I wish I wasn't
jealous of such
absurd things.

underneath the nylon blanket I got the
impression that your hands were
these beautiful, shadowy, cecropia moths
reticent with their intentions, while they sat
idly on your ribcage before seeking out warmer
bases. My back, my thigh, my hipbone that wasn't
connected, you whispered.

You smell like cologne and beer; warm and perfumey,
faintly sweet.  I wonder if I'm still tipsy, that was over an hour ago,
over an hour ago when I had to focus on my words
to make sure they came out in pieces and not viscous liquids
thick and sugary. I imagined gems hanging from my lips,
gems hanging from my lips and letters bubbling past
them.

you keep pulling down my shirt like a curtain, derisive of your
own actions, only to find that you have yet to prove yourself
and rock my thigh into yours which was perhaps too zealous.
Too zealous, I think, nonetheless quickened by your thumb
brushing the underwire of my bra.  I laugh because we are far
too juvenile. Here I am protecting the sanctity found in patience
and yet you've evaded the rules.

all this touching and we haven't even kissed, I say, which wasn't really an invitation, but then we are and i am breathing all of you
in sweet staccato breaths, tugging at your skin and still doing the
guesswork, still trying to pin down your wings like a true lepidopterist
all the while knowing that butterflies on cork-boards are usually
dead.

you left
at sunrise
while I had
my head turned
and disappeared up
the mountains, I went
looking for you in Nepal
even down dark hallways
where I wouldn't normally
spend my dreamstate, I'm
spending my alone time
looking for you, but
you're always leaving
already gone, sharing
yourself in New Mexico.

sleep against my thigh
my skin is made of steel
so you melt the edges
with your breath,
draw figures in the grey
like windows in the cold,
you huff, puff and the frost
is gone, your hands burn
imprints on my waist and
crack my hips that are made
of glass, a fracture line that
carries up my chest, an
earthquake that shifts
through my bones, that
haunts me when you're not
at home, so come home,
come home,

come home.

A pound per grudge
45% lean body mass.

bit by bit we begin
to disassemble the
life we have made
here and the material
things leave cushion by
cushion, I always feel
this little ache when
saying
goodbye
to things that provided
a seat, a pillow, a drink
for so long.

bye-bye
says
the little
girl.

reneged, reneged
like Matt Nathanson
all those nasty poems
I wrote about that one
kid are only half truths
because I realized I can
fall in friends and not
fall in love, would you
believe that kid, reneged
that kid, reneged would
you believe that kid I wrote
all those nasty poems about
made me laugh today, enough
to make me think I was burning
calories being happy instead of
the latter.

I wrote a poem about a lie you told
but instead decided to commemorate
you in a better light, probably because of
Paul Harvey's God Made a Farmer,
rememberin' you hoist a bale up at least
three stacks, starin' off into the distance
as you curled baling wire together, looking
like some ****  painting
probably because I know that if you were
out in the woods up behind the hay shed,
I might've mistaken you for a  wounded buck,
all caught up in wire, struggling for whatever's
left of you, with your antlers speared
through clumps of spinney--what a sight.

that even though your heart's in a different place--
albeit a different country altogether, that you are
your own state and nationality, even when your
pride is the biggest plot of land from here to Oklahoma
City--

Your chest reminds me of the helm of a ship, and in my mind
you're still an old tree, gashed and notched with chopped roots
that cleave the earth and ripple above ground in grey knuckles
of european beech wood. You try an' grow into whatever you
can and whoever you can, marriage ain't ****, just as long as I'm happy carved into your branches that I tried to smooth over as
gentle as I could without comin' on too strong--but, darlin', you
never wanted a woman's touch anyway.

Still beautiful as ever--your smile still'd be enough to warm my hands
and I wasn't lying about the way you stand makin' me feel some sort of
way, clinging to your neck and losing feeling in my shoulder
biting your lip hard enough to make you chuckle and memorizing
the specifics of your spine--
so now at night I might be caught thinking about the way you'd feel
if I whispered your name--

but you said it yourself that actions mean more than words, that you probably wouldn't remember something you said two weeks ago so
what's the use in me callin' you a prepossessing man (see also: imposing), I could write more about just your forearms and continue
comparing you to trees and bucks but none of that really matters, I realize. To someone who wants kisses and thighs and just
the outsides, you're fascinated by my spirit sayin'
you ain't ever felt this way, and I wonder why.
Why?

You're not into that kind of thing, but I am that kind of thing.


so, say no to me again.
like you mean it.
keep sayin' it.
keep sayin' it.
you had the answer all along.

When Chaz broke up with me I was
painting the old room on Hartford,--
this rich prussian blue--in the middle
of an indian summer, thick solvent fumes
shimmering outside the windows.  And the
sweat didn't leave your body, just dewed up
on your skin in a thousand glittering beads--

When he called, I walked to the playground and
began  to internalize the heat in anticipation--
the thick chunks of ochre tanbark and red-hot tar in the
playpit--sat on the edge of a scorching step and said things like
no, really, I'm okay.
of course not, I'm fine

When he hung up, i only remember the true indifference to the
mothers and their startled babies, in awe of the spectacle
of beings other than themselves crying--avoiding the strange
girl dissolving on the swings, a sweaty, positively remorseful thing,
baking in a pair of caked shorts.

When my parents come to find me a half-day later, I am a dried up husk, salty and shriveled from sunburn
--Sitting in the same place--
you vow this will never happen--that this pain, this hurt--will never touch you again.  It's too much to say that that day you broke, at most, you cracked down the side, a piece of drift wood hanging onto its branches
by a few sinewy fibers,
sewed yourself up with moss, with steel and rice paper--hoped no one
could see through you, enough holes for catacombs, fissures from here-to-there, across the state of i-never-thought-this-kind-of-heartbreak-was-possible--

at best, slightly used, worn once, okay condition. 19.99.

And you've been keeping your distance since you were fifteen,
where people deflect off a touch, bounce off your atmosphere--
so now, people come into your orbit and your gravity is thrown, when
he reaches for you all you see is the way it ends a year from now, a loss
you've already counted when his hands are threaded into your cerebellum--when he's beginning to push apart your ribs to know
you a little better, when your spine is not just a column of bones anymore but a grecian pillar, your body is not a cavity but a temple,
when he starts to wonder about what it might feel like to love you--

you only know a couple ways to keep men grounded,
maybe here, maybe there, maybe close.  You're so scared.

You're so scared.

and men don't like timid women
men don't like women that need time
he calls you cold and you say yeah, maybe. Yeah, Maybe.
How else should you be? How can you be warm?

I am trying to be less of a tomb, turn my insides out and
show you i am the warmest I have ever been, that if I am
to be pitted with holes then they are sweet and I am full of
honey--that where you were hurt I am hurt too--that I am
healing just the same, hoping for the best,

whispering


get to know me

get to know me.

oh but I'm
searching for
Cat down the
street alleys
without a
Paul Varjak to
tell me I am my
own cage, *Cat?
Cat. Cat!

i want you to
take photos of
of me as i shift
unexpectedly
i want to know
what I look like
when I see you.

I don't like cocky guys
I tell my mom, across the
counter. There is ink all
over my hands and the
bleach has dried out my
pointer finger. *So i don't
want to be near him. and
the espresso machine hums
in the background, Sammy's
cup stained lipstick red, my mom
gives me a look and she knows,
she knows I'm cocky too. So
I'll wait for him to come to
me.

You dropped change
in my pocket and I
haven't had the
guts to pull it
out. I wish I
wasn't so
painfully
sentimental

I am done
playing with
clay, with mud,
making pots
and men.

you stopped talking to me
because you landed yourself
a girlfriend, but didn't tell me
so I went three months wondering
why you never responded to that
one text, after weeks of hearing
you talk about how you were
going to move to Colorado
and, I dunno, I'm kind of
mad about it because
her name is Joy
and my name
is Brooke and
she falls in blonde
tendrils and, well,


I don't.

If I am to let the past
sleep, then show me
how to let



go

How do I love the
way my skin lays
how my skin folds
the way that it bends
the way that it holds

there is not
much to being
twenty, you
spend months
still calling yourself
nineteen in attempts
to get a firm grasp
on reality.

you were looking for
a song by the Clash,
had this idea in your
head (something about
blue jeans) and you told
me don't worry about it
but I read the lyrics of
every single song by
them to see if I could
find it. As if part of
my self worth were
locating those
very words.

I have always
kissed first,
unzipped first
nuzzled into
your hip bone
first, while you
hid your face
beneath my pillow, first.
the nervousness evades
me with it's wispy fingers
too afraid to be afraid I
live by first come first



serve.

this girl came wanderin' in the shop
with slim hips and these summery
blue eyes, real nice, probably 23.

I've always wondered about that
study taken on by the University
of Copenhagen wherein they found
that blue-eyed people might very
well share the same ancestor--

how in the presence of this feathery girl
who looked like she might be hiding wings
beneath that brown leather jacket, I feel
like even the last man on earth would
rather dive into an inch-deep lake than five
feet of muck, only some people find pleasure
in wet earth

but lately i've felt as if even the men who
call me beautiful would much faster take
off for the sky if only just to leave the ground.

there's a dale as you're entering
El Paso County where my fingers
feel heavy and my arms take on a
distant memory, a spirit dug into
the highway that radiates the way
the land does in Mailuu-Suu or Sellafield
because in this valley the rocks are coquelicot
and the trees gasp from snowy outcrops
in a tender, pleading kind of way--
so much so that I want to reach out
and thread through their weeds--a
demand so visceral that I feel the
pine brush on my palms and the
bark scrape skin from my forearms
but
then

the valley opens with it's shaved hills
and pulls back in the rear view mirrors
where its memories don't reach.

A room full of names
scratched from the walls
or peeled back in layers
leaving white spots on the
trim, but this vine winds
and never wavers and although
occasionally it is mislead down the
drains it finds its way up the shutters.

they have picked
at me with chop
sticks and I have
rolled my neck
towards their
teeth but no
more no
more
i am
not
the


prey.

I'm always loving myself off

a precipice, hanging from the
c r a g s  by branch and string
wet down by s  e  a  and dried
by salt, the  w  a  l  k  here was
long in the tall grass that has no
trail where the  wind whets the
bluffs and steals my hair from its
hood so that I am my own maelstrom
a shred of black off the cliffs, incised
into the gray like my body is only an
o  p  e  n  i  n  g but from far off i am
just a whistle against the headlands,
sea foam and pine needles or
the grains of sand that
never settle.

you gave me a list of everyone
you'd kissed, not arbitrarily--
I'd asked. The way you ask
where the bathroom is or
for a glass of water, but
you sent me a full directory
of names, a rolling file of
women I didn't know but
would rake through the
similarities and try to define
your tastes, blonde, blonde...
blonde

When I asked you how many
people you had slept with, I was
lying on the floor picking at the red
threads in my carpet while you rolled
your heavy palms into my shoulders.
you stilled for a moment, sliding down
to the base of my hips

I dunno...five? Or ten...
I laughed and you loosened.
Well, I mean...define sleeping with.


to me there are not many definitions for
one thing, there are synonyms for *** but
none of them you really need

Just four, then.

What happened to the other six? Were they only
kind-of-sort-of's? if you didn't really feel them, did they ever exist?
if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around hear it, did you really sleep with her?

Later on you would casually mention that you were worried that's how I really kissed as if a peck could dictate a whole eight years of
kissing--and I was kind of offended. But then there's that list, the list of
all the trees in the forest that fell and the six that went missing and i think about how I can count the number of people i've slept with on
my pointer finger and how perhaps that doesn't even apply, do you pump gas for twenty seconds before the girls at the counter start crying?

suddenly there are experiences that you
have stamped into your belt and none where i've pretended to be
full of lusts and talents and shortcomings
really I'm just a baby, a wisp of cotton
yellow, so yellow
and you're a full bag of burlap and wire

For once, maybe I could feel it
straight down into my thighs
grounding my feet to the stairs with the palm of his pupils
I will skirt around the issue because I've been here before
in front of the door waiting for someone to leave
go home
laugh and play it off like trust wasn't as big
of a deal as it was
but then there it was, living between my heart and a hard place
a rawness subdued and a sourness to be dulcified

oh wait
you were serious?

telling me to slow down in less words than there
are in a look, in two eyes
speaking calms
I've never
before
seen

i feel like a medley of bloods
of non-favorites and choices
left undecided, all corners and
edges--a heart beating in sheets
of rain where the freshet of my spirit
has ravaged the banks and driven
bones from this ossuary.

that leaves something to be said
about the state of greater things--
of the things i've left frozen that
melt in torrents and wash away
this facade of placidity, this
supposed contingency plan
swept away in a deluge of
all-the-things-i-had-going-for-me
and the worst of it is that i have
not yet been drained, I am still
raging, still raw and
r a g    i    n g

They say a human
can spot the flicker
of a candle from 30
miles away, Hey,
out there, in the
dark, I can feel
your warmth
you're on a
train, I can
feel the
sing of
your
wheels
on the
tracks, lighting
rails towards me.

do you
drive past
walmart three
times trying to
decide if you want
m&ms;, if only people
heard the fights that go
on inside your head, the
way you feel the weight
of your skin on your legs
you have scabs from thigh
rub from running up hills
apparently men like meat
compared to bones but will
strip you for all your worth
like a beef rib, have you seen
those rubberbands that have
sat too long in the sun? or
grapes at the bottom of the
bowl? strawberries in the
corner of the basket?
won't cut your hair
because you think it's
the only beautiful thing
about you, do you eat
bread in splendor and
pretend you're john,
peter, mark and luke
you're just trying to
be passage in the
**** bible, effortless
poetic, in red, his
words, spoken
by a prophet.

i would like to tell him
that i would not have
documented these things
if I had known it all would end so soon
I would not have kept track of the firsts
of his hands, or his movements or
the profile of his face with the Sangre De Cristos
rising up behind him, how I thought he must
be a part of the land.
of the steady
way I was p r o b a b l y
falling in love

The way i ask people
to hang out is kind of
predatory, if this were an
act in two parts, you
would see all of my
acquaintances board
a carousel, and then
watch me grasp at
their clothes as
they flew past
on their steeds
the camera
film would
shutter across
my face, and
a pair of arms
stuck out like
prongs or jaws
or claws or pincers


trying to catch on.

catch on?

joe always
asked why
I didn't just
decide to be
with you and
the answer was
always the same
always something
he couldn't grasp

it's not as easy as you think.
but he always
said

[                                ]

i had a dream that girls put purple flowers in my hair


for him to see across the dance floor
and when he saw me he laughed with
with his body, took to me immediately
with strong hands, kept dancing when
I fumbled against his knees because
what did tripping matter when we were

flying.

i miss
your
feet
your
bad
breath
your
sweat
and
your
voice
that
shook
me
from
my
tree

Before I forget:
the pictures up
the stairs in your
old house and
a littler you in
a baseball jersey
"I was never good
at sports"
Me neither
did I really walk
that short little hallway
that many times

oh,there you are
downstairs on the
piano

plink plink
plink

I only like myself
in the dim mornings
in the shade, in the soft
blues, when there's no
mirrors and I feel my
skin for what it is

Do you ever feel the innocence slip
away from every corner till
the last bit you knew was gone
the last bit that wasn't yours to preserve
wasn't yours to protect
wasn't yours to keep
as if the one person you tried to save
couldn't be saved
couldn't be saved
couldn't be saved