you’re like art or something --
i don’t understand you and i always think i’m supposed to.
you remind me of stealing from my parent’s liquor cabinet,
i can’t look at you too long without feeling like
i’m gonna get caught up in something.
i can’t look at you too long without feeling like
i’m breaking some sort of rule.
now i know that love was the first time i saw weezer live,
that love was losing your voice because you’re singing too loud,
that love was pressing you down the backseat of your car,
that love was censored out of this poem.
too explicit. too tongue and teeth.
love was an honest liar.
love was at least 70% proximity, maybe.
love was not a victory march, just the drive the home.

we are terrified of it, maybe that’s why we like it.
there is no litmus test for love. just trial and error.
just… a lot of error.
love is hotel room we’re never going back to.
we existed there once
but we time ran out and had to return our keys, go home from vacation.
there are no good poems that come from that.
just 2 AM and missed calls and quiet.

see, i am bad at doing simple things.
my hands shake too hard and ruin dreams.
i hold too hard or push even harder.
baby, you were never hard to love, i just wasn’t any good at it.
see, i can write three page poems about the curve of your eyelashes
or the way your laugh sometimes gets stuck
in the back of your throat like a secret,
but i cannot seem to look you in in the eye
and be honest with you.

so tell me what to do when you’re staring god asking if he exists,
tell me what to do when every shot you’ve taken has missed.
tell me what to do when you’re standing on a dance floor
after all the music is gone,
like the fifth of july when all the fireworks have faded out of the sky
and all that’s left is casings and matches.
tell me what to do when you run out of words.

when you wanna go home, where do you wanna go?

the worst thing about growing up is learning
that you can always leave home but you can’t always go back.
the thing about roots is that unless you want to die,
you can't ever pull them out completely.
we are always going to be from somewhere.
we are always going to be from here.

when you move out of your childhood home,
will your mother clean out all your **** and make it
into the home office that she always wanted
or will she keep it like a time-capsule, so preserved that 20 years from now
you will come to the same posters staring down at you?
what dream is she still holding on to?
does she remember, did she give it up for you?

sometimes i think i am the last five things i gave up on,
a mausoleum to my mistakes.
i am bad asking forgiveness.
i don’t really believe in god, but for some reason or another
i write a lot about it him.
maybe it’s always easier to blame someone else.
because if god exists, i think he’s on autopilot.
see, god is good at letting go of things.
i know this because what else could it mean
when his disciples told me to find someone new to pray to?

all i remember of my baptism is white dresses and pinched shoes
and my cries echoed off stuccoed walls of the church.
my father has a rosary hanging on his bedside table,
he always likes to say that you’ve got to
believe in something.

and i know i don’t always make myself easy to love.
i keep saying “i’m sorry” so what does it mean anymore?
if you say something too many times, the meaning starts disappearing.
i guess that’s why i never told you that i love you,
but that feels like an excuse, too.
love called in sick again, i keep telling you that you’ve gotta get better friends.
they only love you when everything’s going wrong.
you can’t love somebody just because they love you.

love is mumbling you feel so good into the side of her neck.
love is promises. love wants to believe you.
she is beautiful like sunday, not friday. she is holy.
she is beautiful like sunday and tuesday and all the days in between,
like three weekends and six day work weeks
like ***** and soda pop
like sleeping in every sunday and staying up every saturday.
she is alternately the wild fire and the burnt shell of the forest,
the calm and the storm, the curse and the cure.
the hell and the highwater.
you want to learn to swim and learn to drown in her.
love is love is love is in love with you
but she wishes she wasn’t.
love is an unfinished symphony,
all the lullabies you’d sing for me, the clank of car keys.
there is no silence in leaving, there is no silence in believing.
there is nothing that feels better than never coming back.
there is nothing that feels worse than never coming back.

i’ve been too many people to call you home.

summer in kansas is like being underwater,
humid and oppressive as our state’s current legislature.
our skin would get stuck together, when we pulled apart
it was like we were unzipping parts of ourselves.
painful.
there’s a metaphor in there,
somewhere, i swear.

some breakups are like surgery; removing a part of yourself,
coming out of the operating room and still leaving things on the table.

we spent a lot of time stuck together
then being pried apart by the air conditioner, among other things.
you make me feel like i have too many nerve endings
and not enough skin.
i think it must be a ******* talent to make someone feel like
too much and not enough at the same time.
we spent a lot of time driving with the windows down,
music filtering out of them
like we wanted people to know what we had stuck in our heads.  
you groan when i turn on 95.7 and whatever top 40 tune
dubbed the “song of the summer” comes on.
see, i kind of hate people who hate pop music
because honestly get the **** over yourself
and admit that taylor swift songs are catchy already
but i still like you.

so the speakers are blasting “fix you” by coldplay
and i’m wondering why songs that are written about things
i’ve never really experienced
are always the ones that make me cry.
my mom always says that i am the most empathetic person that she knows.
it always just makes me feel ashamed of all the times
i have felted shuttered,
judgmental and close-minded.

i am usually glad that people don’t know me like i know myself,
i’m afraid you wouldn’t like the inside of my head;
it’s not like i always do.
sometimes when i’m sad and my head feels foggy
and i want to unzip my veins
or something else ugly and over-romanticized like that,
i think that universe is trying to reject me
like a bad ***** transplant
like i was something never meant to be here in the first place
and it’s trying to right itself,
find equilibrium.
i know it’s not true but i still think it sometimes.

i think i love myself too much or not enough.
i am not good at equilibrium.

when you said, “i think i love you,” i thought you were joking.
i don’t know if that says more about me or you.

i’ve always been afraid
there is something terrible and fragile and hopeful
about young love that i will never get to know.

love is probably at least 70% proximity and i’m okay with that.
so you're kind of like my spleen,
i could survive without you
but it be pretty ****** to have you torn from of my ribcage.
because love is not completing a set,
it’s just finding something you really ******* wanna hold onto.

sometimes when you’re a poet you tend to idealize love into stanzas
instead of realizing that love is not poetry --
poetry makes too much sense.
love is a long-*** novel that you get bored of sometimes.
love sneaks up on you, it grows inside taking root like… honeysuckle.
an invasive species.

and honeysuckle are no roses, they’re prickly in a whole different way.
just the same,
nobody tells you that love can often be so ugly.
but a lot of kids still pick handfuls of weeds,
dandelions and clovers and grass stains,
and present them to their mothers
with a fistful of pride.

maybe love is not a victory march.
maybe love is just… the drive home.

some people only see the sun
as something that gets in their eyes when they’re driving
and i don’t wanna be one of them.
i wear sunglasses a lot so i can pretend i’m not bad at eye contact;
maybe it’s the same idea if you think about it like that.
god is still playing on the radio and all i can hear is static.
i don’t have a car, but if i did i think that it would still stall.

sometimes life tries to sucker punch me in face
and i’m really bad at ducking, i spend a few too many minutes
in front of the mirror wondering
if i’m going to grow into this version of hating myself
and ******* in.
not my stomach, but my lungs.
because whenever i panic, it feels like they’re caving in.
it feels like i'm new orleans after the levees broke.
every hurricane has a name and, sometimes, i’m trying to forget yours.
and i’m still trying to stay ahead of the curve,
i’m still obsessing over the curve in your neck.
i’m bad at details
but i could be good at the big picture.
i could be good at you.
which is a ****** way to say that
i wanna get drunk and tell you about my insides.
i want to tell you everything about me and still hear you say “i love you”
and not mean it in spite of anything
like if a tree falls in the forest,
it might not make a sound but it leaves a mark.
all these poems scrawled in my margins make their marks.
poetry doesn’t exist until someone hears it,
i do not exist until someone listens to me.
i used to think i didn’t really exist until i knew you.

and i know i try too hard sometimes,
but i figured it’s better than not trying at all.

yeah, i’m a few years behind, but i still listen to isabel and evan.
i don’t know about god and i can’t seem to believe in heaven.
i don’t know much about milk and honey,
but i know about rice and black beans.
broken hearts and bad dreams.
***** hands and rhyme schemes.
those kind of things.
because growing up is a whole lot of growing into yourself
and whenever i’ve got big shoes to fill i just stuff socks into the toes.
there’s a not a single “grown-up” that i know
that doesn’t wake up feeling 13 years old sometimes.
so i stopped waiting on a miracle.
i packed up all my ambition in my backpack;
the zipper got stuck but that’s okay.
i stuck my thumbs in my pockets, i’m walking.
there’s more time that way
and i think we all need a little  time in some kind of way.  
i’m a homebound hitchhiker who doesn’t know what direction to head in,
how do you get home when all the lights are turned off?
what does it mean when the place you call home
is somewhere you have not been in years?
i’d ask my dad, but i’m trying not be cruel on purpose these days.
my father protested in the streets,
young revolutionary trying to change the fabric of his country
into something more breathable.
do you have any idea how much of my life i have spent silent?
silence is the biggest privilege that i have ever had.
silence is the loudest thing that i have heard
silence is the sound of police sirens and fists,
of flatlining heart monitors and pretending you didn’t see that.

but if heaven exists, i still hope it’s quiet.
i want it to be quiet.
because there has to be a halfway point
between chaos and silence somewhere.

i. i don’t think i ever expected to live quite this long.
the bus has always been coming
and i have always been braced for impact.
i have never thought that another 80+ years were
automatically allotted to me,
life is too much loss and uncertainty.
i am 17 and i feel tired and oddly lucky.

ii. i’ve heard life is inherently more exciting
when you think of things in terms of “i get to…” rather than “i have to…”
i’m trying to apply it to my life.
i get to wake up tomorrow. i get to go to school, to have a routine.
i get to keep going. i get to live.

iii. some people are born content and some people are born itching --
you were born with ******* poison ivy.
dying to jet set the midwest, always swore
you were gonna leave this town before it burnt you to the ground.
a born nomad who’d never even seen the ocean.
i watched you disappear out the rear view window,
you’ve never left this town and i’d hate for the world
to let you down.

iv. i think that part of me is scared to leave home
because i know that you can always leave but you can’t always go back.
these are the things they don’t tell us growing up;
the way that places are just places
and the air around them can shift into something
that you no longer recognize.
it’s the feeling when you’ve been away for too long
and you come home to find it changed.
it’s the feeling when you want to go home
even when you’re there.

v. i heard you either write to remember or to be remembered.
i dream of crashes and my legacy of stained ink
confined to 15 gigabytes and 12 point font.
there’s thousands of other poets
with shaking hands, bright eyes, loud mouths.
it would be so easy to forget me when i’m gone.
i don’t know how much i mind it.
we are fleeting like fireflies and smoke signals and first kisses.
i still think you burn the brightest.

vi. it’s 10:32 somewhere over the ocean
and i miss you i miss you i miss you.
i’ve heard that victorians believed that if you wrote a poem in a airplane
that it stayed there, suspended in the sky.
your eulogy is hanging somewhere over the atlantic,
pinned up in the stars. waiting.

vii. i held your hand on the take off
until all that was underneath our feet were clouds.

i’ve never been religious but i’ve always known how to pray,
words worn down by my tongue like a security blanket.
it’s been years since i’ve thought about what they actually mean;
it’s like my pledge of allegiance, i don’t pray,
i recite.

repetition repetition repetition
my brain’s in fission
i pledge allegiance to the flag--
we only loved behind closed doors
of the united states of america--
i’ve heard if you say something enough times it stops sounding like anything at all
and to the republic for which is stand--
i love you, i love you, i love you, i love you, i love you
one nation under god--

i usually leave that part out.
close my mouth, stand silent.

silence is for sinners and we are losing battles of people.

in my history textbook there is a picture
of a man shoving a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle.
just the same,
you’re the kind of person who’d go planting flowers
on the side of the road just to make it prettier,
you’re always wasting your time caring about people
who couldn’t give a **** about you
and it’s probably tragic or something
but words like tragic and poetic are for different people than us.

i am so ******* bad at gentle and you’re deserving of delicate.
i think some people are less impressionable in the way the take up space
than they are in the holes they leave when they’re gone.

i used to imagine that there were phantom versions of myself,
standing everywhere that i have ever stood
like ghosts or maybe more like placeholders.
waiting.
it’s like how when i was a little kid,
i would try to picture what the spot i was standing in
looked like a hundred, a thousand years ago.
who has treked through through the same places
that i go everyday.
i still like to think like that sometimes.
i like to think we leave behind echoes of ourselves
in the places we’ve been.
i like to think that a hundred, a thousand years from now,
there is going to be a little kid trying to do the same,
picturing me standing here.
i still like to think there is a version of me
hanging around in my childhood home, six years old with
missing front teeth.
i still like to think there is a version of me
wandering around all my favorite cities i’ve visited.

by this logic, there is still a version of you
in the room i last saw you in,
still framed by the light pouring in from the window.
by this logic, there is still version of me
in the room i last saw you in… waiting.
for something.

on sunday, i sat in our kitchen with my dad as the pale april sunlight streamed in and we watched as the brasilian government held the vote over whether or not to impeach the president dilma rousseff.

my brother’s at college, my mom was at work; it was just me and my dad.
a family friend told me once that my dad loves his country more than anybody they'd ever met.

i remember, we ate apple slices as we watched the government vote on the fate of the country. i am 17 and my dad still slices my apples, cuts my grilled cheese sandwiches into triangles, calls me querida.

my dad gestures at the TV, we both talk with our hands a little too much, and tells me that you can tell which way the politicians are voting based of the color they’re wearing.

the worker’s party, partido dos trabalhadores, called the PT is wearing red. they're the ones that vote against impeachment, eu voto não.
my father marched for that party in the 70s, 80s. they were born of the opposition to the military dictatorship of his childhood. he glares at the TV screen, now, like he’s angry for the promises they broke.

the TV in the kitchen is practically a relic, a boxy fourteen inches, older than me. we have a satellite dish in the backyard so we can get globo, the biggest television network in brasil. neighbor kids accidentally chuck their ***** into it, hitting the dish and scrambling over the fence to collect their toys.

on the TV, ricardo barros walks up the microphone. he’s a congressman from my family’s home state of paraná. my dad says, “hey, i went to college with him!”

they both majored in civil engineering, went to university in maringá.  
i remember i laughed. my dad knows so many people that he can find acquaintances on the TV. i asked my dad if they were friends. he laughs a little, too, says it depends on how ricardo voted.

ricardo voted yes.

my father was 7 years old in 1964 when the military took over brasil’s government in a coup. sometimes i wonder if for him this whole thing feels sort of like de ja vu, history repeating with a new face.

i don’t ask.