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Aubree Champagne Apr 2014
You've yet to mention the ghosts
in my corners, collecting like dust,
or the tree limbs chandeliered
over my bed to remind me
I'm not the only one with lost pieces.

If there's another word
for love, I've yet to hear it.
If there's another name
for happiness-- it's yours.

Looking at you is sunshine
seeping into my pores.
Vitamin D makes me feel
like who I should be,
not who I am.

This wasn't supposed to be
an apology, but I'm sorry.
Sorry for my cookie smile,
crumbling, for my atrial
septal defect, for clinging
to you like the freckles
on your elbows.

I'm sorry about a lot
of things, but you'll never
be one of them.  What
I'm trying to say is
I love you

even on days I don't
know what love is.
Aubree Champagne Jan 2014
Speak to me in darkness
when the sun is tucked behind trees
and stars welcome insomniacs to play.
Whisper to me through silence--
our secret strawberry pancake recipe.

"Eggs, flour, milk, sugar--" you list.
"Shhhh."
Parents are dreaming, not suspecting
two young lover frolicking their kitchen,
breathing their souls across a steaming skillet.
"Don't forget the strawberries," you say.
"Yeah, I know."

Thoughts swirl through my head
like steeping tea.
How cute you are while
you wait, licking batter
off calloused, worn hands.

To say that you are cute would be
to say these strawberries are sweet.
As sweet as a strawberry tastes
it has secret flavors, hidden--
sharp and ****,
red and deep.

I would love to find you growing wild
out by the woods.  I'd make
a basket with the looseness of my shirt
to carry home as many of you back to my kitchen
as I could possibly hold.

Lips pressed to my neck pull
my attention back from the brambles.
Aubree Champagne Jan 2014
Sadness gathers in bruises along your hipbones
and in aches of metatarsals
when you're dancing alone at the bar, stumbling
over your feet, reeling into counters.

You greet 10 o'clock with the night's fifth drink,
searing the back of your esophagus--strong.
The spinning world around you romanticizes
loneliness.  There's nothing captivating
about swollen cheek bones and shaking knees
from the futile retracing of weary footsteps
in search of people and hope you've lost.

Misery crawls outside where radius meets ulna,
not for a party, but a bar fight,
full of drunkenness and hatred.
Pent up emotions carve flesh along your arms.

Emptiness pulverizes your ribcage,
plucked light guitar strings, your nerves cave
till you puke it all into an unwelcoming bathroom sink.

Despite all 206 bones,
you're never together in heart.
Aubree Champagne Jan 2014
Lately I've been waiting.
Waiting for the trees to lose
their leaves, for the clouds to release
their snow, for April showers to summon
buttercups from the soil.

Autumn builds a cathedral above
my impatient head as light
shimmers through fallow branches
while the sycamores blossom orange.

Till winter's bustling breeze
pushes up daisies, and summer returns
to my arms (unnoticed and sudden).
I'll wait on whoever moves
the universal chess pieces to
exile the frost speckling my yard.

Sitting on edge, as spring's
raspberry sunset grazes the tree line
(and allergies drip from my nose),
I try to spy a lightening bug--
any trace or sign
of summer.

She'll arrive late May,
with curls toss'd like the sea and
blue eyes two shades lighter
than a cloudless sky.

Treasure her while she lingers,
notice how her bonfires consider
your friends' faces with a wild blaze--
dim, but bright all the same.

Let the sun brown your shoulders,
moving through each day she tucks away
with adoration.  Forgive her
for fading, for she's pulled by the wrists on
Galaxy's timeline.

She'll throw back her head
with a laugh that says,
"You don't know me,
and never will."

Then she'll leave you
waiting all year long.
Aubree Champagne Jan 2014
One day you'll find the words
and they will be pure and simple,
effortless as first glances
unfurling a story in your heart.

Clean sheets of paper
are dirtied with confessions
bled from infatuated minds.
A poem is aligned
like dust in the sunlight.

Unlock your doors. Sweep
yourself off your feet.
No commas, no periods.
Words caught in nets taste
like love in the air.

Wake out of your slush pile in the dead of night,
searching for a hand underneath the sheets
or the vague outline of a body
smoothed against the darkness of your room.
Words huddle close against the back of your brain.

Our moments are the smallest handprints,
pressed into the permanence of concrete,
incarcerating the image for parents
who lost their memories.
We vowed never to become them;
our story drained from the tip of a pen
onto a sheet of paper and your heart--
held forever in white and red.

Don't tell me the moon is shining,
show me the glint of light of broken glass
because actions speak
louder than words.
What is love if you don't let him
watch The Terminator--Again?
(Even though you hate explosions and guns).

As the window to your mind tugs shut,
scatter your words into a breeze
like the seeds of a dandelion.
There's always another story to be written
even when this one
ends.
Aubree Champagne Jan 2014
I miss cigarette talks where I broke
myself down for you, bleeding
from my soul instead of my veins.
I miss when my cigarette burned
out faster than the girl holding it.

I miss breathing you in with smoke,
choking on laughter, not panic.
Mumbled disconnections
over your car stereo mean more
than my empty conversations with God.

— The End —