Girl No. 1 wears her jeans cuffed and hates everyone but the Jets. Her voice is honey-thick around biting words. Smiling does not come easy to her. She wears her face like a mask—big glasses, big eyes, big quiet. When I see her, she lifts her hand in a grim wave, delta creases in her brown palm. Her excuse for her silence is that she’s boring, but she’s not. She dots her eyes with tiny stars and listens to German orchestra whenever she can. She thinks she has buried herself well, but bits of her still protrude from the topsoil, aching to be known.

Girl No. 2 is grey flannel and deliberate sentences. Her hair covers her face, yet when she speaks about trees and animals and the hole torn in our atmosphere by ultraviolet, ultraviolent rays, she is thunder. I gave her lotion for her cracked hands one time. When we smiled at each other after, we knew at once we were part of the same club. Girl No. 2 never corrects people when they forget her name. They say Kaitlyn, Kaleigh, Katie…let the word drop as if it were no more important than a used napkin. I hate it. I pick her used napkin name from the floor and smooth it over my lap. I say it right and she replies, with perfect seriousness, thank you: Thank you for the correct pronunciation of my identity.

Girl No. 3 is a hard one. Look at her once and you’ll see Maybelline lashes and a glass-cutting face. Look twice and you’ll see more. The sag of her shoulders, the stinging weariness of posturing for people far beneath her. I startle her. I’m too inquisitive for her taste. She does not want the world knowing her mother drank three liters of ***** before driving off a bridge, that her favorite color is celery green, or that anorexia and anxiety stalked her through the halls of high school like a pair of vultures. She wants to stay in her castle of ice, but it has imprisoned her. You poet, she teases me. You right-brained heap of color and sensitivity. You’re too much. I don’t know what to do with you. I ask her who she is and she recites her answer. 130, 125, 2315. But this girl is more than her IQ, her weight, or her SAT score, and when I tell her so, her Maybelline lashes are ruined.

i. Here, there is sand in your mouths when you kiss. Sweat and long hair. A shared water bottle glinting in her hands. She finds a succulent plant and slices it open, drawing her finger through the clear gelatinous discharge it bleeds. She touches that finger to her cheek and glistens heavenly. You are dry heat desire and she is your oasis. You drink her with stinging eyes.

ii. In this place of neat grass and gridlocked streets, there is not much to do except make chains of wildflowers for her neck and yours. There’s no one around to hear you tell each other how you feel. You feel like a sparkler, so you say so. Like a lit match. Condensed brilliance. She holds your hand in the middle of paved suburban wasteland, squeezes it three times. You know what she’s saying. You say it back.

iii. She draws your initials in condensation clinging to subway glass, while you thunder beneath the metropolis in claustrophobic darkness. You can’t see all of her in the changing light, just fragments. Her lower lip. Her nose. Her jaw, holy. The city makes your want electric. Her mouth on the edge of a cheap coffee cup and crowds jostling the two of you together. Curry and gasoline and the sapphire smell of her hair. Adoration in alleyways and open streets. Here, you can be two girls in love and the world will not punish you for it. Here, you blow her a kiss and a bearded old man says che dio ti benedicta. Bless you.

iv. To love her in the mountains is dizzying. High altitudes and mist. Leaves caught in her hair. When you stand at a precipice and look out, she photographs you without you noticing, dilating the lens to catch the rosy burn of your cheeks above your wool scarf. She finds you painfully becoming like this. You against the violent, beautiful sky. You in love and unhidden. Her heart is thumping as fast as yours when you turn and move into her, wrapping her up as if she were some ephemeral thing, a moonbeam from a passing orbit. Together, you breathe the thin blue air.

That thing she did. It was so innocuous, so accidental, so minor, yet it awakened you. It consumes your headspace. Follows you through hours and days. Makes appearances in your dreams, kissing the edges of your mind. Because of it, you know what it feels like to want someone so much you grow a second heart. Such a gesture should be easily forgotten, but you can’t forget the belly-rolling starburst of it, the oh. That thing she did, it told you who you are. In one split-second act. It grabbed you by the collar, looked you in the eye, and said her. It’s her. Are you brave enough to listen?

2. You want to feign your own fall just so she will lean over you, blocking the sky, beautiful and concentrated. So she will hold your wrist and feel for your rabbit pulse. So you can blink up at her with an excuse for not looking away.

3. She’s sitting there sketching a tree in the margin of her notebook, and she is a miracle. You would die for her. The thought startles you. You want to kiss her, want it savagely, which startles you, too. Your hands stay balled in your lap, half-clenched and trembling.

4. You move and it’s just enough to push the two of you together. Which is, god, the best thing you have ever felt. She draws her eyes toward you with the soft look that takes you out every time. Her arm is pressing yours, solid and warm. You flush and can’t understand why, but you should. That blush knows everything you haven’t yet figured out.

5. You watch her when she leaves, always. You can’t help it. She’s furiously lovely, so much your chest is sore at the sight of her. She hurts you, this girl. She moves you.

We stand at a funeral, hand in hand,
under a sky bleeding glorious light.

The year is dying but we are
here to remember. To celebrate and to cherish.
To laugh and sob, reverently, as one.

We stand circular around a cavernous well,
and in this well, we place bouquets of memories.

There is a door rattling off its hinges. Daffodils picked in a hurry.
A boy, a girl, and two hands finding each other
in the darkness of
a cheap movie theater.
There’s a dying woman telling her sister to
read her favorite book to her one last time
******* it. Two boys shucking off
clothes and leaping into the ocean, shouting
and gasping as the frigid waves lick
their bug-bitten calves. A gun held
to someone’s temple,
ruthless. Desperate mouths
meeting in a train station. An I Love You
written on
torn notebook paper and passed
across the aisle. An endlessness of
January snow.
There are fists on jaws
and pennies dropped into fountains
and meals that taste of loss.
Little girls
standing hopefully
in front of their mirrors, looking for
evidence of approaching
womanhood. Hangovers and weddings.
The stunned pause
after a kiss. Old men in
baseball caps joking at diners.
A boy stepping numbly into the
path of a freight train. Things said
at three in the morning and regretted
long after. Snapped pencil lead.
A scraped elbow. Soup on a
misty night. Want.
This is what we have left.

When the earth turns, as it always does,
this will be the past.
When the earth turns, it will carry us
into a new year
and we will burn, hats in hand,
for what was.
But when the earth turns, all will be fresh and flagrant,
naked and breath catching.
All will be ours.

We stand together between death and dawn. We wait.

There are certain events in every life that happen with stunning destiny. Lovers meeting, for instance—two strangers laughing over spilled drinks in a bar somewhere in rural Greece. A book with a forgotten twenty dollar bill tucked in its pages tumbling off the shelf and falling open at a patron’s feet. The initial eye contact between a boy and the child who will eventually become his best friend.

Falling in love with you.

I never stood a ******* chance. There was always something there, wasn’t there? From the very first moment all the way to now, a duality, circling one another endlessly. I have loved you terribly, awfully, for so long. For far longer than you or I knew. Perhaps even always.

This is the story of that night. That Night. The night I realized. I’ll do my best to take you there, back to you, lightning, me, struck, but no words will ever be adequate.

                                                     …

The night I fall in with you I have no idea what is about to happen.

I have no idea of the long months to come, or how determinedly I will train myself to dismiss the glow you ignite in my stomach, or all the times I will type I love you into the bright emptiness of an email message box, only to punch backspace with a bitter sense of failure, or how I will sit in darkness on another night, a night currently in the unfathomable future, thinking that you don’t love me back and never will, aching like the Earth must have ached when its surface split into pieces, fissure-hearted and dazed.

I am in the path of a swiftly approaching avalanche, but I have no idea of any of this.

The night I fall in love with you I am young and the stars are out and you are at the door. The night I fall in love with you my heart is beating like a wild deer’s and you are in front of me. Leaning against the door frame. Smiling a little.

Oh, if hearts could speak. If they had mouths of their own, if they could voice the truths boiling within us. If they could say this is what I want. If hearts could stand up and say I love you so much it feels as if I am dying then that is what mine would have said, unstoppably. Because if my heart had had the ability to roar just then, it would have declared its infinite adoration for you and demanded the same in return. It would have said I’m keeping a place inside me warm for you, I promise you. The lamp is lit, the door unlocked. I am ready for your entrance, dear, and I always will be.

But this is not a story about declarations, because the night this happens I am young and shocked and burning, and my heart has not learned how to speak.

                                                         …

It goes like this.

You are at the door and I am falling in love with you.

No, that’s wrong. I’m clearly already in love with you and must have been for a while, but it’s finally falling together. The pieces of you are settling into my psyche like mosaic fragments of the most of extraordinary sort. You’re saying something, probably hello, but I’m not hearing you. All I’m thinking of is you and your eyes and your way of treating me as if I am someone more deserving than I really am, you and you and you and you. Your hands and your laughter and your beauty, tendons and muscle, bones and ligaments, veins and blood, blood running under your skin and mine.

There are other people there, but they don’t matter. Just you. I want to melt in your arms, your hands, your voice. I want to be rebuilt and reborn, transformed into something proud and lovely, something that is you and I together. I know then that I am ******, utterly, that I would carry you to the ends of the earth.

That just standing beside you is heaven.  

                                                      …

Behind you the night sky is sweeping coal, but there’s so much brilliance radiating from you that there is no place to hide, no place to bury my breathlessness. I cannot escape your light. The night is cool as ice, but you are warm and my heart is leaping out of my chest, jumping toward you like a worshipful beast, red and rough and bursting.

One day it will reach its destination, but not yet. It’s the moment I fall in love with you. It’s now, and the night is deep and soft.

You and I are together, and between us there’s a shivering bond nothing can ever extinguish, not even the end of the universe. Because even if we weren’t together we would still be thinking the same thoughts, sharing the same observations, arcing in the same trajectory.  The sheer certainty of this makes my head spin. It is in this instant that I know if hearts could shout, mine would say us and always.

I’d like to tell my heart about the future. Whisper things like she’ll love you too and it’s going to happen and when it does it will be so electrifying that the wait will be worth it; when it does it will release parts of you no one knew existed and you will not feel like a criminal anymore for wanting her and when it does it will be miraculous.

But it doesn’t know about the wait or the want or the worry, or the day it is finally brave enough to sing its love, putting us together, finally, as we must be.

Not yet.

All it knows is tonight.

This is a poem for nobody’s eyes
About my students
my flowering black and brown baby girls
more bud than human, saying all singsong how
black is ugly ugly ugly
holding their arms up to
one another, comparing hues
About the instant I realized
I loved women too
and sagged hard against my bedroom door while
dread and hope danced a strange dance
in the pit of my gut
About the college kids I see in class everyday
popping Aspirin and Xanax and the pill
with their headphones and angry publicness and
******* ******* **** this
and notebooks and pens and
soft privateness and
I love you I need you I need you
About the boy I couldn’t speak to for years
without feeling sick or small or unrequited
About Audre, Toni, and Maya teaching me
how to start revolutions with a word
About how I dream again and again
of kissing the girl I am in love with
and sometimes
we are the in the dark and sometimes
we are laughing and sometimes
I am moving breathless
into the room saying
I have never loved you more than I do at this moment
and lips are on lips are on lips
About how I can’t look at this one
pink nightgown because I was wearing it
when my father said he was cheating and
too many tears fell on those
tiny satin cherries
About Holden Caufield and that
******* merry-go-round
About a crazy, unquiet and
utterly illuminated self
Me, spoken yet unspoken

I was born with a heart full of blood and stars.
I was born brave.

When they laid me on my mother’s chest
I stared into her eyes as if I’d known her always.
When she gave me to my father to hold,
he wouldn’t put me down. Just rocked me
through that hospital night of beeping
and chaos and latex gloves snapped
onto capable hands, staring at me
like I was something confusingly
wondrous.

My grandpa first met me after my mother and I
trudged off an airplane into the bustle
of thousands
and when he got a good look at me,
smiling hugely, he said
my god, she’s otherworldly.
No one can compare an infant to
the mystical
but I was round and rosy and
January and furrowed-brow and
decisive, determined, dauntless,
and I think I kind of believe him.

I was what they call a late-bloomer,
a warrior of the quiet kind
who picked tiny strawberries from the neighbor’s
yard and ate them on the driveway
amid battalions of rainbow chalk, who
wore her fairy wings and flower chains
long after other kids gave up make-believe
for video games.
I was an arrow of a child,
headed perpetually for rawness of spirit
and purity of truth,
and when circle after circle of friends
closed on me
my heart ran salty scarlet rivers through my chest.
When they said I was too sensitive, too odd,
I bawled into my mattress
with a richness of despair and yes,
I wished I was not who I was.
I was different, and that scared the other children.
I was kind.

So I grew up. Slowly.
My drawers filled with poems I fought to birth,
waiting in the darkness for them like an animal.
I did stupid things and I did lovely things. My bones
ached me to a new height.

They say the day you get your period is the day you
become a woman, but the day I became a woman
was in the middle of August on the living room couch
when my father stopped loving my mother and started
loving someone else.
I did bleed, but it wasn’t the right kind.
It wasn’t fertility or practicing walking around
with a pad between my legs, awkward,
awed at myself. It wasn’t that kind at all.

There are many ways to grow up. I grew up
because of my dad whistling on mornings after
*** with my best friends’ mom,
because of him showering
to go out and my mother retching into the bathroom sink,
because of the mutilation of family.
But I didn’t grow up dim.
I grew up steely and flagrant and voluminous,
unfolding in all directions
because I, runner in the woods,
I, poet,
I, last one picked for the team,
I, oddball,
I, exhalation of light,
I, otherworldly,
am not stem, nor stamen,
nor petal.

I am the blossom.
Blood and stars.
Brave.