I’ve got a habit of
splintering my mistakes
and strapping them to your bedroom ceiling
in self-pitiful stucco style,
where they glare at me
like waking nightmares and
strip me of the sainthood
with which you clothe me.
I fill our little boat
with my buckets of vice,
submerging us in overshared sob stories -
but somehow you are
breath, underwater, always
you are soap
washing my hands and
kissing my fingers
using yours to brush burning tears
from my cheeks.
Your forgiveness
glues my lips shut
as I desperately try to justify
my self-perception, leaving me with
no choice but to return
each precious favor.

because the night burns heavy
like tears hugging
the back of my eyes,
and the seconds run electric
like air buzzing
in the space between your fingers.
Rosy I-love-yous
turn to quick to
thorny goodbyes
stuck scratching my throat
as my lips fight fate.
Give me breath again
show me we were never happy happenstance,
string my soul out into
baskets woven holy
for the sanctity of us.
Drive slow
buy me time to pray
that we are eternal beings,
unbound from time, able to see
beyond seven colors to someday.
But maybe
in the end it doesn’t
matter how slow you drive, because
even after you leave, I’m there
in your car
always, every moment
in memory.

He walks barefoot on rose petals and
mint leaves
his silent footsteps leave no
footprints
I'm scraping gravel and
begging
to be the ground he walks on.
Patience flourishes between his
lips
and hurls me sprawling awestruck into
love
and tearful adoration
for all the beautiful cracks in his skin
that ****** sunlight and smatter
glittering rays in
prisms across the ceiling
and thread all the raging gaps in my heart.
Of course he is artwork,
blessed by reason and
the mercy of the human experience,
highlighted
by his generosity and the way
his kindness ushers the blood though
my veins.
If not for his beaming soul, I’m sure
my ship would sit shattered selfish
at the bottom of the
livid ocean. And
if, after all his noble graces,
I can offer him nothing else, I
will
at the very least
fix his mirrors.

Where do you go
when your gaze is fixed
on the junction of the crown molding
in the corner of your bedroom?
I watch your eyes, glazed with
labyrinthine pessimism
darting back and forth, navigating
a universe tucked away in a cupboard,
as you try to conquer the monsters in your
never-ending mental maze.
I used to think you were
admiring the stars,
but now I
turn to them
and beg them to let me follow you
and bring you safe back
home.

is windy, almost cold
littered with people,
watchers, walkers, guests in the house
of ocean.
“Don’t step on the sandcastle,”
a mother warns, as if
it will stand through the night, as if
the tide should listen to her.
“Look at all these shells, girls,”
a father smiles, as if
they did not tread on
the bones of those exiled
from their silent ecosystem.
The people stop and stare
at the waves, as if
they will change, as if
they will stop, as if
the sea is not staring back.
And at the edge, I
sit shivering, in awe
almost afraid to peer beneath
the rippled glass.

Saturday morning
is an unseen sunrise
usurping my sleep; pain splayed
just behind my temple.
It’s
the dreaded goodbye
whispered by weekdays
filtering through the fabric of my shirt collar
like teardrops
and landing along with my gaze
on your nicest shoes.
As my eyes rise, my mind’s eye
is frantically memorizing all your lovely edges
duct-taping images of you to
every surface of my memory.
Saturday morning
hides in purple shadows circling my kneecaps
and hints at the giant, painful subtlety
of the unknown, sewn between my future and
yours.
Saturday morning
is clung like grass and dew,
early me and you
so spitefully aware
of every ticking second tacked on
to our ages.
And in the end,
Saturday morning
dies bittersweet on the tips
of our tongues; a
wordless assurance of
Sunday.

Hope runs down your skin in waterfalls
begging for my hands
puddling on the floor and flooding
the air like light.
The first time it touched me,
it shocked me at
the small of my back,
tingling and spreading to my
mouth. It was the
electric taste of
Eden’s apple, the choice
that rewrote the future.
It knocked wind from our lungs
a half-breathed epiphany,
the blessed assurance of symmetry:
darling, everything exquisite comes in pairs.
You are everything I
spent years on my knees for,
praying with my fingers crossed.

in the night sky,
the way the crest of the moon seems to kiss
Venus; how you’d never know they were
miles apart.
I see us
in the morning fog,
the way the clouds brush the dewy
grass, how they don’t know they’re supposed to be
in the sky - or don’t care.
I see us
in old couples
pacing the beach after crowds trickle home,
filled with conversation,
still learning about each other after decades
together.
I see us
in the
air between my fingers,
always moving, always there.
I see us
in pairs of teardrops descending
imperfectly from my eyes,
falling together
hurting together
turning to mist and
returning to the sky.
I see us everywhere beautiful and chaotic and
tragic, and
I want it all.

We've found my pressure point it
seems, it's
every inch of my paper skin.
I'm sorry I
look like this,
my red cheeks slick with
tears that freeze
before I can follow them upstream
and dam the corners of my eyes.
I'm sorry I crumple
and can't stop apologizing.
They'll tell you love is
hard work, but
nothing of the weight of fear
hanging over the time
we spend apart
and woven into words I want
you to say but you
don't.
I'm sorry, sweetheart,
I'm a writer and a pessimist
reflexively narrating
everything unspoken between us and
I don't know if it's your fault
or my fault
or neither or both
that I flinch at uncertainty, expecting
it to strike me in the most painful way:
when the fear is as bad as the thing itself,
it can't really get any worse, can it?
The scariest part is the
maybe.
Maybe there is
no such thing as enough
no such thing as certainty
that it will be okay,
that you love me,
when I've lost
what it feels like
to love myself.

I'm alone this weekend
just me and the echo
of a plate breaking
on the ***** kitchen floor.
I wish you were here.
I spent the day sideways
wishing for your upside-downness,
how you'd peak at rock bottom.
I'm thinking of inviting you here
so you could take up enough space for
the both of us,
so my pain would no longer be
mine, it would
be you.
You'd ask me to
slow dance through
your field of landmines, because
only you
knew all the right steps
and I'd
trip one
so you could scream about
things you could never understand.
You'd feed me curses
and when I got thirsty
you wouldn't know how to be water
until I was
a grease fire.
But in the end,
I'm alone here because
the only person who loved to see
me hurt more than you
was me.

The obsoletion of libraries
dangles ominously like
one big ice stalactite
just above his head.
He needs books, the real ones,
soft paper to clutch
between his fingers as he
searches for the right answers
to all the questions he
can't find,
the how-have-you-beens,
where-are-you-goings
and sometimes
what-is-your-name.
He can't keep track of the time
but he can categorize catechols and bird calls
and remember to be worried about
a greying Earth
and cling to its pole
letting it spin him round and round
until he gets too dizzy to distinguish
the letters from reality.
And he reads the fantasy novels alongside the
news, it
is all too entertaining to peer down
from his box seat
on the fear dripping from the ceiling
onto the audience.
Neither is scary to him -
fiction nor nonfiction,
not on their own, anyway -
but his blood pressure begins to rise
as he raises his eyes
to the stage
and watches them
obliterate one another.
And there he decides,
if libraries will die,
he will bear their sentence
he will fold himself into every page
and melt in between the lines of ink
and they will settle into dust
together.

You emerged from the breaking dawn
glittering to rival the rising sun.
Molten gold dripped
from the tips of your fingers;
shimmering dust encrusted your footprints.
Had our paths not crossed,
I'd not be frozen here;
a statue of fool's gold,
the work of your touch.
But I'm stuck in your kingdom,
watching the golden age
waiting until you wash your hands in the river
and come back to me —
you are cursed with the Midas touch,
and I am cursed for making you king.

Eloise, I showed you my soul
you blinked and your mouth did not move
I wanted you to smile, Eloise,
I wanted you to shed a tear
despite your efforts to keep it in
I wanted you trembling in my arms
I wanted your salty cheek against mine
What did I lack, Eloise?
You hung the moon and
left me to burn on the sun.
You pinched my heart between your teeth
and kissed another's lips.
When lightning struck my empty veins,
your laugh was thunderously clear,
your smile like a lonely star,
burning as my universe dissipated into black.
Ruin me again, Eloise,
I’ll stand and melt in your acid rain,
your scathing apathy will puddle me
as it flows from your soul into mine.
Numb me, if you would, Eloise,
so I can be like you:
so my mouth does not move
and tears no more escape my eye.