i. Like a building on fire, you appeared in my path. You were what all burning things are, hot and radiant, crackling with a force I cannot name. You were a comet speeding to earth, a malfunctioning two-stage rocket. I watched as you turned yourself inside out, as you were absorbed by the sky, as you detonated yourself in an act of destruction so powerful it created collateral art. I watched as you gave yourself up to ash. I was there.


ii. When a building is on fire, the first human instinct is to run away. But I ran toward you. I ran toward you, because I knew what things might be tucked within you. I ran toward you, because your heart deserved to pulled from the wreckage. I ran toward you, because I was not afraid, because I have been a burning building and I remember what it was like to be trapped inside myself, dissolving in the heat and the pain, toxic and dehumanized. I remember. So I ran toward you while everyone else ran in the opposite direction, and I put my hands on your windows, and I entered you.


iii. You were trembling in those flames, those flames I swept aside like curtains, looking for the salvageable. You were sad and raw and red and wonderful, surrounding me with your swollen hopes, bleeding words of venom and gentleness, a dichotomy of throbbing remorse. You blew out window panes and shook down doors. You shattered the roof, sent furniture tumbling. You howled at a moonless night, you agonized gloriously.


iv. I watched the pieces of you fly. The Tuesday night Hennessy, the poets you tried to understand, the I-am-not-scaredness of you, the pressure of your angry palms smacking the table, the movement of your legs, the ache of your voice, the bravado of your soul, all sent scrambling like grains of sand. I watched you contort, watched you turn quiet and strange, watched you forget things I still remember, things I cannot forget: the color of our laughter, the finding of trust, the promises you failed to keep, the dissolution of the invincible. I watched as you were, for one incredulous moment, so beautiful I couldn’t breathe. I stood at the core of you while you collapsed around me. I wept for you in ways I have wept for no one.


v. Like a building on fire, you appeared in my path. You ended the way all burning things do, falling, skeletal, to earth. Desperate. Brilliant. Gone.

There is nothing but love, and now. Nothing but places that ring out memories, memories of learning to lose, memories of us. There is nothing but heartbeat and heartache. Nothing but night sky. Nothing but the gleam of our spirits, their sheer capacity to keep opening themselves against all odds. Nothing but soft eyes and warm hands. Nothing but breathless winter snatching our oxygen and making us taste of ice and courage. Nothing but risk.

There is nothing here but ecstasy and boredom and wonder, nothing but watching her watch the moon, nothing but light. Nothing but mistakes and forgiveness, tender uncertainty. Nothing but the accepting of what is. Nothing but stars falling overhead, and us lifting our hands to catch them. Nothing but resistance, war, the ache for justice; nothing but our poetry burning these walls down, nothing but chain link fences and snow.

Nothing but creation, nothing but sunrise, nothing but nervous first kisses shared in the back of a city bus, nothing but mouths moving together. Nothing but reverence, guns, a god we don’t believe in, the children making snow angels in the park. Nothing but breathing together, laughter and bare feet. Another day, another hour. Nothing but the revolving of Earth, the splitting of cells, these fears we nurse in the darkness, the loss we have chosen to accept.

Nothing but our longing, our need, our dying, our letting go; nothing but nakedness, this human vulnerability, the trust we give to others, the thunder of our feelings, the words we cry out; nothing but our souls rising and falling and growing and moving and touching and aching and knowing and leaving and loving and becoming.

There is nothing but this.

i. What I mean to say is, I’m sorry. I’m sorry everything’s changed. I’m sorry my bones are dark with mourning and need, sorry I don’t feel the way I used to, sorry the light doesn’t catch in my eyes. When I was 17, I’d lie in the grass near my house and watch the sky with such wonder, it’s astonishing I didn’t implode on the spot. I was so full. Where did she go; that marvel, that gleam? I miss her terribly.

ii. What I mean to say is, what am I doing? I’m split. A part of me is hanging on so hard to the past I think I’ll die if I let go, but a part of me wants to cut those years off like a rotten leg—pretend I only just came into being, that I have always been like this. I’ve carried so much shame with me all my life, but I’m just realizing it now. Or, maybe I’m finally realizing how not okay it is. How somewhere along the line I stopped believing it was alright to call myself Writer or Poet or Author or Warrior or Brave, just because I wasn’t doing those things well enough. I read great literature so I’d have something to aspire to, fueled by the hot, strange beauty, but in doing so, I burned myself. I began to feel like an imposter among my own words. I gave up Writer and Poet and Author and Warrior and Brave, because they just weren’t mine enough. I let them belong to others. I became a spectator to myself.
        
iii. What I mean to say is, it’s a hard world. There are beautiful things, yes, moments that catch me off guard and stun me with love, but they seem to grow further and further apart. Nothing is easy. What use are those once beloved flowery words and strung-out phrases of effulgence, which now make me squirm with embarrassment? I don’t write like a child anymore. I write like someone who’s worn out, someone who just wants to slip off her shoes and rest for a while. I am trying to be okay with that. I’m trying to accept the lostness. I’m trying to exist, somehow, in this jumble of souls. I’m trying to figure out my place in it all. I used to know everything, but I don’t know anything anymore.

iv.What I mean to say is, life isn’t romantic. The human heart isn’t romantic. Romance isn’t romantic. The poets were right when they said blood was never beautiful, it was just red. I want to spin you a story of angels and upsurge and glow, but I can’t. I can’t be silver. I cannot be delicate. I can’t breathe lilacs or moonbeams, when what I really need to breathe is oxygen, right down to my belly where my soul has clenched itself tight. I cannot live like poetry, though I tear myself apart trying. I can’t.

v. What I mean to say is, I’m Still Here. Even though it feels like I’m not. Even though I go home and wash the dishes and stand in the dark watching the skyline under its field of stars while this gnawing, unfillable pit within me writhes to be heard. I’m still here, writing these flawed sentences, wondering at the meaning of everything. The world isn’t familiar anymore, and neither am I, but I still have some things. I have my voice. My resilience. A body that sobs and laughs. Love. Clouds and water and comets and bees. The sky. The earth. All of it.

in spite of everything
i want it to be
you

Man thinks he knows what we are.  
He examines us. He calculates us.
[A WOMAN IS A STARLESS NIGHT, A WOMAN IS SPACE TO BE FILLED, A WOMAN IS VOID, WAITING, GRASPING. SHE IS MEANT FOR SILENCE, SHE IS MEANT TO KNEEL]

Man puts himself inside our body without asking if we want him there, his breath like an infant’s rattle. He thinks we are soulless flesh to be punished, yanking our hair back as if it were reigns.  He leaves us raw.
[A WOMAN IS SOMETHING TO PASS THROUGH. A WOMAN IS A TUNNEL.  PENETRATE HER. DESERT HER]

Man pinches the fat on our bellies and thighs, and tells us to shrink. He is a net pulling us into the deep, relentless.
[A WOMAN IS WASTE, A WOMAN IS NOTHINGNESS THAT ASKS FOR AIR.  SUFFOCATE HER]

What man does not know is that we are sun, we are mountain, we are the resurrection no one believed in, the one man thought he could suppress, the revolt he tried to defeat. What man doesn’t know is that when we spit, we spit starlight, our mouths holy with rage and crescendo. Our kneecaps are not meant for dirt. Our bodies are not his soft earth to plunge into. What man doesn’t know will hurt him. He thinks he is God, but God is two women in love. He thinks he knows what we are, but we are beyond him. Ultraviolet beams glistening at the edge of the spectrum, too glorious for his naked eye.

We know the truth.
[A WOMAN IS A KNIFE. A WOMAN IS A MOVING FIST.
A WOMAN IS 90 MILLION MILES OF LIGHT]

Man will never know us.

That song, that awful terrible song.
The absurd sting. The foolish decision. The irony of it all.
Me, staring down at the black and white grin of the piano keys,
every atom in my body screaming with awareness of you.
If I didn’t look at you, not even once.
If I kept my gaze elsewhere. If I leveled my tone to a sedated monotone.
If I talked about pace and rhythm and chorus and speed up there and slow down here and yes, yes, like that, beautiful. If I didn’t watch your hands on the bow or the bow on the strings
or the light on your face. If I crushed those violets of want blooming in my belly.
If I built myself a castle of steel through which you could never penetrate, maybe,
maybe, I could reach a quivering sort of equilibrium.
But that song. The melody mocking me, mocking my heartache,
pointing to my hidden places and yanking the curtain aside.
It shouldn’t have been romantic, not the stone in my chest, nor the
frigid fact of my unreciprocated feelings
but god, the room shrank until it seemed as if you had hollowed me out and
saturated me with yourself, that the end of me
and the beginning of you had become completely indistinguishable,
my heartbeat so loud we should have heard it echo off the walls.
That song and that glow and that loss. That soft desire, that song
I should never have suggested we play, that ruin.
That song and you and
you.

[new moon]
Moon girl is breath and curve. She catches light and throws it back to the universe. You see her and tremble, falling, as she once must have done from some heavenly place.

[waxing crescent]
Moon girl is wild. You follow her into the forest where she steps barefoot into a stream and takes your hand, water swirling over her feet and hers. She talks about roots and branches and flight. You are in love.

[first quarter]
Moon girl is dancing. Moving her body, dynamic, unpracticed elegance, shaping space, graceful, unafraid of audience, unafraid of pause, unafraid to bend and swish and rise, flying, electric, boundless. She gets everywhere. In your morning tea, clouds, April storms, wrapped in sparkling strung-out melodies, and especially in your head. You dream of waist, skin, movement holding her and warmth, closeness, desire kissing her and your heart burns soft inside your chest, a lantern lit by lunar beams.

[waxing gibbous]
Moon girl gives you violets. You give her your hands, open; your heart, open; your soul, open. You give her everything, or you try.

[full moon]
Moon girl is with you, always, this silver fire here in the filth and blood and terror, head on your shoulder, palm on your skin, speaking to you in ways language cannot, grounding you, saving you, saying your name, holy, lifting you up, repeated tenderness, voice low, eyes deep, glorious, and she is steel, she is iron, she is endless.

[waning gibbous]
Moon girl smiling. Moon girl watching. Moon girl brave. Moon girl rough and sweet. Moon girl creating. Moon girl radiating. Moon girl moving, toward you.

Moon girl.
Moon girl.
Moon girl.