I am sore muscles, burned food,
lit windows of houses I’ve seen
while standing out in the cold,
dead leaves underfoot, dreams of shoulder blades
pushed against plaster and a lump in my throat,
catching someone check their reflection
when they think no one’s looking,
running after an ice cream truck, airplanes crossing the sun,
laughter shooting from the chest,
vehicles racing along pavement,
the tenderness of the air this morning,
shadows stretching across snow, my gut fluttering
when we’re alone together, poems I write in which
nothing is true, the migration of birds,
lights dimmed and all the music turned up, constellations of stars
I will never know the names of, my thoughts chattering to no one,
driving on ice with a pounding heart,
dragonflies and thunderstorms with one ear-bud in,
a head on a shoulder,
hugs tight enough to hurt,
swerving to avoid strangers in the street,
poetry read on full eyes and an empty stomach,
waking in the middle of the night to
move through the house while everything’s soft and quiet,
leaning into things with base violent passion,
strawberries picked in August,
things I want but will never have, that great numbing beauty,
laying back on an unmade bed,
laughing and sobbing like a *****,  hurling rocks
into the navy monotony of the ocean,
electric jealousy,
inhaling dust of old books,
euphoric indie riffs, photographs pinned to walls,
jogging to catch up with a new friend,
spilled milk, a cool pillow at the end of every day,
shifting seasons, happiness louder than bombs,
lungs full of breath,
affluxes of glitter in my eyes,
a roar building in the space around me,
love and love and love

When your youthful command of language
is not enough to convey
what swings its jaws inside you,
when you stand pulling from your shelf
volumes written by the great and inimitable—
names that inspire centuries of admiration,
minds that managed what you cannot,
their icy clarity pummeling you
like a stream of fists,
you of tremble and grief
and writhing weariness—
when your age prohibits you from expressing
your apocalyptic, purgatorial verve the way you want it,
you don’t stop trying,
you don’t stop trying,
you let the sun drop and rise
and then
you launch your body at this wall again,
you bruise yourself willingly and determinedly,
you throw your whole weight into the crash,
you work up a fury of hope, an improbable recklessness,
you keep going and going and going and going
never mind the blood in your mouth or bells in your ears
because you are the whale that beaches itself by choice
and you are right to be this way,
you are brave to keep looking for gold

This is for a girl whose name means light,
Who fights every day of her life to beat the gravity of depression,
Whose dearest pastime is turning everyone she encounters to poetry,
Who’s never stopped looking for fairies or shaking glitter over everything,
Who is tall in the flesh and tall in the heart; love overflowing,
Who aspires to be ironclad but always tender,
Who knows too much about bruised innocence and precious things ripped away,
Who can never get enough of walks in the wind and rain—all of that pulsing sensation, all of that alive-alive-alive,
Who salutes Eve each time her teeth break the skin of an apple,
Who is thoroughly in love,
Who has taught herself to bleed out with dignity,
Whose defiance could halt the turn of the earth,
Who grew up on bare feet, free will, and the softest joy imaginable,
Who would die for justice,
Whose soul is warm and messy and unfurling,
Who has a family of artists living in her head [Alcott scribbling in the cerebral cortex, Van Gogh mixing pigments near the frontal lobe, Ginsberg clacking at his typewriter beside the cerebellum],
Who dreams of avenging the marginalized,
Whose arsenal includes sturdy black boots and neon strength,
Who is ruthless yet sentimental beyond belief,
Who slipped into the world with a sweetness she’s never really lost,
Who lives like she writes like she laughs like she argues like she loves, with heat and certainty and unending vibrance.
This is for myself.

Perhaps an introduction is in order.

We are fields of graves, bone-dust lying soft beneath the earth, footnotes in the annals of history. We are housewives, warriors, mothers, witches, healers, poets, inventors, philosophers, seekers, servants, royalty. We are young and old and middle-aged. We are the line of relentless faces in front of The White House lawn, the chaffed, frozen fingers gripping banners of purple and gold. We are wombs that hemorrhaged from the unforgiving wire of coat hangers. We are the tender and unbreakable who raised generations under the weight of our ***.  

We are legend. We are life-source. We are women.

In any case, we have something to tell you, our daughters, who are so defeated you can barely find a reason to go on. Listen.

You come from the guts of the Universe and are equipped with more power than our society knows what to do with. From cradle to coffin, you face a world which tries to snap you in two at every chance. You are branded with labels as soon as you’re old enough to attract attention. You are *****, ****, *****, ****; weak, silly, inferior, dim, useless. You are good for your body and if your body is not good enough—if your hips are too wide for **** and your ******* too small for beautiful and your hair to rough to be desirable—you aren’t worth anything.

Each time you turn on the television or computer or step outside your home, you are assaulted by what you should be, told to go to war with your sense of self. You’re something always in need of fixing and this only intensifies with time. You are naturally unclean, too wild for your own good. Men won’t touch you unless you are smooth, supple, and hairless—practically childlike. They shudder at any mention of the monthly blood flow between your legs and the way your abdomen clenches and aches, proof that you can create life.

Your most base rights and liberties are still (God, still) the source of violent political warfare, because Human does not apply to Female. You are ***** in billions of ways, stripped and stripped of your dignity, your power, and those sweet stars in your eyes. You stand in the center of a great mob, and their spears are all pointing at you.

We burn for you, are enraged to the point of combustion. We’ll never forget what it was like to be in your place. The memory of such oppression will always be imprinted within us, reverberating long after death. Our softest, deepest apologies are with you, as is our softest, deepest admiration. We hope you can feel it.

We hope you’ll put down your despair for a moment, listen to your heart drumming away, and remind yourself that your subordinance is man-made. You are crafted of the same atoms as Eve and Joan of Arc and Cleopatra, your strength is infinite. You are pure helium, rising, reviving and resurrecting, again and again, on and on.

Lift your chin, raise your eyes, and breathe from the root of your being. Don’t be frightened; we are with you. The fight goes on.

May it always feel like this
May it be electricity that streams
through everything with
blood-rocking sweetness
May it never stop filling me
with what I cannot for the life of me
put into words…
that clear and soft thing,
that gasping blooming thing,
that glow in the deep deep core of me,
where you live

Their violence. Their fire. Their beauty.
Their clenching, unclenching. Their bedlam.
Their silence.
Their toes squirming in their shoes. Their sobs. Their seventy-mile-an-hour fury.
Their eyes. Their glimmer. Their construction paper dreams.
Their insecurities. Their melanin.
Their rapture. Their forgiveness. Their twisted-up mouths.
Their screaming.
Their laughter. Their spoiled innocence. Their decent.
Their wilderness of wit. Their barbed future. Their ineloquence.
Their noise. Their stretching limbs.
Their vigor. Their hair spurting out of their scalps.
Their secrets echoing and singing through low-ceilinged halls. Their desire.
Their chipped orange fingernail polish. Their belly aches.
Their misspelled crayon messages. Their ghosts. Their audacity.
Their fear. Their braids. Their arms tight around each other.
Their torn jeans. Their longing.
Their possibility.
Their harpoon words. Their blood. Their bursting hearts.
Their walls. Their art.
Their endlessness.
Their airplane arms and their shrieking and their streaming outside into the yellow ache of a sinking sun.
Their rhythm. Their nonsense.
Their hands cupped around their mouths.
Their reverberation. Their chapped lips. Their love.

Them.

[it’s not romantic, it’s bizarre and almighty and so much better than you think]

Let me tell of you real love. Neon, staggering devotion. Let me paint the picture as I see it.

I won’t make this sentimental. I won’t be tender or aching about it. I’ll be wild instead, fiendish, disturbed, and mad with adoration, just as I like. I’ll destroy and resurrect. I’ll growl. I’ll do anything but play that wistful raw-hearted darling the world is so fond of, because I am much too audacious to wear the sweet flush of the lovelorn or trace sonatas across my skin. My nails are rough at the cuticles and my hair flies out of my skull the way it pleases, and I can tell you much about falling in love, but I won’t do it the way people want. I will do it my way, in my time.

Falling In Love, however you look at it, is terrifying. It has been plucked and prodded and molded for centuries, eventually becoming known as some shining thing; salvation for the lost, mercy for the suffering, joy for the empty, but this is romanticized ******* and it has no place in my sphere. If you believe in that myth, you clearly haven’t been in love, because when you are you realize that you have fallen into something much like a great void, and that this void is full of monstrosities and starlight and a billion, throbbing maybe’s.

When you are, you realize the object of your affection is not flawless as everyone told you they would be, but ridiculous and incorrect and fully *appalling. They’ve got dirt under their nails, and they peel the dry skin off their knuckles, and they shout when they shouldn’t, and they do the wrong things, and they talk with food in their mouths. They make you writhe with impatience and seethe with anger and throw yesterday’s paper at the wall, and for some shatteringly bewildering reason, you want it to be them annoying you for the rest of your days. Them, always, and no one else.

But there’s more.

If I could dissect for you all of humanity’s misconceptions about romance I would. In a heartbeat, so to speak.

We’d discuss the stupidity of The Swoon. I’d enlighten you, mention the historical buried context behind that so-called starry-eyed tableau—women stuffed into whalebone corsets, dancing with their beaus to thunderous fiddle and drums, while trying not to pass out, to breathe and stay upright, stay proper, even as their diaphragms were being squeezed like fists.  

We’d dispel the idea of The Beauty and The Beast. I’d beg the question of why we cannot be both monster and marvel, why we always have to make a distinction between the two; good and evil, saver and saved? I’d stand in front of you with my misshapen body, my solid body, my curves freckles scars body, and I would laugh and yell and spin round and round with my arms thrown out, and I would show you how to be both.

We’d dismantle the concept of anything being Written In The Stars. I’d tell you that in a planet of seven billion there are too many random acts and intersections to believe that anything is set in stone, that if one lover leaves, you’ll never have another. I’d teach you how to enjoy whatever lands in your path then how to let it pass away with keen grace, when the time comes.  

We’d discover that no one, no matter how violently you adore them, can complete you or heal you or restore the things you’ve lost. I’d inform you that they can love you, absolutely, and that you can love them, but you can’t save each other. You can only fight your way through the haze side by side.

Love, as I know it, is a drunken sprint for the finish line. It’s a grueling, constant decision to stay and be and do for another. Senseless euphoria. Days and days of boredom, itching at each the other, hitting all the wrong nerves until you both blow up in a blistering melee of fury and fear. Leaving and coming back, leaving and coming back, leaving but always coming back. The two cups of coffee set on the kitchen table even though one was never asked for. Displayed weakness. Perfect synchronicity. Breakdowns. Their arms around you, holding you to Earth. Abbreviated sentences that need no explanation because you speak the same language. Their fat, your birthmarks, their yellowing teeth, your knobby elbows, their cowlick, your nose, and the two of you completely infatuated with each other regardless. Cleaning bile from each other’s hair after a night of too many drinks or the flu. Thunderous pain. Turning up the radio not because you like that song but because they do. Clear, gutfelt laughter. Walking into a room and feeling watery in the stomach at the sight of them, even after years and years and years.

That’s what this is. Insanity. Huge, implausible reverence that will bloat your heart until you think you’ll die from the stretch, but it won’t stop there.

Love never stops there.