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 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

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.

I can't trace the crown of my indifference towards you (or anyone else) to a definitive source.
Whether you are strung to me or I to you,
our union imports
several interpretations.

You might be like fishing wire:
binding limbs, constricting movement;
if I deviate, I suffer your sharp cut of resistance.

Maybe you're yarn: soft, nurturing; but again, any move that falls outside the lines of your predicated design--any undue tightening or loose end--results in chaos.

Or perhaps you are the hand that draws the line:
you, the invisible puppeteer
who governs my every wayward glance
or dishonest act at the whim of your object, your desire;
one string leads to the
magnetism of your cologne
and another, the heat
of your knees in fitted jeans
against mine.
If it be that,
then, my indifference would serve as my aide,
a final desperate cling to autonomy.

But what if we were both cast
in the same web, rendered useless
through entanglement, would we
claw towards each other, content
though the silk grows thick
with every reach?
Would we tear our way to liberty?
Or if we were to find that thing-
the source-
and cut all ties,
would magnetism wind us up again?

If I unravel, what would you do?
If you unravel, would I leave you
in a pile at my feet?
Would I cast dead strings aside
and embrace the freshness-
raw and bleeding but alive-
beneath the rage?

My hands were shaking
Not as hard as yours, I'm sure

You almost lost everything and I
was forced to watch,
bearing silent witness to a
destruction not my own
but at which I felt at fault,
thus I digested it as my own

Who knows?

In my mind, I had lived fantasies of
something like this happening--
you, helpless, I hold fast to your life and then
salvaging you, just barely,
scaring us both out of life and then
falling back into something new--
dark, strange, and yet intimate

This has happened to me twice now (for real)
and neither time was nearly as glamorous as
I had played out in my mind

(I'm a stupid girl)

Both times I felt drained of a vital energy I couldn't
call back--ever

I became an echo
of me
and us?
we were skeletons of
the children we once were. Both times
robbed me---
of sleep, and years, and appetite.
robbed me---
of innocence, and soul, and
love
which always
bleeds out uncontrollably
in times like these
unclottable

and out with love
spreads guilt and shame

(I'm a jinx, I'm a cursed girl)

across the tar, filling the black empty
cracks with invaluable energy

Full of foreign weight
cargo stored too long
too far pushed down our throats
too removed

My hands were shaking
Not as hard or as long as yours
I'm sure

the stuff that makes me loud while
the mind whispers softly, reminding
me not to speak
about the pain

the stuff that makes the eyes' luster dim
around the edges
(but we're always
evolving
behind
the eyes)

the stuff that makes us fitted
or whole or pierced
or shed or Other
or perpetually looking down
at our own interactions

the stuff that makes me hypothesize
you across the table
as fitted and whole or maybe
you are broken and barricaded

either way
I want to know you
and
your
warmth,
and
your drift
in the attention span
(can't count to five
seconds without
changing
activity constantly drifting
in and
out
of
life),
and
your electricity, and
vulnerability,
and
your ease in
knowing me differently
than I'm used to,
and
your affection concealed
with halfhearted punches,
and
your inability to Be
without fully Being

the stuff that glides
warm and
burns
down
the
throat

Beauty Queen
Miss Q
Thinking of you
;-)
:-)
...
?

Post-apocalyptic characters flash white
against a twilight screen
Tiny, shiny meanings begging for responses
But I won't feed
these visions of nothingness

Since when did I become
bound to this ubiquitous pretense,
since when did I become
cast into these tiny webs roping me inextricably closer
to the "you" I just met yesterday and
since when did we become
like spineless eels
caught dumbfounded
in these fishing lines
of textonomy?

This ain't swag
and if it is,
then your swag
makes me want to regurgitate
la salsa verde y los tamales de pollo
all over your smooth and crisp
white shoes

Can't someone untie me from these social knots?
I want to go back to ink-blots,
conscriptions, Polaroid photographs,
X's and
abandoned
I's

Thank you for being nocturnal with me;
for kissing me on the cheek
with your grizzly jaw,
for letting the silence between us speak
for itself.

Thank you for dreaming
of Greece
and music festivals
and road trips,
and for carrying my friends across the busy streets
and for laughing about it;
for holding me in that perfect way
that makes me feel safe
and loved.

Thank you for letting me bounce around enlivened with energy
and never asking me to slow down;
for never complaining when I wander away;
for staying;
for treading softly and living free.

Thank you for astronautical mornings, sweltering afternoons spread out in rainbow grass,
and for smoky nights;
thank you for being the last one on the dance floor with me.

Thank you for horses grazing on the beach,
and for log cabin jacuzzi hazes,
and for unfalteringly
hoping;
for huddling in a tent in soft white sand;
for believing in me.

Dear friend, you feel like home to me,
so let's keep chasing
dogs through the streets and trekking through sewage tunnels and
watching hours fly away from us like a swarm of gulls on a Mediterranean beach.

You know me:
a fickle girl, afraid
to commit or admit or abstain,
yet all the same,
thank you
for being my
friend.

Her eyes, your solemn witness
are so unlike mine

I am untamed!
a loose humanoid chained
in gold
always spinning
under high beams
like it's no big deal

(while you reside
in your mind)

but why
can't I dream too?
I wanted you
to stay
you energized me

(every contact
left me broken yet intact)

Hallelujah!
You're outside!
Traced your face
in refracted light
Stand-still silhouette
Crop her
out
Fill the void
with blackened foil
while she makes nasty
public announcements
(and loves the attention
creating irrelevant banquets
and barbecues)

This was never my war
so hold fast to us
or crawl or
meet me at the door--
Wherever the blame feels
a little less
and confess
I was the one
you were looking for

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.

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

I feel it like a twist in my spine: momentary paralysis, a choke on the truth
I declare I'm better than this! your lies, your blatant deceit.

But she exists: giant lips and hair and pale eyes against ravishing olive skin;
A vision of exoticism.
Yes she exists: undeniably, in photographs and in the world and probably in your hands and in your mouth and in your bed
and she probably breathes in the same spices and sweat I too succumbed to,
She exists.
And you lied.
And you owed me nothing, as people never really owe each other anything.

And these pangs
Feel all too sickeningly familiar;
this time I promise myself
not to turn the other cheek,
not to ignore hard evidence, which condemns and reveals the harshest morning-after light
but my eyelids betray me; my mind is set to rewind, it can't get past
your soft mouth or your smooth chest or your voice saying "if you steal my heart, you can tell his father...." or your piercing eyes that felt like danger and freedom and wanderlust intertwined and
I know
putting you on paper is just further validation and permanence
both of which
I seek to avoid.

But I need to speak this pain because it's still moving
inside of me;
How can you, perhaps one step beyond a total stranger, gut and roast me like this? Ripping open wounds from years past,
as if all that scar tissue never
formed in the first place?

Every morning plays over like a silent black-and-white film.
You wake up and somehow you’ve forgotten how to speak.
Your throat feels raw and congested from the disuse of night.
The sunlight strikes your eyelids,
affecting an obliterating blindness,
forcing them apart,
drawing you from the velvety embrace of a dream.

Your feet sink into dirt-smudged sneakers;
they drag across tiles and floors and grains of cement,
across blackened splotches of gum tacked to the streets,
pressing them ever deeper into earth,
into tar.

A young woman in a fitted red pea coat stands near you,
leaning against the steel column by the edge of the tracks.
She is tiny,
her olive skin stretches tight across her bulging cheekbones,
her eyes are pools of grey,
her shoulder-length hair is the color of molasses.

It happens slowly:
the woman in the red pea coat leans further over the ledge,
tilting her head to the side,
searching for life in the roaring darkness.

It happens briefly:
a low rumble beneath your feet,
a glint of light,
a yellow-white rectangle splays across the tracks.
It widens and expands,
oppressing you,
swallowing the woman in the red pea coat,
as she looks up and stares back at the brightness.

The train does not strike her –
it consumes her,
it ***** her up like a vacuum through its sharp metal teeth,
and she vanishes,
or she becomes a refractory beam of light,
or she explodes.

A screech hovers above the crowd,
shrill, high and clear – the rawness of terror.

You cannot help it – you peer into the gap
between the platform and the subway,
absorbing the darkness.

You wonder what moment, precisely,
her life left her body,
or her flailing limbs surrendered to their inevitable consumption.

The paper bag she had been carrying survives,
strayed on the platform,
an afterthought.

i feel like an alien in my own skin
scratching through flesh trying to get back to myself
echoes of my youth ringing in my ears, clawing to get me
back to the way i was before
all the scruffy chins scratched up
my face, making me red and raw and exposed,
before hands meant electricity to me,
before i lingered for anyone other than
a ******* stuffed animal, and
before lips meant excitement and awkwardness and
even *******. i'll just
sleep all day to forget who i am and
remember who i was,
if she's still out there
somewhere.

I know we haven’t talked in a while. Not since
I recognized the decisive crack of your voice
like a crinkling plastic gum wrapper
and I let the phone fall. That was
five years ago and I don’t know where you are now.
But I’m writing this
because I can’t stop writing
about you and your shapes and your smells and you
and white powder and you and religion
and religious books neatly stacked and you and every piece of you
and a rickety black tram bursting forth in the darkness and you
and pockets of light that sometimes shine through in cocoons or at elegant dinners
and you and aftershave and blood and muddy river water and you
and flowers in porcelain vases and couches encased in plastic and you
and I am endlessly backtracking to silent violations
and black midnights riddled with hunger and confusion and
I don’t know maybe some other time
and it’s like our hands and wrists are bound together as though bandaged
and the whites of my eyes are permanently reddened by an
invisible fire’s breath
or the glow of your face
and even now everything won’t stop shaking
and I just stare
at my hands
and tiles
and patterns in carpets
and I keep staring and staring forever
only at things that won’t move away from me
like inanimate objects but
I’ll leave you here
with a letter I’ll never mail
because I’m no longer the quivering little girl
beneath you
and I’ll get ****** up again and think
this is freedom, isn’t it?
churning sweetness and liberality into my
empty stomach?
but then why does my mouth still
taste like metal?

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

I was sitting next to you on a ledge
overlooking the Hudson River
and the orange sun seemed to stare at us
as it fell, like it knew something
sad and terrible was about to happen
maybe a joke was being played on us

in the back of a dimly-lit Japanese restaurant
we cowered behind white makeshift walls
and sipped crystal blue sake, and you whispered something
and I smelled you and the smell was strong
like crushed feathers
and dead roses
such a lovely fragrance
and my heart swelled in its wake

and then a snapshot
and a white fist
and a heaviness
and a fleeting thought I’m too ashamed to disclose
and soon, you
were in between me
and your rough voice was crying
it was crying dangerous things
and then I watched you
drive your hands through worn walls

and now you are cracking
and I am weeping and I am running
through beams of lights and buzzing highways
and I am watching your hulking form disappear behind
a metal barrier, and my eyes roll back
to the orange sun that stared at us
as it swept beneath the same river
you are about to plunge in

I rediscovered you under my bathroom rug
I was rendered artistically silent
Blindly fighting
Fierce winds of consciousness and
Eternal sadness that
Tastes like ***** bathwater

Now I’m glowing
Aloft and permeated
The ***** dishes are right where we left them,
unfortunately
And you’ve gone and
Stolen all of my rosemary linens and
Devoured them
One by one
Plus –
I’ve overcooked the Dali Llama
Oh when will love’s agony end?

Don’t harden your eyes at me
Or lock me in the back of a limousine
I shall pour
liquid charcoal
methodically
into
your
moonlight
eyes

There are certain things you shouldn’t ever think too much about
Math for instance
Math,
Death,
and the reason you decide to get naked with someone

You are drinking yourself red-eyed and crumpled
on an unmade bed meanwhile I
am hating the world’s promiscuity and signing
autographs that serve no alternate purpose
subsequent to their ink-blotted conceptions and silently
my heart scratches and claws and penetrates
bone, muscle, and choked fat
to get to you

How will we know
when we’re no longer
young enough
to inconsequentially
rot our bodies
from the inside
out?

If I could
I would search for a space
impenetrable
by ants molecules and medium-sized atoms
that exists between
my pale finger tips and
your freckled
bare back moving
slowly up and down

If I could
I would be somewhere where nothing
is the tarnished byproduct of anything
where no one will remind anyone not to
clog their throats or minds or eyes
when they
shiver and choke on scarlet inkblots
and chug gasoline
and wipe away dirt stains
and drink each other’s shame
and form cuts on the soles of their feet
after rushing barefoot through beds of sharp stones
to reach other

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?

You are a fox, she said.
I looked down and saw that indeed, I was.

Your hair is pretty and red, she said.
I looked behind me and noticed that indeed
The red from my hair was dripping down my bare back
And sliding down my shoulders and forming
Pools of vivid red beside us.

Suddenly everyone wanted to touch my hair
But I began to cry and said stop.

Fay found a frog.
It was green and bumpy and shined rainbow in the sun.
It was actually a toad.
I cried because I thought it might die
And if it died the world would most definitely be over.

I held it and I felt its heart beating in my hands
And I thought there could never be a more beautiful precious thing
Ever
In the entire world
Again.
The heart was beating louder and faster and I couldn’t take it
Until I began to cry again.
Fay came and the frog disappeared.

My heart felt heavy.
My mind went “Hm.”
It went “What should I do now?”

I should eat a cherry, I guess.
So I did.
I ate a cherry.
I didn’t feel satisfied, so I ate another.

Meanwhile Melinda,
My golden haired friend,
and I couldn’t talk because of my purple shirt.
She said, I can’t talk to you while you are wearing that purple shirt.
And I said, Do you want me to take it off then?
And she said, You look like a grape.

And when I laughed I couldn’t stop
and I couldn’t stop stop stop
until I was crying again with my head in my hands.

Then my heart felt heavy again so
I went outside and looked at some trees.
The sun was hot and my arms were getting tired.
But I wanted to get burned.

At nightfall I went upstairs and looked in the mirror.
Makeup dripped down my face and I wanted it off.
I began to scrub.

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.

the body shook uncontrollably,
the road dropped out from underneath us,
streaming cracks of frightened light,
steel grey sky, the high-line
illuminated by a faint breath of heat
the dark shame had me full in its fist,
dead light simmering now on a fallen rock
lift the lifeless face.

the planet waited but no one rang,
the heart stopped curtly,
stuck in the pain,
I waited for no one, so no one came