I finally saw you again after 34 days
and
in between those 34 days
I strongly believed I was over you
but then I saw you
                 I remembered
how all your imperfect flaws made me fall for you                        
                 I remembered
how you made my stomach fill with
little
      colorful
           meaningful
                    butterflies
                  I remembered
how your words made my heart melt like wax
and then
                  I remembered
that I'm not actually over you

j.f

I have written you one
hundred and eighty
one poems about stars
and blackberries fat
as thumbs, and your
hands and sweet
plums, because that's
what I do:
word play, cabaret –
but if these are just myths
I perpetuate because I'm
a perpetual liar, believe me
                                            anyway.

Childhood stress is not living in a two-story home
when your best friend does,
even though your mothers are the same. All day long we talk
about weeds and leaving our husbands for each other.

Then, you go on to ask
why should anyone wear clothes if they just leave scarlet
dents on our skin, then you will answer,
someone’s branded us with barcodes like cows.

I once cut my ******, the right I think, while shaving my legs -
cried for weeks afterward wondering
if I would be able to breastfeed twenty years from now,
thought if I could not, I would be less of a woman.
This was before I met my girlfriend who has a ***** and is
just as much as a woman as I am,
this was before I learned that womanhood is a fine powder in
your soul, like *******, but not only white, brown too
and black and mine is pink, and womanhood is
every color of the rainbow and gender is fluid fluid fluid.

Childhood was ignorance of ignorance,
adolescence taught you everything you needed to know on
hating the unique,
but in adulthood, that can change, we can know better.

He nipped
her lip the first time.
Back against the brick wall.
Bottles warming,
soon forgotten at their feet.

There was something
so urgent
in the way they fell--
limbs tangling on
or against
any surface that
could hold them.

But those surfaces were edged
in pasts long hidden
and razor-sharp,
wrapped in caution tape.

And they remembered their fragility.

So they tucked
in their elbows and
side-stepped each other.
Trading bitten lips
for shattering glances,
they told themselves
No.

But sometimes,
in quiet moments,
the Yes still breaks through.

weather splinters in
      to fragments, repeating, like
          dense recollections of
what's already
    happened,
                 and
change dissolves indefinitely,
                      into all
streambeds, like        calcium
cycles              backwards out
               of my diet
these days and lately
         of course, being I, the mess,
am not
or ever
                     doing anything to fix this,
                                     and it's
               not like I don't need the
                sustenance, like
                                            all
warm               confusions
              you so graciously
                      endow upon my
                                    life.

He used it this morning.

Kevin Robinson,
Who has thick curly hair
And
Thinks
He
Knows
Everything.

And I told him,
"What kind of a word
Is
Irradiate?
It isn't a word."

And he told me
In his
Know
It
All
Way
"YES, it IS."

And he spelled it for me.
Because he's into spelling.

I
R
R
A
D
I
A
T
E

So I huffed
And left
Kevin Robinson.

But Randy Weidman
Whose last name
Has a whole different meaning
Had his fancy
New
iPhone 5
And during
First period
Which happens to be
Geometry Honors
He took out
Sira
Or
Whatever
Her
Name
Is

And he asked her.

Sira did not understand.
Sira is not so smart.

But autocorrect is.

And it turns out that
Irradiate
Is
A
Word.

i.
We would sleep, but never touching,
your sheets were always cold,
your room dark, like a thick blanket

You told me tonight that all you
wanted to do was hold me in your arms,
I didn't know if this was the truth
or the ***** speaking your sentiments
for you

ii.
You have been out with women,
women who I'm sure were beautiful,
who were possibly more expressive,
more full of life,
able to offer you what I couldn't
but still, you said
that you were left with
comparisons
and that every time

I won.