the sunrise we plant
ourselves on the dock.
Fill our lungs with smoke.
Count the patterns moving through the lazy black tides.
And you tell me all these profound things you’ve never mentioned before.
And I forget almost all of them.

But the thing is
We are falling in love.
You could never say It,
so I have to.
And I don’t want it to feel intense or weird—
but there’s intensity and weirdness already
brewing beneath the surface of our interactions and
now that I let It in
you feel too far away from me
when you’re only across town.
And there’s not enough of you
to swallow me whole
And It scares me.
And It comforts me.

Because you love me
even when I can’t bear to be loved,
and I unravel
because somehow I know – I’ve always known –
that you’ll never hurt me
worse than he did.

I didn't know if
pulling it from the wreckage
would feel as good
the second time around.

I dragged it shoulders first and
it felt heavier and damp and the body gave and
lurched forward, unarmed and broken like trash strewn
across the road slick with black wetness
and silent like
a ranger at
quiet
sea.

Make Space between our bodies,
it once told me,
and find the dirt
in the cracks
on the ceiling of
what used to be
a brand new home.
(Greasy handprints on white plaster never
stay invisible forever.)

For without Space
there is no silence,
just the deafening explosion
of skin slapping skin slapping across bone crashing into knees connecting joints at the sticky side of muscled electric adhesion; breathing becomes mutual, then
stops.

Every morning plays over like a silent black-and-white film.
I am nowhere: I belong to the realms of the in-between.
I am the glint of light in a thread, the starlight, the particles, the grainy matter sliding between your fingernails.
I run through beams of light on buzzing highways, I am in the walls.
Now I am far away and you cannot see me.
It’s physics.
It’s ******* physics!
I can see it all before me: the infinite equation.
I am free. I can do anything.
I can become the light and the voices and the bells and the twinkle in a pigeon’s eye.
By the time you read this,
I am gone.

Siempre sabía que eras demasiado como una nectarina
a principios de verano. Tú: sin poros y brillante e insinuando dulzura.
Me llenaste con tu erupción secreta, luego me apagaste
con tu lengua plateada y elegante,
lava palpitante en mis tímpanos,
realzando mi sangre,
con fuego en tus ojos. Yo era una ciruela, vagando hacia su calor agustín. Mi piel tierna cedió a su toque hábil.

Pero luego lo mordí. Probé la carne bajo tu brillo brillante.
Y ¡oh cómo te traiciona!
Tan amarillo e inmaduro, tan tenso con la novedad,
Aún aferrado al brillo del alba,
primavera congelada con miedo
de la oscuridad de mi néctar.

Hoy me desperté aquí con un imán en mi estómago.
Ecos de metal frío recorren en mi garganta.
La falta de amor, el dolor que
corre entre las penumbras aórticas--
la esperanza, un refugio tragado por la noche efímera.
Siempre sabía que eras demasiado como una nectarina
a principios de verano.

The end was a hurt, a low throbbing of the temples, a panic in the chest.
The end was a purple circle, an eye sunken in more deeply into its socket than the day before.
The end was an end; the end was “The End.”
The end was a notebook underneath a mattress we lifted up to pull the sheets over them, beige and freshly cleaned and still smelling faintly of detergent.
The end was when the words scribbled in slanting, harsh ink entered into my mind, into my soul, burned itself into my face.
The end was when I looked back up at him, and in my face, he saw something had changed.
The end was when he pushed me against the wall in a dark corner, glow lights like floating heads in the darkness around us, when I felt the heat of his chest, the controlled strength of his hands pressed against my hips.
The end was a feeling.
The end was his roommate’s 21st birthday celebration at a club in downtown Atlanta, when we looked out over the balcony at the sprawling city waiting below us, waiting for us, alive. When we talked about our futures, our careers. I was to be an English professor – he, a corporate lawyer, a politician, a businessman, anything lucrative. I would do what I love, he would create our life with the profits gleaned from a more conventional career path.
The end was when he left for Prague, or when I left for Spain, when we stopped speaking on the phone every day, when the connection fell flat and disintegrated.
The end was when I socked him in the face.
The end was when I read the words that spelled her name, the girl before me, and how he had missed her---was it when we had been falling in love?
The end was when I learned he described my body not as beautiful but “full figured” – for these were the truth, the contents of the mind.

In theory, the end in our story was written
before we had even begun.

At the peak
It felt like diving into nowhere
Endpoints nonexistent
All I saw was her, then celestial white

And in the hazy aftermath
This flurry of creation
This jagged promise of newness
Everything real coughed up in our numb faces

But it doesn't snow in Texas

The words taste funny in my mouth
like tin
School. Escuela.
The place we go
to rip our self-identities to shreds
and force big thoughts out
through holes too small
with languid, careless tongues

"You're ambitious,"
he says with disdain,
spittle collecting
in a corner of the unfed
mouth

and he falls,
drumming his fingers on
her bare knees
like pick axes
tick tock down
the body goes
falling fast
like a drainage system
***** life from organisms
clotting in the sink

"We cry too,"
she says loudly,
but no one seems to hear her
except for a sorrowful
trombone whining
noisy and rambunctious like
the wind and *** and
pain only really matters
if you're there
to witness it

It seems strange...
The voices of the TV on-set screen switch to channel nine STOP play it back again
far
it goes

You decide if time goes forward or backward,
whether the earth begins here or ends, say, right over there.
You name things into Reality.
Bones, flesh, skin.
These are concepts, works of fictions we tell ourselves in order to feel real, or whole, or assembled.
But we are bags of blood.
Our only reality, our only truth, is feeling.
And feeling too much.
Like how the whites of my eyes are permanently reddened by an invisible fire’s breath:
the glow of your face.

The way we love each other despite ourselves and the universe is insatiable. You’re the feast to my starving poetry, and I’m scrambling after you trying to unscramble all the pieces you let trail behind; I’ve spiraled into puzzling over every detail of your face and the imprints on your heart and the things you’re never really saying but silently radiating

The way we love each other with our whole arms and our whole hearts beating up against one other, magnetism pulling our bodies together all close and warm until our skin is melding and there is no more feeling or air, only lightness and the white behind your eyes

And even then, it isn’t enough—

that can’t get enough of you feeling, so tragic and profound, how it makes you move
different, that sudden onset
of warmth (and how that cool can pull you down so low)

analyzing you as if you aren’t equally a mess as I am, and you’re so deeply beautiful to me, even if the universe can’t see it yet


And yet but despite ourselves, and the universe