I slip under with a cry
and am lost to the depths,
sinking ever deeper
into the blue
as though bound by
ball and chain

What I pass on my way down
is not glittering schools
of fish
or the benevolent
sea turtle,
but a circling, snarling
mob of responsibilities,
a sight more menacing
than even
the most cadaverous
shark

[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.

(athena)
        the sweaty, jacked-up summer is approaching quick
        fired from the mouth of april
        like a bullet from a handgun

(aphrodite)
       we are fast, beautiful
       ***** like gasoline on someone’s palm
       ***** like fences that hold gardens of shredded tires
       ***** like blood dried on the sidewalk in the shape of a
       tightened fist

(athena)
       ***** sneakers and ***** hair
    
(aphrodite)
       with shampoo that never got washed all the way out

(athena)
       ***** because of how we love

(aphrodite)
       sharp-beautiful-longing!

(athena)
       with our hands on other girls’ knees and thighs
       like birds out of their cage
       or the statue of liberty punching her light
       into a sky that holds as much desire
       as it holds stars

(aphrodite)
        nameless-bursting-burning!

(athena)
       rough and sweet and fresh from hell
       crawling to emancipation
       just wanting to love
       just wanting to live

(aphrodite)
       just wanting to move her hair out of her face
       with our thumbs

(athena)
     asking to be allowed to want
     what we are not supposed to have

(aphrodite)
     quivering        

(athena)
       hot and sweaty like little kids under the covers
       with a flashlight reading
       harold and the purple crayon
      
(aphrodite)
       but there is no flashlight this time

(athena)
       and no picture book

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.

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.

Summer.

Summer of losing control. Summer of giving up words because my foggy despair has been too much for thinking or writing about the bursting maple leaves or flush of clouds overhead or the thunder of loving and being loved. Summer of hunger. Summer of scrutiny in front of every mirror, deadened while simultaneously feeling like a stripped nerve held to flame. Summer of running from. Summer of going in circles and circles, looking for the unlocked door and finding none, just stoic plaster and echoing vibrations of sadness. Summer of playing both puppet master and marionette, dominating my own strings with an unforgiving hand [we control microcosms when we cannot control larger things; we count and obsess and ritualize because the reality we can't face will devour us if we don’t, and this reality is that life can be as unexpected and gut-wrenching as a small child stepping innocently onto a minefield while We the spectators look on, aghast]. Summer of doubt. Summer of wondering whether or not anyone has any love left for me, and if so, why? Why such an infinite reserve for my struggling tangle of inelegance and repeated failure? Summer of breaking the surface not for myself but for anybody who has ever felt like this, for anyone who has woken up with a hook through their gills and a throat twisted airless by invisible fists, for anybody who’s flexed their jaws in spite of it and let their tongues dance, for anyone brave. Summer of tremendous beauty witnessed from the wrong side of the glass. Summer of sunset and moonrise and daisies, daisies, daisies, so exquisite yet so far away from where I’ve been living; this morgue of nuclear silence and absent pulse. Summer of polarity. Summer of numbness swooping into ecstasy then dipping into bottomless rage with no middle ground, just explosions of zeal and explosions of ache, but always, always explosions. Summer of lightning. Summer of determination. Summer of humidity between two hands holding. Summer of finality and chin lift and aftermath, of rubble as my foundation and destruction as my momentum, and I, rising like a balloon, unstoppable. Summer of transformation. Summer of trying on selves like vintage gowns, rejecting one after the next with the growing panic that accompanies the fact that this is who I am—endlessly, inexorably, relentlessly—that I can try to run from her or shape her into someone else, but she will always return, this girl of hardness and softness, this woman of perseverant fire, this funny little garden of mishap and epiphany, that there is nowhere left to hide, just this room where I stand cornered, forced finally to turn and embrace myself with a fury of welcome.

Here is where I sit and dig my teeth into my lower lip and extract the splinter of you from my heart, so I can drip red onto the paper and make it into words. Here is where I tell you how much I ached for you and never said anything. Here is where I laugh regretfully over the word ‘crush,’ which in the end fulfils its title so perfectly. Here is where I bleed.

Fact #1:
You didn’t do anything special to make me like you.
There was no zealous epiphany or grand gesture that sent butterflies streaming through my abdomen. You were horribly wonderfully you, and that’s what did it. That is what tipped me over the edge.
I remember the precise instant everything changed. The pendulum swung into unfamiliar territory; I looked at you and a powerful case of vertigo rocked my being. I may have grabbed onto something. A desk. A chair. Anything to keep me standing until my head resettled on my shoulders and the world was normal again. In any case, you were oblivious. I watched you, both sorry and glad that you were, and struggled not to drown.

I don’t blame you. It wasn’t your fault. How could you have sensed the seismic shift I was so careful not to telegraph? How could you have known I’d go and do something so moronic as get a crush on you? I’m sorry, dear. I am. I wish I hadn’t.

Fact #2:
You think no one has ever had feelings for you.

(What an uncomfortable phrase, Had Feelings For You. Sounds like there’s some sort of compartment in my heart labelled with your name, as though if you cut it open and looked inside you’d see ash and glitter suspended like dust motes in light. Impossible, infinite).

You think this because you’re human, and humans tend to see the worst in themselves. You’re—according to you—awkward, bothersome, repressed, weird, unattractive, alone, different, inferior. You worry over the biggest things, the smallest things, and everything between. You crack open with great frequency.

However.
However.

There is someone in this world who loved you, who loves you still (in a deep deep recess of her soul), who wishes she’d been brave enough to tell you; wishes also that she’d been able to hold you and kiss you and run wild with you in every beautiful place.
You are worth someone’s feelings, and there is a heart out there full of ash and glitter in your name, beating away.
Sadly, you’ll never know whose.

Fact #3:
Crushes ******* sting.

(Don’t look, don’t look at their eyes, don’t look at the color in them or the flare, hold your breath, think of anything else, remind yourself that they can’t, they won’t, it’s stupid. Call them friend, just Friend, because that’s what they want. Don’t let them see the way you pine for them, the roaring creature in your chest. Don’t. Don’t.)

Fact #4:
You didn’t return my feelings.

Inevitably, the person we find ourselves pulled to always lets something slip. A mention of a third party with whom they’d like to (and to me it sounds so painful, so ominous) “get to know.” A giggle when a certain girl or boy passes. An admiring look thrown their way.
Worse, the object of our longing declares they like no one at all, and that’s my story. I’m sorry to say I thought, for just a bit, that you did. It’s my fault for misreading the signs. I take full blame. I’m human, too, after all, and I know very little. Who am I to project my fantasy onto you?

It still hurts, though. Aches in a way I don’t wish to remember or relive, ever. Not being liked back takes the form of black, rolling nausea, which I felt when I laid prone on my bedroom floor, eyes numb and full, breathing air all thick with dead things. It’s a sickness, a condition. A person cannot get over it any quicker or easier than they can a tumor. It can recede or overwhelm and usually one has no say in this gamble.
In my case, there is both. The pain fluctuates from day to day, lifts and falls. I see you and we laugh, and, internally, privately, I bleed. But you don’t need to know that. I will not have you see me as some weak or broken thing when what I am is on fire, hot with a glowing sadness. I’m a survivor of nuclear detonation. My heart was once spattered on these walls, this page, but I’ve gathered it up and molded it together again and it doesn’t look at all how it used to, but today it’s (almost) whole.

Fact #5:
A piece of me will always wish you wanted her the way she wanted you.

I think of other universes, split off from ours: a myriad of alternate trajectories. Perhaps in one of them we are together. Perhaps we looked and we knew and we melded. Who knows? What a silly, futile wish.

That is pain and reality. That is life.

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

Listen:

You cannot give back what you stole from yourself. You can’t feed your body the things you denied it while it was quivering beneath the whip of your merciless, perfectionist dysmorphia, or erase the scars you’ve carved into it, or stroke it tenderly all those times you wished you could jump out of your flesh and become somebody else—a goddess-girl, a radiant impossibility, angelic fire with taut skin over crystal cheekbones and a torso so trim it could snap in a storm.

But you can start again. You can make vows to yourself that you will spend the rest of your life fulfilling, because to hell with comparison. To hell with the wars waged on magazine racks. To hell with GET SKINNY IN 3 WEEKS and HOW TO TIGHTEN YOUR ABS and 10 TIPS THAT WILL MAKE HIM WANT YOU. To hell with the mythology of thin—this vile word, this grotesque title, this dismissal of your vibrant heart and humming brain, this slaughtering of your entirety. To hell with the numbers that made you ill. To hell with calories/ scales/ grams/ portions, the formulas that stabbed you and wrecked you and violated you in ways so wicked you still cannot breathe them aloud. To hell with it all.

All this time you have been confused by yourself, thinking it ugly, despicable, criminal. All your life you have suppressed the sunburst inside you. Now, it’s time to release the latch. Time to push the lid open. Time to make whatever noise you were never bold enough to make, because none of it matters, you know? Size and measurement and all that soul-splitting *******. You are not bone or blood or cell; you are dizzy blue light and skipped heartbeats, the intersection of potassium and sodium, that chemical eruption of color, that running down unnamed streets amid stars and heavy breathing, that feeling of pushing through bodies of strangers to where there is the sweet negative space in the eye of it all, waiting for you to pull your hair off your face and dance like you are waterfall upon waterfall come to life.

You are not an equation. You are not pounds and inches. You are breath and sight and noise and movement and growth, and you cannot squander another pounding of your sweet, open-palm heart loathing your body for the misdeed of not being something else. The extra flesh protecting your vital organs is irrelevant when all the world is an electrical impulse roaring its beauty for you. The precise width of your hips is immaterial here in this place where sleepless people are kissing and comets are screaming through the atmosphere like fallen gods and tomorrow is unfurling in great, glittering swaths of potential.

i. the 1st week is the rapid hemostasis. the fabric of your body clutching itself together, rushing to staunch the bleeding. you breathe and oxygen settles in your chest like needles. you are so tired. you, in your continent of pain, will never be enough of anything for anyone. you burn softly as your cells scuttle to repair the damage. you burn in silence.

ii. the 2nd week is the inflammation. the itching and swelling of flesh. the fingers you move over your own body, holding your hips quiet. your **** is no longer a ****, but a rumpled and puffy city, a strange piece of art, a crime scene after the police have left where everyone is sweeping up shattered glass. someone’s murmuring a poem of soul and death over the radio. it might be you. everyone is shouting and the radio is getting louder and the crime scene is turning into an emergency room and the doctors are flying around in their yellow haste and there is no oasis, no peace, no open window, until the automatic hospital doors part with a groan and she is there, and you realize you are about to be saved.

iii. the 3rd week is the proliferation and migration. she tells you to remove the gravel from your body before you grow a new skin. so you do, you pull it out with black tweezers and it makes you scream until you are raw and humble. you watch as you mend yourself, sped up, like a tiger lily caught on long-form camera, bursting to life. someone says the words love and breaking and heal. someone says i will take you and i will carry you. is it you or her? does it matter? your skin is rearranging itself. you are pangea, splitting and reattaching to new places. it should be violent, but it isn’t. she’s calling you in from the cold and you go to her, scabbed up and scabbed over, unable to close your eyes. she takes up your whole field of vision. her lips, her nose. her irises, where you find god and every angel. the only sin here is the distance between the two of you. which you are closing. by the minute. by the second. by the breath.

iv. the 4th week is the angiogenesis. the development of new veins and ligaments. the deeply complicated process of creating new paths for blood to flow. the beating of your heart when she rests her hand on your knee and leaves it there. your tectonic feelings. the way you look for her in a crowd. the sudden daylight.

v. the 5th week is the  reepithelialization. a big, funny word that sends heat all through you. it asks questions. like: when you broke, did you know you would stop bleeding? when you lay prone in a pool of your own carnage, did you know that Good And Beautiful still belonged to you? that even in that crushing agony, she would come to you, and, with her seamstress hands and surgeon heart, put you back together? did you know that the light was never out of reach? that the walls around you were cardboard, not cement? that she would destroy them gently, then draw you from the wreckage? and still see you whole, even with all your throbbing fissures, the parts of you that just can’t add up? did you?

vi. the 6th week is the synthesis. your wound has gone. it’s a tuesday and you are watching her walk to class. it’s dizzying, the way she moves, the way she walks. she doesn’t know you’re there and you would like to keep it that way, because you are a naturalist observing something rare and exquisite, and you do not want to scare her away. she’s the white-hot sphere of the sun in the sky, and with your woundless self, you take her in. you can feel it, when you look at her—the spin of the earth / clouds sliding into other hemispheres / the swarm of your blood cells and pathogens / the aging of trees / airplane turbulence / earthquakes in places you will never see / lava cooling in the ocean / the rings we grow on our hearts—you can feel all of it. she’s turning the corner now, hair ignited. you are in love with her and you don’t want her to be late. she is so beautiful, even though you can’t see her anymore. she’s the last of her kind.

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.

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it
- Richard Siken


there are two facts upon which you ground your love:
     1. you are damaged
     2. they are going to leave

you do not come screeching out of your mother’s body believing this about yourself
     you learn how
     over time
     over minutes and months
     over years

you meet people and take them into yourself
     wrap them in your chest so deeply
     you know they will never escape.
     they may exit your life
     walk away,
     go where you can’t find them;
     but not the presence of them
     the core of them
     the feeling of them inside of you
     beating and glowing and sighing
     like a heart
     not that. that will stay. you’ll make it stay

you’ll teach yourself to grip onto those final remnants
     the way a dying person grips onto breath

you will hold and hold and hold
     not letting go, not knowing how to

you’ll grow a well of absence inside yourself
     and nurture it into a great and incredible yearning:
     this hall of memories within you
     these faces you cannot forget

you will call it grief. you will call it
     *mine

the girl who shows you the truth is
     ballet and brilliance
     you watch her sideways on the bus
     where she sits with her mother,
     face swathed in light,
     profile outlined in radiance
     like the ring of a solar eclipse
     and you have only been around the sun
     nine times
     but god,
     the quiet, uncomplicated
     beauty of her,
     the straightforwardness of
     her warmth—

she is the first person to whom
     you are not biologically linked who sees
     something more in you
     she notices your fire and tends to it
     until it becomes a towering
     blaze

but the last night you see her
     you are sure you are going to die
     caught in the seats of theater
     in front of a stage on which
     this girl dances
     like she has nothing left to give
     but love
     and an utter lack of
     fear

the last night you see her
     she embraces you
     and her hair is curled
     and her lashes are lined
     and her lips are rosy
     and you could scream out with what you
     feel
     but cannot explain

the last night you see her
     the elevator doors close
     between the two of you,
     splicing your longing,
     sending you off onto your own
     barren continent

the last night you see her
     you learn that you love
     and people leave
     and that the people you love leave
     and that this is a truth you almost
     cannot bear


[how to turn my grief into something
     powerful
how not to equate my longing with something
     flawed, something ugly
how to
     rise again
how to
     survive]

these are the things you ask yourself now
     when you are naked and alone in your loss

these are the questions you stay alive to answer
     because yes, you are damaged
     and people leave
     but that is not everything there is to
     this filthy-heavenly existence
     you cannot seem to
     escape

you carry your sorrow like an old handbag
     but you are growing tired of its weight
     preparing to incinerate it and spread the ashes
     the way you spread your devotion:
     bravely, and now,
     without remorse

you are learning that you are damaged
     and wonderful, scarred
     and sacred
     bruised
     and divine
    
they are going to leave
     but you will go on in spite of it
     you will go on because this is
     all you have

you and your heart
     and your overwhelming forward momentum

your love

We blossomed in the hot brilliance of discovery and the deep cold of grief, eating social norms alive, tracing deathly hallows in dusty window panes, standing chins-up eyes-shut arms-out in that flood of September sun, calling ourselves wild, because we were.

Beautiful days, I remember. Days of soft. Days of blueness and falling leaves. Days of numb fingers scrabbling with ice skate laces and racing each other onto the rink. Days of studying our fears. Days of madness. Days of converse sneakers and combat boots and teasing height comparisons. Days of mutual insanity, sleeplessness, midnight conversations. Days of standing shoulder to shoulder. Days of unspoken things traversing the silence between us, a communication entirely our own. Days of laughter up to our waists. Days of belonging. Days of young.

You’ve asked me many times, dear, if there’s anything you can do for me. I always say no, but there’s something this time, and it’s this, just this. One small act.

Don’t forget.

Years from now, when everything is different, keep this in you, alive. A second heartbeat. For me. Please.

Don’t forget our days.

Don’t forget how we felt.

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.

you have entered the realm of life after separation.
gone are the daisies she tucked behind your ears. it’s autumn now.
you are getting older. your boots are heavy and your chest is heavier.
you were given something gleaming, but it isn’t yours,
anymore. you seethe in your own ache.
this is your first silver october. the blushing leaves have gone greyscale,
like an i love lucy rerun. they evoke a stab of grief between your lungs.
you have to rewrite the story of your life now,
go forward knowing that everything after will be somehow
lesser than her. no person will reach into you the way she did.
you are a lost girl. resignation is all you have left,
resignation and streets bitter with dead leaves, streets where you run and shout
a silent prayer of loss.

but then:
but then.

you are reciting a poem for a room of people and your words
belong to your body now. a deep glow has fallen over everything,
right onto a girl you’ve only seen once before.
front row. face open. taking in what you are saying,
your retrospective sorrow, with a particular kind of attentiveness
you have needed all along.
everyone is listening, but she is hearing you.
in that moment, when you are raw and earnest,
you think that perhaps there’s something different about
this one. how even when you are done, she still seems to be
hearing all the words you cannot say.

and then:
and then.

spring is thrusting its way out of cold dirt
and you are twisting and breathing and this girl,
this girl, she is one million ******* shades of red. all you can do is
look at her without turning away, as if you could do such a thing
even if you tried. maybe this is how rembrandt felt
when painting night watch.
full of thick, rich burning too immense for language to hold.
this girl, this girl in the midst of life after. this girl so good
she’s put meaning back into the messy coming of spring.

you have learned not to trust. not to believe.
to love with a window open, a hand on the door,
in case of incineration, ready to run.
but this girl, says your heart,
says the peachy light bleeding onto her lips and nose,
this girl is not like those who came before her.
you’ve been a stranger to yourself for so long, but this girl
is reintroducing the two of you, rubbing you raw with longing.
do you understand, you want to say to her,
how stunning you are.
standing there like that. in your sincerity and laughter, as it weren’t
breath snatching to witness. as if it were commonplace,
unexceptional. as if you weren’t the tenderest work of art.

do you.

The poet tries
with her words
to create something new
something hitherto unconsidered,
unthought, unspoken
She rakes the dirt for language
that is inimitable and rare
Fighting her way out of
prosaic platitudes
Searching deliriously for
a sharp-edged jolt of ingenuity
that will
awaken and inflame
In this great pursuit of something
clever
to say,
she overcompensates,
birthing a few stanzas
of exaggerated hogwash that inspires
more dismay than satisfaction
Out the window
her poem goes
A little crumpled ball of melodrama
and stale cliché
Then the poet sits in silence
smoldering with displeasure
wanting nothing more than
to finally write something that
works
It is when, radiant with disappointment,
she relinquishes her fantasy of excellence
that the true
poem begins
With rosy wings and
eyes like screaming bullets
it sails forth to proclaim
to declare
to profess without apology
or contrition
the wildest truths of her
soul
It is out of this realm of
deflation and defeat that
true originality is bred
Just a murmur at first, just a glint,
but listen, listen as
it swells into an exquisite roar
and watch,
watch as it rises from
the decay of the past
to flare
in a new light

i. Allow yourself to be clichéd. Forgive yourself the comparison to phenomena like stars, tsunamis, volcanoes, and the end of the world.  There is no shame in depicting the galaxies you see in your irises or the seas crashing in your lungs. Don’t for a minute diminish your words because you’re afraid of seeming larger, lovelier, or grander than you really are. Keep writing huge. Keep writing splendorous.

ii. Destroy the anxiety gap between you and your work. Sit down and write whatever’s filling you in that moment. When stupidity comes, embrace it. When unoriginality comes, offers it your deepest welcome. When panic comes, give it a wink and keep dragging your pen across the page. There is no wrong, no right. There is only Something. Do not label the Something in such stark, dull terms as good or bad. If you must label it, label it burning, label it victorious, scarlet, howling, fresh, moving, disastrous, gleaming, but never reduce it to success or non-success. Who are you to determine these things? How can you take what streams out of you and cram it into a superficially constructed box? Would you degrade any other kind of natural release? Would you relegate blood flow or shouting or tears to a simple one-word title? This is your time to glow in full vulnerability, to fall head over heels for every blundering, beautiful thought within you, so build a bridge between you and the paper that will be strong enough to bear your weight. Then cross it.

iii. Know who you are writing for. It should be yourself, not the one who holds your heart or the fire-faced figure in the park at dusk or people who make your soul twist. Write for brave, bruised you; wondering, powerful you. Always you.

iv. Rise above the need to match your creation to a preordained image in your mind. The two will never be the same and this is fine. Accept whatever you produce with tender detachment, then move forward. Remember that every literary icon has felt the same pounding dissatisfaction, and walked about tugging at their hair, frustrated and abashed. Remember they are no closer to divinity than you. Ultimately, we are all just shells through which a greater ocean sings, so let yours wail its melody as it likes.

v. Write without the tight egoic fist; write without a blueprint; write without fear. Write like it is your first day on earth and you are stunned with awe. Write like the caterpillar bursting from its cocoon, transformed, breathless. Write like that.

i do not write love letters often. i am not good at them.
my words are clumsy and ill-fitting. i live in superlatives,
exhaling exclamations, loving at high altitude, among the
cloud vapor and wind, where the sun burns so hard it
bathes everything in holy white. but it is not enough for you.
i drop the pen and pick it up and begin again. i stop and start                    
and stop and start and try to tell you. what you do.
how you live in my lungs and brain tissue and belly.
how you are flammable. how you Glow.

the things i don’t know how to say: they run wild in me.
they squirm. they tell me to tell you that i was alone
on the face of the moon until you dropped from the sky
and showed me something more. until you ran with me
down craters and up dunes. until i fell in love with you
while moon dust settled on our skin like glitter.
i asked you to bring me back with you, and you did.
your lunar flares quivered to life and we ascended,
watching that frozen american flag until it was beyond us.
we kissed on a backdrop of dark matter and i touched
your face in wonder. we kissed and the universe
bent before us. and to watch that happen.
to watch it happen brought a strange, warm pain
that split me in two.

two, as in our hands holding. holding, as in what you do
to my heart. heart, as in this brave drum-beating muscle.
muscle, as what it has taken for us to survive.
survive, as in what you teach me to do each time you breathe.
breathe, as in what i cannot do when i see you coming.
coming, as in breathless. breathless, as in my body.
body, as in rising. rising, as in love. love, as in everything.
everything, as in you.

There are things we come back to:

People we can’t stop loving. Places that sing and sigh. Words gritty and livening inside our mouths. Songs that shake us out of our indifference, make us feel. Those little coffee shops rattling with charming oddities. Stories of scares that turned out to be enjoyable thrills. Photographs where their hands are in yours and you are both beaming. Poetry. Motion. Light.

It’s all the same. All the wonder and heart-twist, all the love and loss.

…

There are things we come back to.

There are things we come back to, and there is you.

…

A long time ago, I dreamed of you. Back when everything was uncertain and fantastically, despairingly painful.

In this dream, you looked like the end of one world and the beginning of another. Like a door cracked part of the way open. I wanted to walk through to the other side. I wanted to see what this new world was like. I wanted rebirth. I wanted you. Simply, stupidly.

I’ll never forget the way the night and all its neon lights played with your face. I’ll never forget waking up with a pulse faster than a bird’s, and swinging my legs over the edge of the mattress, and blinking at the wall as I decided it was time to take my poor, engorged heart to the page.

I didn’t write that day. I confessed. I admitted the unadmittable: Love, being in love.  

I erupted.

…

Tell me to stop romanticizing you and I will be defiant, I will refuse your request.

Tell me to stop rhapsodizing you and I will tell you that I have always done so, have always been composing poems within your orbit, as if, like some kind of Jerusalem, all roads lead to you.

Tell me stop idealizing you and I will say it’s impossible for me, for someone who falls in love with everything raw and good and blooming, for a writer, for a woman who is all blush beneath her sarcasm, all stomach-flutter beneath her carefully arranged neutrality.

Tell me to stop and I will rebel.

I will keep writing you as you exist. Crackling with energy. Sharp, like new ice. Flagrant.

I will keep drawing upon language to arrange as close an image of you as I can possibly come.

I will keep telling all the world how you are collision upon collision of forest and wind, endless.

You cannot stop me.

…

There are things I come back to.

This (eyes that never fail to see straight through to my core; a laughing mouth; beautiful hands tuning a violin in sun-dusted silence as I watched with my own poised over piano keys, wondering despondently why our duets were always love songs);

and this (a small, privately lovely box of canvases with your trees, star-swirls, phoenix enflamed, and other rising things; two girls, a bookstore, a meeting of souls, a rescue from excruciating loneliness; us sprawled out side by side on an uneven cellar floor beneath the glow of lights strung everywhere, awash in amusement because parties were never something we excelled at);

and this (the moment it all became clear; the answering longing; the brilliance of synergy; the soft and glorious voyage of our hands toward each other; the inevitability of it all).

You, always.

You.

I stand in it:
The streets
The people
The face-blurring
shoe-smacking
heart-knocking
symphony of thousands,
full and explosive as
a swarm of grenades

and I am
overwhelmed, overwhelmed,
by the divinity of
our overlap

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.

there’s a soft blossoming
at the core of us;
neighbor children have
begun making their chalky universes
on asphalt again
loud laughter rings along these
muted suburban streets
seeds tremble into bloom
the reappearance of sunbeams and bird flocks
and other splendid details
we’d forgotten during the cold
delights us

now is the time to step out
of our old skins
and waste breath on dandelion wishes
now is the time for these
chrysalis hearts to break open
and ascend
unbound at last

is here
and it tastes
like rain
The slight chill in
the air sends spasms of
delight down
my spine
during long walks
through mud, gravel, and
new grass
Splintered sunlight throws
shadows dancing
and geese form their
bold vee's overheard
sailing through the
stratosphere like
feathered ships with
trails of
cosmic sparkle
The sandpipers I watch
as they scuttle
about on
spindly legs, making funny
little tracks in
the sand at
the roadside
Waves lap on the
shore of a pond, ripples
made by a clean wind blowing
down from the ether
A star burst sky
hangs above
dotted with gossamer
wisps of vapor
and the occasional
falcon or hawk, swooping
with the greatest intensity
you could imagine,
wings going
down
up
down
There is music in
our veins
this time of year;
the dirt has
a pulse
of its own
And as I squint
out at the
light-drenched scape
I begin to
grasp the sweetness
of renewal,
the infinitesimal bravery
of that
tiny flower
pushing its way out
of the earth

This age has been to me a fist in the abdomen.
Rough. But sweet, too.

18, and the first line of my journal emerges like a rebellious blush, longing and delinquent. It sits in its designated place with blue ink honesty that terrifies that breath out of me. I must keep writing. I must push away from my confession. I must ignore the panic rolling in my chest. Love, in this moment, nauseates me.

18, and I am running my thumb over a round scar on my left wrist with an emotion that is not quite sadness but perhaps disappointment, for not being brave enough, for not putting that blade away before it was too late, for letting myself down. I’m supposed to be a feminist. I’m supposed to A Strong Woman who is big enough to love herself at all times. But I slipped, I fell hard. I let myself visit a place I never should have, and here is the evidence. A little continent of puckered skin I stroke while apology quivers in my fingers.

18, and I’m in my bedroom by the window with the blinds raised so I can see all the stars. I’m soft and sad and laughing. I am thinking of a girl.

18, and everything aches under the weight of awful silence. I wonder what it’s like to be normal. One of those happy faces in the grocery store choosing between black and cannellini beans, ignorant of the sickly fog clinging to my being. I isolate myself from everyone, because who the hell would want to deal with the horrible mess of a creature that I am? I can’t even look in a mirror without wanting to gag. I am my own heaviest burden.

18, and there are no words for what I feel. The warm shock of electricity when my fingers find hers and curl around them is much like a hopeful satellite alighting on a foreign planet. Only this planet isn’t dust or crater or rounded emptiness. This planet is knuckle and pulse-point and heat. This planet is divinity, created from two-sided love so entwined it is one indivisible entity. I sit here in the dark, while a fullness of light breaks open in every part of me.

18, and all I am in a person repeatedly dragging herself to her feet.

18, and I will not let my body be the target of insecurity a moment longer. I look at myself with softness and this is when I see how my inadequacies are actually a language of fierce beauty, how my stretchmarks flow over my hips and thighs like the Nile, delta after brave, pale delta. I glow with gratitude for these marks, these signs of growth.

18, and I am resting on the root of a great tree beside the love of my life. There are daisies in her hair and I think, if vital organs could spurt wings, my heart would rise right out of my chest.

18, and graduation burns like a bittersweet beacon. I smile and hug people and say goodbye, but what I am really saying is, “Watch me.” What I am really saying is, “Someday I will be nothing more than a humble relic in your memory, but today I am now, and now, and now.”

18, and I want to hold onto everything. My flaking yellow nail polish, letters given to me to send me bravely on my way, the shaking of my heart as I square my shoulders and step from velvet darkness into light, the precise slant of the sun as it leaves us for another hemisphere, this chest-heaving mess of adrenaline and perspiration and ache, tears I won’t hold back, pansies blooming on my windowsill, the symphony of myself growing bright and loud and lovely enough to fill the walls of every place I set foot in, like ink dropped in a waiting water glass, endlessly expanding.

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.

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.

The phalanges are connected
to the metacarpals,
the metacarpals are connected
to the ulna,
the ulna is connected
to the humerus…
and the heart
is connected
to pen and paper
in a way that defies
all logic

i.
You’ve struggled and grappled and fought, but it all seems for nothing, because here you are, locked in your bathroom, falling to spectacular pieces.

Your heart is a bullet flying out of your chest and your face has never been so bleak, so blank, and your shampoo bottle has been upended, oozing everywhere, and you should really start cleaning it up, but you can’t. You can’t put out another fire, mend another broken thing. Your machinery has come to an end. You’ve run out of fuel, and, to be frank, you have been running on empty for far longer than you should.

This is the result.

You: Alone.
You: Kneecaps hitting ceramic tile.
You: Leaning over that porcelain rim, steadying yourself, readying yourself.
You: Pawing crazily through the mess in your drawers, looking for something sharp.
You: Pushing your hair out of your face, fingers all clenched but the index, which is extended, trembling toward your open mouth.
You: Sliding the plastic sheath from a razor.
You: Lurching forward as bile floods your throat.
You: Pressing metal into your skin, and deeper, and deeper, and—

(Nobody tells you what it will feel like when you reach the point of no return.)

ii.
Sickness likes to romanticize destruction, especially that of the self-inflicted sort. It’s a nauseating satisfaction, a bizarre high. Your clouded perception goes along with this fairytale, believing in the power of the blade, the food you expel, the food you don’t let yourself eat, the isolation.

Sickness convinces you that this and only this will make you right again. It eats you out and leaves you hemorrhaging, and when you gather enough strength to feebly resurrect yourself, the cycle repeats and you go under, victim to a poison as grotesque and unending as Dante’s Seven Circles of Hell.

You do try, at least at first, to stay normal. You cast about for a distraction, and maybe you find one. Maybe it’s that rocket-hearted boy, or anything fatty and sweet, or the internet and all these strangers you pour your secrets into, or the contents of your father’s liquor cabinet, but there’s always something, isn’t there?

Funny how inevitably it leaves a sour aftertaste. Funny how inevitably you fall, sinking like a bird with an arrow struck through it, lost.

iii.
You once learned about creation.

How all matter exploded into existence in a single bang, how the solar system burned to life, how planets formed from colliding asteroids, how every creature that has ever been since is made with dust left over from the formation of galaxies, how you and I are the flesh and heartbeat echo of the universe.

You once wore daisy chains and called yourself extraordinary.

Now you call yourself a waste of ******* oxygen and forget, dear human, that you are a meaningful part of this totality.

Consider this when despair comes for you. Grit your teeth and hold onto something and remember, remember, that you did not always feel this way. Call to mind the image of your little kid self, your missing teeth self, your loud laughter self, because if you take that piece of sharp metal and puncture your skin, if you ***** your breakfast, you are going to annihilate her.

If you keep choosing this, you’re going to be bleeding out on the floor someday when your mother walks in and sees you and cries out.
“What have you done to my little girl?” she’s going to ask, hysterical, reaching for you.

And you’ll look at her, eyes snapping and full of something frenzied and disastrous, and say, “I killed her,” and the whole world will wonder why they didn’t recognize the signs sooner.

Is this what you want?

iv.
There’s a little poem I keep close to my soul, which says, “You must set out to save the only life you can save,” meaning your own.

Meaning you have to stop this. Meaning put down your weapon. Meaning breathe.



v.**
Nobody tells you what it feels like to face yourself post-battle. There’s not a great deal of advice on how to be an elegant example of life after, so you feel very much on your own here. It’s hard to go on after talking yourself down from so many roofs. Everything is struck with a certain silence, and you realize this tumor was filling so many hollow places in you that you don’t quite know what to do with the emptiness yet.

Be patient. One day, this blank space will be bursting with flowers and firelight and a rising, beating love.

You cannot give up. Not yet.

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.

Scraggle haired, red-cheeked, grass stained
         things, running with wild flowers in hand
         and mud underfoot, shouting and stomping
         and grinning, sunshine sliding through
         let-down curls, all missing teeth and
         ankles showing beneath cuffs;

who  sprawl crazily on park benches, on
          dirt, on chalk-ruined cement, faces
          upturned to taste the rain,

who  drop everything to watch an airplane's
          ascent, a scarlet fire truck, the
          scrambled flight of migrating geese,

who  seize mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles
          around the waist and hang on for
          dear life, squeezing with affection
          almost too ferocious to bear,

who  wail at the butterfly smashed
           on the pavement,

who  scatter like autumn leaves when
          told to come inside, darting into
          the shadows, teeth glinting wolfishly,
          scampering into the boughs of trees
          to hide with bated breath,

who  ****** their hands out of car
          windows to tickle the wind,

who  choke on laughter all day and
          dream of dragons and stardust
          all night,

who  want the answer to every
         question,

who  are the embodiment of wild sunsets
          and turbulent skies,

who  haven't yet inherited the rust
         of adulthood,

who  chase pigeons in the park,
          flower chains slung haphazardly
          round small necks in the
         slanting rays,

who  dance on the sidewalk to songs
          that exist only in their minds, arms
          flailing, heads bouncing, indifferent
          to passers-by,

who  walk the earth with wide eyes  
          and bursting hearts,

whose  love could power a stellar
             explosion;

            Scab-kneed, angel headed, sun-burned
            beings, flushed and bare legged, tearing
            across fields of dandelions with
            mad smiles and outstretched arms:
            a band of the best and
            brightest creatures

there is a woman who has been with me all this time
who’s felt the careening anguish of a family gone from three to two
who’s breathed oxygen into my sagging lungs
when then only thing in them was vaporous grief
who’s bled with me from countless soul-wounds,
both of us
driven to the brink of endurance
again and again and again
who’s shielded my raw meat heart with all she has
who’s never seemed to see in herself what I do;
the gleam of someone who has been ******
into the pounding depths against her will
but returned to the surface
every time alive
every time breathing
every time finding
the wet bedraggled girl with her and
putting both her arms around her and
saying over the shriek of the water:
I am here, I am here, and I will be, always

this is for her

for my hand holder, my moon howler,
my affirmation, my companion,
my soul keeper, my forehead-kisser,
my garden-hearted pillar of integrity

for a brave brave woman
who’s been smashed by poison people and atomic loss
but still come out
miraculously, fluorescently
shining

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.

After a great deal of climbing
I reached the top
and paused to admire things from
that new place. The sky was
a trio of hues (halcyon dragging to
teal fading to slate) and the sun was
a great big bright thing
(inflamed, illuminated).
Inch by inch, I lifted my arms,
as if to embrace the gusts of wind
licking at my skin.
I tilted my face toward
the volcanic dazzle and
stood there a while, imbued with
ponderous joy. The longer I
remained, the more sure of
everything I became,
of the steady drumbeat of energy
pulsing in the dirt,
of the synergistic tangle of
death and life.
My scalp began to tingle with a
giddy, glowing sensation:
a breathless sort of reverence
I had never known.
Oh, what a life,
I thought
and took off down that hill with
arms out like airplane wings,
not caring what the neighbors
might think

It’s so miniscule—
this interval, this growing up

You fool yourself
into believing
it won’t ever end,
as if you could turn it back
to the beginning
like a radio dial
and let that hot-pink rapture
pour over you
again and always
but eventually it comes
to a close
and as I look back on my own
I feel like digging it a grave,
giving it a proper ceremony

Here Lies a Brief Forever
the epitaph would say

Here lies unearthly hardship
my hands gripping that first notebook
a screen door thrown open
dresses I wore and grew out of
wildflowers picked too soon
a head scribbled dark with sadness
glitter and one-sided love
bathrooms I wept in
swooping optimism
woods astir with light
heartsick
surreal courage
evolution
expansion
people who didn’t understand and
people who did
moon dancing
the carpet where I spilled English Breakfast
the road where I slashed
my knee open
and blood flew everywhere
breakdowns
the rush of space between
vocals and bass drop
snowflakes blinked away
my father gone
my mother remaining
credit-rolling darkness and a girl
hair I wanted straight until
I didn’t
stars burning and seething
ice rinks
aloneness and unity and
aching forward motion

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

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.

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.

[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.

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

i.

What sustains me is the lushness of vulnerability.

I live in pursuit of exposure, soul-baring, the practice of being what we are without apology. We are all different. No one else carries our specific memories or desires. No body is formed exactly like ours. We play at oneness, but shared experience only stretches so far. In the end, we are left with the reality of what this really is—a colony of beings, endlessly individual, utterly separate.

ii.

Sometimes, I catch snippets of the light inside us.

Maybe it’s the boy with a pegasus tattoo laughing outside in the cold. Maybe it’s the parting words of the librarian as I scrape my pile of poetry books off the counter: Take care. Maybe it’s the eyes of old woman at the corner of this street and the next, so clear and penetrating, like an elephant queen’s. Maybe it’s as simple as the wisdom offered to me by a friend, as quiet as the man tipping his face toward thin, Decemberish sunshine.

I hunt for it. I await its presence. Where is it, I wonder? Where’s that throbbing openness I covet so fiercely? When I am feeling especially aware, I see it everywhere. Beneath these layers of makeup I apply to my skin. Behind the gloss of sitcom utopia. Under the practiced apathy of all of us, under our coats and scarves and skin, curled up over our hearts, in tangled love with our veins and aortas. A luminous octopus, a sort of eight-limbed love.

It’s there, yes. Indubitably.

iii.

Tell me what shakes you.

Tell it to me like you would tell someone you are in love with them. Be trembling and slashed-open. Be frightened. Stop holding your facade together. Don’t clutch your persona so tightly. It cannot contain you. Let it pass away.

Tell me what elevates you.

Is it the warm burn of your favorite song? The tin-gray feathers on a starling’s belly? Bonfires in autumn? Say it now. Quickly. Without pausing to make it coherent or acceptable. Be as jagged as you like. Give up the dream of normal. You’re dirt and madness and screaming beauty; normal is never going to fit you. It pulls on you already, pinches your elbows and upper back like an old ill-fitting sweater. Loosen your fingers. Let it fall.

Tell me what moves you.

What climbs into your cells and bones and tells you to inhale, to make something of your precious time here? Speak it. Speak it, and it will wash over you like a great light, and it will feel good, better than you knew possible. It will feel like being alive, which is what you are. Not flawless or bad or worthy or weird. Alive. A deep continual sweetness of breath.

iv.

I’ve fallen in love.

I’ve spit words onto pages I later tore and tore away. I’ve run into the ocean in mid-October and shouted at the cold pooling around my ankles. I’ve cried at the death of a dragonfly. I’ve taken a fine edge to my flesh because I could not bear to be the person I am. I’ve said ridiculous things. I’ve walked beneath ambulatory stars and felt great, expansive joy at the fact of my existence. I’ve pinched the wobble of my upper thighs, the places on my body that are round and soft, been ashamed of it. I’ve written things that will never see daylight, because they are too indicative of the darkness I carry with me. I’ve been very loud and very, very bright. I’ve longed to tell people how I feel about them, how my heart swells or shrinks in their presence. I’ve bled. I’ve changed. I’ve danced so hard I thought I would die, and laughed afterward, laughed and laughed.

I am a creature of unearthly peculiarity, and I will not pretend otherwise.

This is my power.
This, too, is yours.

v.

It feels like hell, I know.

Nobody ever likes saying I want you or I need you or I am afraid or I love you. In the moment, the fear is nauseating. In the moment, we are small as children, and just as breakable. But you have to trust in the majesty of vulnerability. You have to trust that even though your throat is a vice and your heart is jumping like hell, these things you’re admitting—they are reaching through. People are listening. Their souls are shifting into resonance with yours, and you are there, standing together in your realness, all the armor gone, all the light rushing in.

Oh, the wretched, damnable ache of growing older
of saying farewell to wild romps through the park
of turning these sunshine smudged days over to memory
of taking it all into my arms once more
before
letting  it
go
  completely
it’s a funny sort of pain
and I don’t much like
the way it pulls at my insides
an ulcer; stinging, perverse, present

years ago I longed to be
the age I am now
thought it would guarantee
confidence and joy

but now that I’m here
staring into the abyss
on the brink
of living
“my own life”
I’m paralyzed

perhaps that little girl
with the tender spirit and
brown eyes
who believed time would solve everything
was wrong

because now I would give
just about anything
to be in her place

combustible
is the feeling
streaming inside you:
a rose rolled up
in a bloated tidal wave
amniotic, aglow

it tastes like gold and fury
like the atomic composition
of a dying star
and there is dedication there
an extraterrestrial fervor of love
which persists as tirelessly
as our dear moon circles this planet
even though it has been
pocked so many times by
unidentifiable things hurled
from the root of deep deep space,
even though it is marked
so physically and permanently
by the gravity
of its worship

you are full with it,
the rain-slicked gravel
the buds unclenched
the sonorous maskless
moment when you reached
for her
and she did not let you
go empty

your belly is aquiver
and your chest is unlatched
and god
billions of prisms could never catch
all this light

​I said you are
the purple veins of an orchid
quickening footsteps
mist clinging to pines
the dip in the waltz
a geode cleaved in two
tunnels thrumming their pulse
hitched breath
lungfuls of winter wind
the dusty burn of smoke two streets over
an invasion of fireflies
fields with moonlight beating down
pollen-ridden light

I said you are
picnics caught in the rain
and petals in the hair
stones glistening at low tide
and Vivaldi
sound waves from outer space
and ink smeared palms
a warm shoulder in the dark
and the snap of a wind-ruffled sail
heart pounding
and movement


I said you are
crystalline
rooted yet rootless
atomic, ultraviolet,
ineffable

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.

I write for people
who have not made it
out of the dark yet
I write for girls and boys
and everyone burning between
I write for those with gardens of pain
bursting in their lungs,
for everyone so tenderhearted
they quiver
at the red wilderness
of splendor and absurdity
around us
I write for souls with teeth,
for shadow eyes,
for scapulae fighting to become wings,
for rage and awe condensed to the point of
explosion

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

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.

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.

with time
we'll grow accustomed to the sweet sting
of this cyclical Life
which writes and erases
flies and falls
stops and starts
flares and extinguishes
unites and parts
inhales and exhales
gives and takes
fails and flourishes
lives and ends
as we grapple in the middle of it
looking for normal
while change smacks us
off our mortal feet and
leaves us
breathless