each space between your fingers
is a holy sacred space.
might i lace my own between them,
i would feel nothing less than blessed,
to endure the synchronization of our pulses
in the melding of our wrists.

kiss
my
mouth
with the taste of suicide still in yours,
i long to consume the massacre
gurgling guiltily inside of you.
i know you hurt,
and i hurt,
and maybe in another life we were fated
to be each other’s medicine,
but in this one you are seven words
in six poems;
i’m five seconds of thought spanning four days;
three,
two,
one brush of prayer past lips. in desperation,
i pray you’ll seek me out,
paint our bodies by numbers until we count to infinity,
and then some.

women smile seamlessly,
men crook their fingers in a hunger delicious,
and we all fall into a cursed sobriety -
human nature is defined by our strength
to swallow preconceived prescriptions,
and i have a dozen pills to take each morning
but none of them cure me of this shattered glass yearning.
my lungs curdle, wet with the words i push back down
whenever i feel a pinch, a pop, a squeeze inside
that plays in the staccato rhythm of a two syllable name,
that plays in the urge to condemn myself by telling you
“hey, your smile is a sunset,
your laugh is an ocean,
and i’ve been trapped inside for much too long.”

i am too sweetly suffocating,
because a girl across the way
has made herself too pretty to be ignored.
an open mouth is an ocean to swim in,
but i cannot keep myself afloat against
the impending crash of wordless waves;
frail confessions staining nervous teeth,
neither she nor i will say it,
but we both know.

i share with her a hello in the morning,
not far from my mind when once i shared
the touch of spine with a car seat’s leather,
a hot hot heat bleeding into my body from hers.
it’s not lust, and it’s not love,
it’s just one day of swallowing each other whole.
i take her breath in, belly pulling into me
when her fingers find my flesh.
i am trying to make myself small
so she can engulf me.
there’s stars caught between her teeth,
and when her mouth matches mine,
they spark.
my tongue burns with the supernova taste
she leaves when she pulls away.

and it’s not love,
but i still today cannot resist the want
to be the only name that bleeds out her lips
when someone’s touch drags her back from the dead.

“madness is what i have instead of heaven.”
she is both of these things
late at night —
stars crack and crumble on the memory of her tongue,
and i can’t breathe anything but her oxygen.
if i could
just one more time
have her slide into my bones,
gladly would i let my skin unfurl into ribbons.

i’d let her torture me into submission,
her eyes half-lidded, shut
with the mold of lust,
and her tongue absorbed with my taste,
hands capturing my freckles between her fingers.
maybe her legs will quake under the weight of my promise,
thighs flushed as pink as my cheeks
as the white-hot pierce of passion
overwhelms.
i grossly still so want
the tremble of my name spilling on her mouth —
a prayer i can answer without words.

and it’s not love,
but i almost wish it was.

you are
the cosmos
in a paper cup.
i could drink all your space
from this fragile pouch,
and gladly burn the roof of my mouth
on the core of all your stars.

i wish i could bottle your laughter in a jar,
so then i could unscrew the lid
whenever i’ve been unscrewed myself,
a body separated into parts rather than a whole
and the demons inside crawling out to make
art on this canvas skin as red as their bitemarks;
this is when i would most need to have you there with me,
to hear that guttural joy from deep within your throat echoing
to me in the greatest dark.

they say vincent van gogh drank yellow paint
in order to find the flavor of happiness.
i can’t say that i blame him;
i think you’re like drinking yellow paint,
because ultimately you will **** me,
but you’ll taste so sweet going down.

if i could swallow amnesia like a pill,
i might just have to;
because i walk a fragile line between
forever and never,
and i’m about to lose my balance.
you are a cliche i refused to be a part of,
until you opened your mouth
and out fell the christmas lights,
the rainbow decadence of promise,
though what you were promising wasn’t so much
what i wanted as what i desired,
and even with the tickle of warning behind my veins
as they quickened in blood flow,
i thought for a moment maybe i could be worth something
you didn’t outright say i could be.

and i wasn’t surprised when it all took a note from the challenger
and exploded in my sky,
but i cannot say my body did not seize and shake,
my tongue did not swell until i was choking on it.
it’s hard to understand though, because i’m not in love with you.
i know i’m not; everything i felt was merely an exaggerated carbon copy
of what you professed you felt,
and yet it’s me who tasted salt twice in one day, not you.
you didn’t promise to love me in that way,
merely promised to graze my thighs with a tongue so strong
i could forget for a minute the reason why i said no
to being friends with benefits in the first place.

i think it’s not so much that i’m in love with you as
i think it’s because i’m used to being the second best thing
someone could have,
the not-quite option, the good but not good enough version
of what is so keenly desired by beating teenage hearts.
no one wants to be the second person that gets told good news,
the second person that gets invited out when the first cannot go.
i think it’s not so much that i’m in love with you as i love you,
beyond hormones and beyond friendship.
because there’s something between us that
is wholly poetic but cannot be melted down
into the human catastrophe of words.
and i just want to know that you believe the same.

truly, i feel as if you are my person,
and not in the sense that i will see us lying hand-in-hand
at the mantle of our graves with lips tied together;
i haven’t found that person yet.
i mean in the sense that we are the twins of a different mother,
we are the soulmates who don’t need to touch unclothed to feel
intimacy.
we are the best friends who go beyond that definition,
and i don’t know if i romanticize everything until it tastes too sweet to swallow,
but i love you a lot and i don’t want to lose you.
i don’t want to be your second,
and not because there is sugar in your lips
but because there are storm clouds in your soul,
and i’d regret losing someone who could understand
why our skies look so much the same.

why blush when you can dance;
the reddened clasp of hand on cheek
ignites a tremble of a waltz in the air around us.
your heart has loosened its strings,
dangles as it does in the hollow of your chest.
i am tentative in my approach,
the bones in my feet as fragile as
the whole of a bird's skeleton.
the breath in my mouth as breakable
as shattered glass,
i fear cutting my tongue
on what i'm afraid to say.

your marrow light as helium,
all i ask is you do not float away from me.
a cocktail of chemicals my brain drinks;
my stomach fills with the toxins of touch too easily.
it cannot be helped that i fall a little in love
with everyone who leaves their fingerprints on me;
but is there anyone willing to dance with my blush,
to create a menagerie of skin
pink as the petals i fill my hair with;
i am in my own mind a nymph,
a version of persephone not yet lost
to fire and brimstone,
still at ease with the world because it has not yet abandoned me,
not unlike the fashion in which i imagine you doing
with your grasp tight on a watered-down apology.

you've a skeleton mouth.
static crumbles in your throat —
please enunciate.
i am no translator of this archaic language
of sidestepping the truth,
i am merely a pair of lips and a heart
constructed for you to do with what you will.

here's the thing: i like you.
i like you how a flower girl might like
tossing petals to the air and watching them
flutter down:
with a foreign innocence
that instills in me a voracious appetite
for your sacred space to invade my own.

i liked you in october chill,
when rosebuds were your cheeks,
and with gentle panic
i think i am falling for you
crept into my unspoken lexicon.
novocaine verbatim numbed words
that would otherwise violently swell
to the tip of a stained tongue,
and i liked you in a little black dress,
just as all the stories said i would.

i liked you in moments
when nothing could logically tether me to you,
and i think it stays prevalent in the curve
of the husky laugh i can so easily drown in.
i like your laugh,
but what i like most is
that it comes from your mouth.

you might slip a pill past your lips,
and a loaded gun might rest on your tongue the same way,
but you cannot escape this.
poets say there is rebellion in bones,
but something that shatters so easily
can't possibly hold
a trembling civilization within.
your bones are merely bones,
not some poetic device for romantic analogy.
your heart is just a heart,
your lungs just lungs,
and a hitch in your breath is just you
not keeping up with time.