There were these written exchanges
where you told me I would find a
place for my chest to settle into again.
I said, “No.”
There was too much to weigh,
even then with all the inevitable consequences
of faulty nerves.

I burrowed into the landmine
of your genetic code
and you kept shoving at me,
telling me there was more than
just you, here, now, and after.

You joked and joked
until there was nothing.
I never started laughing
and you finally stopped.
You couldn’t hold a cup
or a pen or my hand.
You just played a
phantom piano,
that transformed into a foxtrot.
Nothing could make us
laugh
when the Greek dance
took over your body.

Interim with salty eyes and a slowness
that comes with the hollow sadness
that nips at our calves like we’re
little girls again, disturbing the grasshoppers
of summertime with our stamping feet.
This buoyant heart is from God,
even if I don’t know him too well these days.
This lightness in my cage of bones is
growing.
You are a thief of heavy things and
you fling them off the highest hill
until we are small again, and our souls
aren’t haunted.
We stand, hand in hand, with our faces
to the breeze. You say,
“Brace yourself for the joy.”
and I believe you.

I took my luggage to you
and you said, “Just check it over here.”

Then we went sailing
as people do when they find one another.
We went fishing
for words and atonement.

I said, “I am this violent thing and
I thrash about like there’s anger when there is not.”

We put together seven hundred and fifty pieces of a
puzzle and it made my heart ache.
You put pieces together of me and I put
a few together of you.

You said, “You’ll leave. I am not enough.
Never was. That’s how it goes.”

We sat in a park, on a graffitied picnic table
and did nothing but talk then sit quietly.
I was once taught the value of silence and stillness
but before that park I felt too raw to practice it in turn.

I carved curves and names into the table beneath us
and bumped my shoulder to yours.

You very nearly arrived in the caul.
When I reached between my thighs
to touch you for the first time
without a barrier of skin, muscle, and water
I felt taut, soft, rubber instead of the
slick velvet I’d come to expect.

It’s supposed to mean things, keeping
your 10 month membranous home around
you as you enter into this world from yours,
bringing your planet to us.
Good omens and seers and a symptom of
sacred luck.

I like to think the way you splashed into
this existence was just as auspicious.
You quietly keeping to yourself until
the very end when the bag ruptured and
poured right before your crown, like
you knew you deserved a headdress or chaplet
of dauntless liquid and warmth.

No jazz hands here, just the crowning
of a soul who decided that the quiet but
relevant ordeal of the amnion was too much
and the rare gush or early trickle of
water was not enough. So instead you
chose the in between:

Kept your foggy sheet wrapped
tightly around your body until the last second
then announced your arrival in a burst.
Bringing you to us, but also claiming
your quiet possession over yourself.

If I’m gonna be heartbroken then I’m throwing my shame into your lap.
I have no use for it. This is a brand new theatrical performance.
The guilt can be your footwear, not mine. I’m a map not a floor mat.
This chest is a windrose and the terrain is a glory that beats behind my ribs.
My spinal column will surge up like a barometer, bobbing to the nape,
but you’re not my storm anymore so sit down, stay still, watch me.

These directions aren’t so cardinal now; I swapped them around.
I was born facing up, my laboring mother cursing her derision
like she knew someday I would raise up, face the sky again
and let loose a fury that began in me when I was conceived.
I am a violent flicker and I can syphon out the light until I swallow it whole,
until you’re begging me to swallow you again too. I am not seasonal.
Keep frantic at that compass in your hand. It won’t bring me back.

From the bruising
on your back
to the lines
decorating my
left radial nerve,
we keep count
of bad fortune
and tired breaths.

Your breastbone drum keeps me alive.
I’m not sure if I can make it out today
or tomorrow or yesterday.
You see, I try and when I try real hard
it’s like I’ve been cooked too long
and my clay just cracks.
In one full shudder, I shed my
whole body like a skin.

You send a message through the lines
“How are you today?”
My smile and shrug aren’t working for me right
so I try to breathe and say, “not okay”
without breaking you too.

I can’t write checks for the bills
or tug a sock on, or reach around for the blanket.
It’s too hard, I’m sad, I’m terrified.
My stomach hurts
and there are fists clenched up inside my thighs
and my chest that just won’t loosen up.
I can’t see past the seam of the pillowcase
two inches from my face.
I should mend it. It’s coming apart. Unraveling.

You give me a few words again
and I don’t feel lighter or fixed
because you can’t fix people.
We don’t come with system codes
or instructions for when we break
and lose our first-glance worth.

But I feel you like a concrete floor beneath
my palms or the old, pealing linoleum
in my bathroom.
It anchors me down, and I remember
to take a deep breath now and then.
It reminds me that I’m still here
and you’re still here
and that’s enough for now.

Kissing is described as pliant
and warm.

I’ve never touched your mouth
but your softness has the same
glow. The same flow of
surprise and movement people
like to talk about.

I think if we pressed ourselves
under the same sheet and
shared the same air, then my heart
would settle

mouths slackening and tightening,
into pliable smiles. Tongues curling
over words and laughter.

Shotgunning one another’s voice
with the same virility some
lovers kiss with.

Her hands write novels through the skin
of her palms. I am ink and graphite.
Covered with the smudges of her fingertips,
and the cant of her R’s and L’s.

I have lyrics lodged under my nails, and
a meandering thought pressed to the middle
of my back. Meaningless drunken messages
live on my shoulder-blades.

My knuckles and palms are unrecognizable.
They were held and smothered in chapters
and anthologies and I could never bring
myself to wash them of the marks.