Today I wore a dress. It was cold and my skin
pinched up in the wind. I hurt a strange and
angry sort of hurt today. Where my bones
shook and my stomach hurt but with my
sunglasses nobody on I-5 knew the difference
between singing and screaming and I ended up in Seattle
where the roads are confusing and the sky is stretched through
shuttle bus wires and the blinkers never stop, I may have blown a red
light but nobody noticed--especially when I ended up in Ballard. who knew
you could get back to Everett by skipping half the free way and by the time I
ended up back where I started I saw myself leaving hours earlier down the ramp,
decided I couldn't go home because I wasn't ready. I asked the boy at the ticket
counter which movie was the least less full? Sorry, least most full? Which theater
had the least amount of people (to see me cry) and he smiled strangely, but asked
for my ID. For a moment I remembered I wasn't 17, 17 was just that age where
you're allowed, I was so past allowed but here's my ID anyway, it was sticky.
I didn't watch that movie, what even happened? A man sat behind me,
grunting. I tried to cover my phone but my mind was elsewhere in
an anger that did not let me be mad. Instead I could only consider
the situation a hundred times over, consider the words
I could say, should say, would not say,
should not say, the things I should do,
the right
things (whatever they were)
the wrong things. At this point I noticed
the movie was crude, disgusting even. I hadn't even
laughed once. What kind of humor was
this? But again, my mind
was
elsewhere
and Stephanie wanted
to know where I was, where
are you? Where was I? I was at Costco
with mom earlier, how did I get here? I was laying on
my bed when I got that text but here I am now, soaked
in salt, although my bones no longer shake and my stomach
no longer hurts but these blankets know the difference between
screaming and singing, I know the difference. But I'm. Still. Here.
God, God, I don't know what to do or say or be. I don't
know what to do or say or be or say or do.

kids by mgmt on your
summer playlist, I remind
you of two (three?) summers ago, a
season with no year because
it's lost in the chaos of me trying
to hide your hickeys from kaitlin
all the so-called oldies, back when
we first had cars, had no jobs and
listlessly sweated the lyrics to all
the pretty girls by fun.

I should worry less
about the talent in
your fingers and
take pride in my
own

i am troubled by the vast
differences between the
distance linking the
synapses in my brain
and Cotopaxi, compared
to how fast my heart starts
beating when a dodge truck
comes grumbling down Main
and for whatever reason I keep thinking

All   I       could    ever     be
is a bud of honeysuckle tucked
into your jeans, practically suffocating,
(have you seen what happens to leaves?)
when you snap their obcordate bodies
and your oils seep into their pilose little
surfaces--

trying to be as smooth as Tennessee whiskey
but let's face it
let's face what?
let's face that I am not any kind of high
That in the past couple months the only
way I've seen myself is in the brash statements
of others tangled up in their ridiculous ideas
about where happiness comes from which
is about as silly to me as people thinking that
money really does grow on trees

there's this churning in my chest that
feels like i am thick as cream and someone
has stirred me up with honey, i could be
sweet,

i could be sweet.

I wanted to
make this
longer but
there is no
pretty way
to ask if
you have
fallen in
love with
someone
else
yet.

we are in your car
and I ask to play a
song, you ask if it
is good quality and
I am on the plane
giving a little smile
to a book unsure as
to whether or not I
am still in love with you.

I'm at work on my day
off, drinking Toddy and
watching the spokes on
the city commuter bikes
glint in the windows
it's so weird to want
to be everywhere and
then nowhere, because
everywhere and nowhere
require the right kind of people
so when my mom asks if I want
to see a movie, if I want to go to
the gorge, if I want to go thrift shopping
I tell her that I am restless, that in 1909
subatomic particles were fired at a
solid object and passed through
that humans could possibly
vibrate fast enough to
travel through time
but might end
up liquifying
themselves
but that the
atoms in my
bones are
firing so
fast they
appear to
be not
moving?



but that doesn't make a ton of sense
so I tell her I am a little restless.
a little restless.
rest.
less.

Our ideals are
so easily scattered
as a voice whispers
see, I told you so
but we should know
that just because
it is so with
another does
not mean it
will be with
us.

yes ma'am
no ma'am
and they
even stepped
aside at the
door, i guess
i could go back
to being a country
girl.

let me
take my
hair down
for you.

I can't put
everything into
pretty words.

i could describe
the sensation as
wringing, but in
truth, the motion
is more like milking.
Sometimes in the morning
there are hands in my chest
and instead of milking, they
wring to the tune of old peony
lotion and your face in disassembled
machine parts, brief instances that belong
nowhere (but existed once) and maybe I
fabricate you but the hands keep reaching
and wringing, cording me through the loops
in their fingers, unforgiving in their job.

I'm sure you all know that
having patience with your-
self far outweighs the need
to love yourself, b e c a u s e
loving yourself is hard but
knowing that everything
takes time to accomplish
is harder, and so I wake
up and ask myself when,
and if I do, will it be all
inclusive, as in, will I
love myself at my
worst, too?

We walk on the sky
whipped blue cream
in the puddles, and
the rain gives every
thing a distinct perfume
that only few can
smell like dogs and their
whistles

there was a wasp
outside the coffee
shop earlier this
morning trapped
in the cold, splayed
out between some
bricks, and I nudged
him with my toe,
wondering if i should
crush him or if the sun would
bring him back to life, despite
the irregularity of his nature
and I thought of you, often
lost and trapped in the cold
how I couldn't bring the sun
it just had to rise, so I stepped
aside and went to work.

equate your self-worth
with nothing.

he sat in his
room and thought
of her he dreamed
of her he wondered
why she
couldn't
just break
a couple
rules

but why would you want to break the things that mean the most to me?

Lit stage; a petty thought
I realize every day that
I cannot please everyone

i drove an hour and thirty minutes
to drop a loaf of banana bread off at
your house and I walked up to the
door talking to myself like a mad-man
it's a  m i r a c l e  you didn't hear me--
saw your truck in the lot but didn't think
much of it, (you were supposed to be at work)

but then you were there--
with those eyes that can get so
wide as if I am the darkest thing
in the room and you need  a l l
the light you can get to take me in,
filling up the doorway with those
b  r  o  a  d  shoulders that sometimes
remind me of the horizon, like the whole
sky has settled across the slopes
of your body and branches
off to the sides, everything
goes on for miles like i'm seeing
something so far off--with that frame of yours
that always seems to pour itself into empty spaces--
you could be standing in the middle
of a whitewashed prairie and the fields
would still gently wrap around your
hands, fold you up in the dirt and
you'd still be the arrowhead i'd find--
and I just mutter jesus christ because you've made
me jump, but still. We haven't seen each other in two
weeks and all I can manage is a jesus christ, you scared me.

you disappear into your room and i'm thinking;
  "do     I     set     this     here     and     go?"  
so I take my time unwrapping the bread, crinkling the
bag between my fingers and stuffing the note beneath  
the sweet tea that I brought because it's been sitting in my fridge waiting for you--but you still haven't come back out so I head for the door, breathing slowly and chewing a hole through my lip.

you're already leaving? You've materialized on the couch with a rifle jammed between your knees, staring out at me past the rod you've got
poised at the muzzle.  I have the door open with the wind blowing in
these soft flakes that have started on a lazy drift, skittering in and collecting around my boots--I have one hand on the door **** and I can hear you running that tiny square of fabric through the chamber, fixated
on the barrel and briefly meeting my eyes.
Waiting for me to say something,
it's a split second--barely any time at all--
I think about how that navy blue shirt looks good on you,
looks like those cloudy ocean waves and you are the sand
riddled sea foam pulsing in and out--

I didn't know if you'd want me to stay, I whisper sheepishly. But I close the door and step back inside.

I can feel my
heart heal
slowly
inch
by
inch

i know that i tend
to over-think the new
year, as if a single day
will change my entire
life. but you know, what
if. What if, and what's wrong?
what's wrong with believing the
new year will be the start of something
wonderful? Let me tell you;
it is okay to have such hopes
and be afraid of them too.

This door and this
carpet are worn
because I have
taken this exit
many times
before

I would prefer not to live
in a dry hot place with those
sandy stucco houses and windows
you can see straight through, there's
nothing there that quenches a **** thing
just brown lizards and copper crickets
and I don't remember why I was
so mad about this in the
first place.

I feel the need
to surpass you
when I remember
you're in college now
as if I don't have confidence
in my own talents to grow
to grow
grow
grow
blossom

I want to tell him that I
love everything from a distance
but can cross oceans in seconds




that the people before him sopped
through my fingers like wet sand,
were ever flat and disarranged, empty
men with waterless words and exigent
appetites for my body--(that this is where
i learned the only way to please a man was
to give him myself)

I'm still undoing the knots, unraveling the little girls
coiled in lies, and taking mallets to the plaster molds
I built up around myself, mannequins for different men
and if there is anything I am confused
about it is him, his I-could-nevers, his frightening
absolutes, the ways in which he vows he can never change

you think you want me but at the back of your mind you want
something else

I don't want you--not like that. Not  as if
your worth was based on how quick you jump into the fray for my sake.  How many times you make me smile or say your name--however
you are soaked in rosemary and oil, folded up out of my notebook
into a thousand paper cranes--no, not even like that.

How do I tell you that I see your soul? Your threadbare spirits peeking out and the willowy fibers unraveled in your wake, that you are more than your mothers many marriages, more than the women you did not
want to have-- and deserving of a lasting love that transcends your mistakes and leaves your mirrors remarkably clean, did you know you can be clean?

How do I tell you that the broken do not fix the broken, how I cannot share the blueprint for healing but the burden if he asks--are we in the same book? The same chapter? I once heard that two people must grow in a similar direction at the same pace--are we on the same boat? The same road?  On the torrent seas, will you hold your own?

I realize I cannot come at you with such brazen artillery, that the paths I choose have no gates and are often unmarked, not even the grass gives way, nor the trees and twigs their secrets--and the journey is wholly faith, an expedition I have not fully taken but is presently on its way. When I tell you what falls first and where my priorities settle, I speak down the pike of the ways I hope to be and the woman that waits in whole.




So when he tells me I am confusing for the hundredth time and I sink somewhere off the Atlantic with the weight of my own thoughts, I am quiet.  His words are ever resounding but do not fill me up--just the glimmering hope that we will somehow

meet
in the



Middle

Moby ***** was a humongous
mess of religious garble that threw
everyone for a loop in the shadow of
Typee and Melville was publicly shamed
for writing such a flop so outside his genre,
supposed.

But bound by blue canvas, inscribed in
gold, would you find failure to be subjective?
oh, don't be scared to reach beyond your known
talents, beyond what is said of you,

beyond your genre.

i start  losin' you but you bring
me back around without even
being here--

I wonder about all the blond-haired
green-eyed heroines with lean arms
and venus dimples, who stomp their
feet and shake pomegranates
from the sky, stretch lithely in between
the gates, between arms, who fit into
your side a little better than I do
who glide across the cattle
guards and look good in miss-mes
but then there's

me

and could I ever be so beautiful?

I feel a little out of place, if your heart was full
of daffodils i'd be the single cattail, a plank of
polished wood in a barn--out of keeping with the
regulars--can't dance, can't swim, can't dive--
but I sure want you to teach me
  I learned five albums of george strait
just so we could relate and made a mental note of all
the people you knew just so i could call them by name--

bought boot cut jeans just so you might think a little higher
folded my hair beneath a hat to let it grow out since you
you loved my long braids, (should have let them stay)--
you said we always do what you wanna do and my heart
raced out past the blocks, because I'm scared I'm
not
enough.

because God, I'm so quiet.
a songbird that doesn't sing, a girl that leaves no
trace on your pillow case, a book full of nouns,
pages and pages of soliloquies about peonies
a pen melted to my palm, pockets full of change
and spearmint gum, I don't want to be what you want
certainly not what you need-- I just want to be, to be
and if we're both steel, then I have hope--the plates that
shift beneath the earth have no where to go but up

and mountains can be moved as they say, the faith of a mustard
seed, it supposedly takes.

i said my face is so round

and a little voice murmured
but so is the sun and moon
the flowers that face the sky,
all the planets that sit heavily
on starry thrones, have you
seen the earth? a l l   f  u  l  l
things inherit the land,  you
could plant gardens on your
jawline and hide n a t i o n s
under your cheekbones,why,
it wouldn't be presumptuous
to say the wounded could be
cradled in the dip of your chin


all good things are *round

i hate that
color that
off black
off green
dishwater
safe paint
forever
sealed
into
your
epidermis

he speaks a kind of
currency that could
pull the stars closer
if that kind of thing

were possible

I'm swollen with
annoyance, and
popular culture
disgusts me.

stand fast, sink not
never of your own
strength, never by
your own legs,
always on His
shoulders.

I've stood aloof in the
middle of traffic stops
at green lights, sideswiped
by every other car, left stained
by paint embedded in gashes
but I've picked up my bags and
against all odds, crossed the ****
street.

sometimes I
still taste you
on my breath.

sometimes I imagine myself
deep in the ventricles of your
heart, a small figure planted
in flesh, and I gingerly touch
the walls, where everything
seems so raw, I whisper that
I am so sorry, and you absorb
my apologies.  B        u          t
I am just another echo, a heart
murmur, that is exactly what i
am, a heart murmur.

God spoke
to me today,
barely a thought
hardly a whisper

in the past
i've thought
I was doing
people favors.
as it turns out
I was giving
them open
access to
scald
me.

i'm pushing all these
decisions with precision
but there is no sneaking
with a god who knows
your heart and my
perfection is pure
fiction, a boy built
in a hundred teenage
romance novels imposed
on every man I meet, each
interaction a fitting but men
aren't shoes and I am not
cinderella.