All wrapped up in flannel
A bouquet, of sorts -
Of love, maybe
Pride, maybe
Effort, always.
It has to be hard
to be earned.
Jump for the flowers,
Make them come to you.
this body right now
Feels like summer
Like home
Soft, capable, and
mine.
This body right now,
My body,
Finally feels as so.
credit my clothes,
Grant them power,
Make them make me
but in all honesty,
this body is more
Than flannel-shirt deep.
A blossom, of sorts
underneath
of love, maybe
of pride, maybe
Of me.
Writing this
feels a bit like a prayer
sometimes,
Most times,
This self-love
gets tangled in
it's fair share of
Misfirings
Miscommunications
And doubts.
Without it,
I have learned
To feign
Self-hood.
But with it,
Now,
I can claim
This body.
I claim it
for love.
And mostly,
For pride;
whatever that is
For you
Whatever you are
To me.

everyone feels alone
sometimes.
we all have parties we couldn't go to,
weren't invited to,
left early because we felt like we didn't belong.
Loneliness is not a disease.
It is human experience,
like love and hunger and getting your toe
stubbed on a door.
What they didn't tell me was that
loneliness should not be a lifestyle.
I don't mean isolation -
I knew not to cut myself off,
I knew we could never survive all alone but
I didn't know that we could never survive
all tangled up together either.
Loneliness becomes a lifestyle when
codependency becomes your idea
of closeness, of love, of identity -
I don't know how long I've thought
other people needed to be helped before me
other people needed to be loved before me
other people needed to be felt before me
I don't know how long I haven't known
Myself to be anything other than others I've loved.

It is so easy to hate yourself when you aren't convinced you exist.

When you're not sure you really aren't just his legs or her torso, their throats combined into one,
Who's to say these hands are really mine?
When I think about my fingers,
individual, small, difficult,
I am scared.
I forget every day that I am here
As soon as I fall into someone else's eyes and shape and words and -
and I do not know how to remember.
My loneliness is not a disease,
tearing me down and eating me from the inside out;
it's the cure that makes me
shiver on a floor of my own sick tendencies
to push and pull and scrape,
never sit,
always wanting more skin
than anyone has to give.

I am reaching.
So many of my poems
begin with reaching.
I feel like I am always reaching,
without ever breaching any of the
walls I crawl to.
I just can't get past you.
You trespass and then scatter,
even when I want you to matter.
There's no way to start a poem
without reaching. My poems
are all about grasping at thin air
with words that are my arms,
my hands trying to grab
anything to keep me grounded.
I've found its only a matter of time
before my crime is punished -
I have empty hands,
swollen arms,
and a useless throat.
I am reaching. Squeaking,
because maybe noise
will draw you in.
Call you into your place
in me. Emptiness
doesn't sit well
with me.
It boils into anger
my friends who won't fill me,
my mother who instilled in me
a fear of getting close; too,
my brother that won't know me,
my father who won't show me
the only thing I need.
I am angry
at them for existing
without me,
Because without them,
I do not remember
if my hands are really reaching
or just floating;
empty space
in a world with too many
walls
and not enough.

i'm missing something i never had
a part of me that i can't get back

...because its still sitting here in my chest,
settled in like a cat in winter,
bathing in the glow of my sighs
sinking in the quick sand of my apologies
lodged in the crevice of anger, unforgiven -
no "sorry"'s for the part you never stole
you didn't lose it, you say, your eyes darting
like lizards looking for a spot of sun

no, you didn't lose it. it was never gone
i can feel it in my clogged wet paper throat
resting like the sun might never rise
i am missing something that i'd never lost
because i'd never found
it

sometimes,
if i breathe hard enough,
i can feel my feet sink into the ground
plant themselves in the earth, as if
they were two trees growing out of my hips.
i can feel them feeding me - anytime
i put my hand to my stomach,
i feel the muscles at work, fueled by
cell bodies that all call my body
their home. at least i shelter them,
even when i feel like a broken window
in a rotting, red-oak shack that creaks and cracks
in all of my once safe places.
the dirt tries to bring me back to life,
but I have to let it.
let my soles take root in the mess I have made,
and the mess no one can avoid.
**** is the best fertilizer, anyway.

sometimes, if i sit hard enough,
i can recognize my own body as
the perfect function that it is:
branches and growing, planted and going.
then, i can feel myself move again.

I was worried that if I kissed you,
You might become a real person
and I'm terrified of anything but ideas
Ideas I'm only frightened by
But I can put them into poems
working on them wistful words
Winding roads of imagery
Paint you into symmetry, easily
no contradictions unless they fit nicely
Onto a page.
But if I kissed you,
Suddenly your lips would be chapped.
You'd probably be breathing, and I probably would taste
Something other than sweet cider on your lips.
Lips are skin, after all, and we all have skin.
Skin isn't porcelain or poetry -
Your skin can't make me cry because
I have skin just like it -
Cells on cells on matter,
Blood. *****. ***. Spit. Ingrown hairs.
I was worried if i kissed you you'd stop being my savior,
and id start being the confused college girl I chastised in my sleep.
In dreams, you taste like apples, peaches, wet but warm and soft
What if in real life, you find bits of food in your teeth, too?
I was worried if I kissed you so I never kissed you.
Instead, I started thinking about the bumps on your thighs
The scabs on your chin,
Wrinkles on your hands,
I found out there was a lot I hadn't painted yet,
There was so much more to work with
now that you are real.

No solace in
hollow trunks. Just space
to fill.
In, out -
nothing quite sits
the way we used to.
Critters like to move around
build their homes in snow and then
vanish. Nothing
to remind us they were here.
I would say I miss them,
but I forget who they were.
What am I to do
with space?
Everything at once becomes
full
and then,
spring