we think my great uncle eddie
was on the assembly line that built the atomic bomb.
my aunt mildred said he could never tell her
exactly where he was or what he was doing,
far away in the desert
back when he had to take trains to visit
back when manhattan was just place in new york,  
he could only tell her that he loved her.
we still don’t know for certain,
there are some stories that are taken to the grave.
but i wonder, i wonder if my aunt ever looked at his hands
and thought of the destruction
that could be so carefully hidden in his palms,
explosions under his fingernails,
the shells of burnt out cities in his fortune teller's lines
when he touched her delicately,
brushed her hair behind her ear.
but she probably didn’t;
most people only question what they want to question.
everyone thinks of what their hands have built.
not everyone stops to think of what their hands may have destroyed
in the process.

good artists copy, great artists steal,
and the best artists reinvent what they’re stolen.
so don’t think of it as stealing,
think of it as borrowing.
everyone who has ever created anything
puts out something new for future generations
to leave their fingerprints all over.
and i’m hoping for a change in the weather,
rearrange my life into something better
frankenstein a poem in an a love letter.
all us poets, we've all been writing the same old things.
we're just regurgitated, agitated,
trying to say something that hasn't already been said.
but i've heard every story follows the same seven plot lines.
all stories are the same narrative essentially
but all stories are still worth telling.
no idea is original
but there are ideas worth being repeated, reinvented.
so i steal from the greats, piggy-backing off the shoulders of giants
and borrowing from my betters
in hopes to better myself and them.
legacies exist because of people taking great things
and continuing to strive to make them greater.
legacies exist because they are given away
to everyone who hears them,
kept alive by tongues and hands and hearts.
when you write you are contained inside yourself.
but when i am here,
when i am on this stage, i am uncontained and free;
i’ve given myself away to all of you.
the thing about art is that once you put it out there
it doesn’t belong just to you anymore.
i’ve got just as much ownership over my favorite song
as the person who wrote it does because i feel just strongly about it.
i’m writing poems for people i’ve never met
i’m writing a love letter that i’ll wake only to forget.
so i think it's funny people call writing solitary.
it's funny to me that people call
the purest form of communication in art a lonely pursuit.
because i think really most writers are just trying to use what we're best
at as an intermediary, a middle man,
trying to make a connection with someone.
every writer has written something down
and hoped desperately that someone a hundred years from now,
someone on the other side of the world
will feel something when they read what they’ve written.
it’s funny.
most people think that writing, that poems,
are something i do instead of something i am;
taking away my words would be like taking away my bones.
i have a deep, passionate need to be heard
so i will scream until someone tells me they are listening,
until someone tells me to shut the **** up
because i cannot imagine a time when the untameable need
to tell stories, to string together fragments of poetry,
will not be bursting out of my veins.
something is not real until i write it down.
so we take photos as the titanic sinks.
we pull out our phones as the twin towers fall, call everyone we know.
what else would we do? just watch it go down silently?
i think the most basic of human instincts is the urge to communicate.
to make people understand
our love, our joy, our anger, our tragedy.
we are just spectators to the tragedy, guilty bystanders to the crime;
we have front row seats to the end of the world.
and when the sky is falling
you know we’ll all be calling each other saying,
“you’ll never believe what is happening.
i don’t know how to explain it,
but i’m going to try.”

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.

charlie chaplin
once told his daughter
that her naked body should only
belong to those
who fall in love with
her naked soul.
now,
my soul’s hardly naked.
it wears layers and layers
to keep hurt out,
sometimes to keep love out.
but if you can manage
to strip me down,
my soul bare,
and the rest of me clothed
but ******* shivering
like a little kid who got
caught in a blizzard,
trying to catch snowflakes
to keep under my tongue;
if you manage to pull that
all away
and strip me down
to a mess of
private parts –
the parts i don’t tell people
about,
the parts i sectioned off
and hastily labeled
mineminemine
because i wasn’t ready to
share myself,
and the parts of myself
i deemed too fragile
to withstand
your gaze.
you see,
i don’t dismantle
my walls
for just anybody.
but if you strip me down,
past the things we all use
to hide out,
maybe you could love
my naked soul.
i’ve never been the kind of girl
who liked the idea of
“belonging”
to someone but
there are much worse fates
i could think of
than belonging to
you.

when i met you,
my bones screamed
“do not **** this one up,”
and every molecule joined in the chorus,
and i sure as hell tried to listen.
and now we’re in a staring contest with time;  
you don’t blink and i don’t flinch, not anymore
we’ve already won that war.
and i’m just itching to get out of this skin,
i’m just trying to fill up my absences,
i’m just trying to lengthen my short-comings.
i’m just full of empty promises.  
and now we’re on the couch too busy unraveling
the universe with our tongues to try talking,
everything we have have getting lost
in between the couch cushions
like loose change and secrets.
i always want i’m afraid of
and i’m always afraid of what i want most.
and now we’re in the car going everywhere slow,
and you can’t keep your eyes on the road.
you keep glancing at me in the passenger seat,
and i’m too busy sneaking looks at you
and your wild hands gesticulating
us into near miss car crashes
and almost run red lights to care.
you said it was reckless of you,
promised me sheepishly
to keep your hands on the wheel next time.
i thought it was terribly endearing.
but maybe i’ve just confused reckless passion for love,
i guess it wouldn’t be the first time.
and still, i don’t know who’s closer to the truth.
we were just rattling past the intersection
a few missed turns ago,
and you looked away before you could see me staring
but just like tunnel vision, you are what i paid attention to.
you see, i don’t believe in much at all,
my only church is the passenger seat next to you.
maybe i’ve forsaken any altars in my haste
to be realistic, substantial.  
so i only believe in **** i can see,
and i was still looking at you like you were
the sun coming up.
and i’ve always been more like the moon
and it’s so very hard for us to exist in the sky
at the same time.
but the sun sets in one person’s eyes
and rises in another’s.
and i have told this story before, i bet you have too.
we all have those kind of ghost stories
tucked in our back pockets,
because loving the wrong person hurts
it hurts because it matters even if it’s wrong
but do you think all the lives we’ve lived
before this one matter?
maybe our pasts only dictate the future
if we let them carry weight
and you know, sometimes i think
that we are only as unloved as
we want to be.

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.

she was lonely in crowded rooms

when my words don't start as twelve point font
they tend to come out all wrong.
you said you're no good at words but you’re a liar
you said you’re no good at words, i'm no good at saying them.
the air was always heavy between my heart and my mouth.
and sick to say, i’m coughing up a confession
i pretend every poem you’ve ever written is about me
and i know it’s not.
but you make every line i write make sense, every clumsy lyric
in my head into a symphony
while i still feel like cacophony of contradictions:  
i like liquor that doesn’t taste like liquor
and love that doesn’t love like love,
i am scared of love and i am obsessed with it.
i think i could have everything i ever wanted
and it still wouldn't mean **** without you.
now my head is so cluttered, gutted out from missing you
and when i said give me something to remember i didn't mean a scar.
but i could never hate you
how could you hate somebody who bared their soul to you,
told your 2 AM confessions to?
i ran out of way to write you down poetically,
and now when i talk about you it’s just pathetically.
always kissed me hello like you were saying goodbye
and this poem is not about love, this poem about leaving.
go on, jaywalk your way right out of my heart.
because poets don’t know how
say i love you and writing is remembering
but living is forgetting.
so brand it in my memory, poetry is always cheaper than therapy.
all my friends took psychology, rooted around in their heads,
but i took anatomy; cut myself up and open.
some people pick scabs and some people buy band-aids.
guess which one i am?
i am terrible, i do not want a love that’s good for me.
i want a love that takes me over
and turns me inside out.
i want you even when you want nothing to do with me.

as the state of our union begins to crumble
like a first grade papier-mâché art project held together
with elmer’s glue and enthusiasm,
i wonder at a nation that thinks investing in guns and walls
will make the world better
than investing in art and empathy.

the united states of america already has a bigger military spending budget
than that of all the other first world nations combined.

you know, the best way to hit rock bottom is to keep building up
until the ceiling collapses in on you.

i do not worry for art
like i worry for a city gasping for breath through the smog
or a woman with smeared make up walking home alone at night;
see, art is hydra -- you cut its head off,
it grows back three more in its place that are singing.

but i worry for a world that thinks that it’s better to destroy than create

so here i sit and write this poem
before there are no more paint brushes, just rifles
no more ink stains, just bombs
and the earth is a canvas, soaked in blood.

remember,
after the world crashes and burns
there will still be someone who needs to write about the scars

and so i think
better to write than to erase,
better to sing than to scream.

she got a tattoo stenciled “tabula rasa” and could never see the irony.

i knew a girl once,
she got a tattoo stenciled “tabula rasa”
and could never see the irony.
irony is cruel, after all, and there’s a lot of things
we chose not to see, obliviously.
irony is a musician with a deaf daughter, a painter with a blind son.
but this was just a metaphor, what we’re headed for
always heading home in the wrong direction,
but i’m not a suicidal head case,
just a dreamer who got high on outer space
and this was what i wrote for icarus
before he gunned me down out of the sky
i don’t why, but my wings tend to get tangled whenever i try to fly.
typos slip past my copy edit and sometimes i still feel pathetic;
i am a gallery of scars.
if life is performance art then i’m a ******* masterpiece.
it’s all growing pains,
knowing better doesn’t always mean you do better.
so pain is necessary. so pain is unavoidable.
but i don’t wanna to live a life where every single week is
“i just gotta get through this week”
but good things don’t only come from pain
and poetry is not sad by definition.
i know we tend to romanticize the tears in our eyes
but i wanna grit my teeth into a grin,
i wanna know about sinking because i'm learning how to swim.
and gravity was never the enemy,
at least not how i thought it would be.
gravity was just doing its job,
it didn’t know the way it was weighing me down like quicksand
and making it so hard to get up out of bed.
i will never understand
why happiness is so attainable for some
and so unattainable for others.
but maybe that’s just the hairline difference
between happiness and joy --
one is more circumstantial that the other.
lately, my brain’s been stalling like an engine on overdrive,
it wants to die out but somehow the heart’s keeping it alive.
so this is the sound two hearts make when they collide,
we write poems and never talk about it.
i write mile long poems and i’ve got a tongue like a riddle
and love’s just a word, but don’t you dare tell me
that words aren’t important.
you know better.
smashing hearts like hundred dollar guitars,
we all wanna pretend we’re rockstars.
you know, some people get drunk just
so they can see something in the sky.
and i need these lines,
they build up the structure in my spine
i don’t know always who i am
but i know who i haven’t been.
i know who i want to be.

my roommate tells me
that actually it can get you
on the *** offender registry
for ******* in a hammock.
she and her boyfriend were apparently
goin’ at it like chinchillas, like two teenagers
made out of nothing limbs and first times
and urgency, when the parker ranger shined
a flashlight on them. she tells me
how officer told them to be more
careful next time, as she nervous
sweat through her deodorant,
clammy palms and stutter heartbeat
as she had to fish her bra from
the bottom of the tree trunk.
and how ****** is it that two kids
trying to stumble through love with
no training wheels can become *** offenders
for wanting to feel july on their skin, but rapists
can sit in class next to me? move in next me to?
hold positions of power over me?
how ****** is that that can happen
and this country can elect a man who wants
to grab half of us by the *****? see, america
has always been a hypocrite with her ankles
crossed like a martyr. she will punish you
not for injustice, but for indecency.

it’s always national something day. national pancake day.
national sourdough bread day. national tweed day.
national jelly bean day. national talk like shakespeare day.
there are bakers with flour hands and runny batter
and elbow patches and rambling professors and assignments due
and the bertie botts every flavor beans that make you think of
hogwarts and sonnets. there’s always a tomorrow dragging
itself up over the eyes of last night.

today is national reconciliation day.
the planet has eleven years before it starts biting back
and your heart feels like a timer. you should see
hawaii before it sinks into the ocean. you should see the polar
icecaps before they melt. you should climb to the bottom of
the grand canyon and look up at the sky if you still see it
and celebrate national canyon day if we have one on the calendar.
you should accept that life is beautiful because it’s ugly.
you should call your mother more. you should tell her that
there is a word for “soul” in every language. tell her alma.
tell her you were buried under snow for so long that you forget
that your father, born of rainforest, still takes it for magic.
tell her that life’s not fair and you still want one anyways.
tell her that people always ask you how could you write
about love at time like this and you always
answer how can you not?

latin poet catullus was often called too personal by contemporaries,
he didn’t write about gods and monsters or heroes or epics,
he wrote about himself and that was terrifying.

catullus wore his heart on his sleeve
and his heart was ugly sometimes, this beating, ****** thing
that would never shut up,
chattering between the line breaks and skirting around the meter.

the opening line to his poem carminae XVI was
“pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo”
which translates pretty literally to
“i will ******* you and face-*******”  
my latin teacher called him “incredibly ******”
i call him “the realest ******* to ever live”  
catullus was the first person to ever write
an open letter to his senatores,
julius caesar burned at the stake of carminae LIV and LVII.
catullus wrote about his boyfriends and his married girlfriend lesbia,
who incidentally was not his beard
or one of sappho’s lovers.
catullus buried his brother in the shrine of carminae CI,
left offerings of wine and bread and coins over his closed eyes.
catullus always made the ugly sound beautiful, eloquent.
you could taste the blood in his mouth,
the pearls and gravel between his teeth.
when i translate his work, he’s the only classic poet
who feels like he’s still alive, laughing at me from his grave
and writing invective epigrams about my grammatical errors.  

catullus was a little bit of an *******, but maybe so i am sometimes,
and catullus was a honest *******.
that’s more than i can say, some days.
he never shied away from himself, not even
from all the ****** parts that are hard to make quiet.
he always wrote about himself because
he understood what ovid and vergil and horace were still learning:
you can’t write about anything if you can’t write about yourself,
if you can’t look at yourself in the mirror
and call your demons by their names.

“pero no amo tus pies
sino porque anduvieron
sobre la tierra y sobre
el viento yo sobre el agua,
hasta que me encontraron”
-- pablo neruda, your feet

baby, you have the most perfect body i have ever seen.
and when i say that you always roll your eyes at me,
embarrassed. and i get it,
women are only taught to feel beautiful in certain ways,
in ways to that fit women like you and me badly,
like hand-me-downs or things shrunken in the laundry.

the world does not teach us how to think
of ourselves as anything other than commodities,
things to be bought and eaten alive.
i spent so long reading stories riddled with
mocha, butterscotch, toffee, cinnamon, olives
that sometimes i look at myself in the mirror like i am something
to devoured and spit back out.

but, baby, i love you even when you don’t feel right in your skin,
like i know the way i don’t feel at home in my own.
and i love the way your heart keeps time to mine,
erratic and anxious,
and the way your eyelashes like to tangle in the corner of your eyes.
and i love those hands, ****, i love those hands
and the covinhas, the craters, the dimples in your cheeks.
i love you down your molecules.

see, i had a friend once tell me that she believed in reincarnation
simply because this universe isn’t as infinite as it seems
and eventually we’re bound to run out of matter
and the universe will be forced to start recycling --
a conservation of souls.
and i don’t know if i believe that, but if it’s true i have this feeling
that in the very beginning, we were two atoms
tangled up in each other, holding on too tightly to ever really let go
and ever since i just keep finding my way back to you.
and that’s *******, probably, i’m not a scientist,
but if you hate yourself right now, it’s okay.
i think we all do sometimes.
i still love every inch of you, even the centimeters
that don’t get that much attention
like the soft spot under your ear or the backs your knees  
and a body is just a body,
just remember that all we are is molecules, follicles,
and every fews weeks we’re brand new again,
we’ve got new skin and maybe it won’t fit right this time either
but, ****, i love the wrinkles and the scars and the words emblazoned
on the fragile skin stretched over your ribcage
and you can’t see it,
but there’s something misshapen etched in ink
with a stick’n’poke there, too.
i can only find it when i’m looking.
i run my hand down your side
feeling all the echoes of other people on your skin.
i worry that my hands are much louder than i want them to be.
i worry someday your feet your carry you somewhere far, far away from me
and i’ll be left memorizing nothing
but the shape of you.

one of my best friends told me that
the first time she got high that she focused in on little details,
almost compulsively.
that she was scared of accidentally stepping on
the all snails on the sidewalk so she stayed frozen in place
for what seemed like hours.
paralyzed.
i was scared of loving you and accidentally ******* it up
so i stayed frozen in place and just… watched it slip past me.
paralyzed.
my finger still stretching, like they were planning
on catching… something.
now, i’ll never know what.
so i guess what i’m trying to say is
you can’t focus on the details so much that you forget
about the big picture
and you can’t love, you can’t live,
being afraid.
because sometimes being in love is kind of like
drowning while you're on fire and getting punched in the face.
repeatedly.
and yet you want it all the time.
handing half of your heart over to another person
and expecting them not **** up is insane.
and you’ve told me before to stop making
metaphors out of moments.
not everything is poetry somethings just... are.
but i love you as i imagine icarus must have loved the sun
before it swallowed him whole.
we are beautiful because we are so doomed.
life would not be nearly as incredible as it is if we got to live it twice.
living is sort of like dying with a seatbelt on.
we are a moment like a movie
where they kept the camera running for too long,
where they didn’t leave all the awkward false starts of conversation
on the cutting room floor.

we love the sun
and its warmth,
but one day it’ll expand
too far
and **** us all,
blotting out this world
with fiery blaze;
maybe that’s just
human nature,
we love what will
destroy us.

as i tried not to yell at you
because i get paid about $8.25 an hour not to,
i thought about what i might say to you if i was off the clock.

first, i’d like to assume that if i met you in person,
you’d be the kind of racist who has a confederate flag
on the back his pick-up truck
and reposts ******* of facebook
with stars and stripes and “build the wall” in comic ******* sans.
but, then again, you might be the kind of racist who will smile
with your shark teeth and shake my father’s hand.
tell us we’re not like those latinos
like it’s supposed to be a compliment,
like being the model minority gives us some sort of ******* priority,
some of protection in a country that’s turning on people just like us.
i will assume you’ve never been homeless,
never been unsure where the **** home is.
i will assume that you wouldn’t bat an eyelash if we uprooted you
and sent you back to whatever european country
your ancestors hailed from.
after all, this country isn’t for immigrants, is it?
i’ll assume never worried about feeding your children
or keeping them safe everytime they stepped outside,
never been in a country trying to burn itself alive,
never been somewhere the only options were drowning
or jumping ship.
if you had, i don’t think you’d hit me with this *******.
and i’m so ******* tired of trying to find a better metaphor
to make someone understand
that people do not leave home without a reason
and i don’t know what to say to make some ******* donor
understand that people don’t leave their home behind,
houses unboarded and rotting into ****** shores,
unless home is crumbling under their heels.
people don’t leave home unless they’re afraid
that someday soon there will be nothing to come back to.
people don’t leave home unless they’re running
from something much, much more hateful
than you.

i am trying to get better at correcting people
when they say my name wrong.

i am both good and bad at conflict.
my hands were born into fists and they never quite unclenched.
when my mother tells me to pick which hill i want to die on,
i pick all of them. but sometimes i let people say my name wrong.
it doesn’t feel like they’re talking to me,
it feels like they’re talking to someone else.

sometimes i say my own name wrong, my tongue getting
tangled over a language that belongs to me
but doesn’t always know how to fit into my mouth.
maybe this is what america took from me.

my father didn’t give me all his names.
in america, you only use three names.
the rest is superfluous, they don’t fit in the boxes on forms.
he didn’t want to give my brother more than we could handle.

people always spell my name wrong.
the first time i ever got published they spelled my last name wrong.
my email inbox is riddled with mispellings, extra Ls and Is.

my name is not even very hard to say.
when my parents picked it out, my mother says
they wanted a name that worked in both languages,
portuguese and english.
i don’t think they always understand what they gave me,
the act of being lost in translation
before i even took my first breath.

did you know that when icarus flew
too close to the sun
it was because he was so tired of being cold
that he’d rather die burning up?

did you know that when andromeda
was chained to her precipice
she hoped for mercy,
not salvation?  

i suppose you didn’t;
these aren’t the kind of tragedies
people like to write about
these aren’t the kind of tragedies
that are beautiful in spite of it or because of it.

we hate narcissus for loving himself more
than we could ourselves.
we **** aridane to the maze for
leading us out of it.

still, she weeps for those
who fell in love with the gods
and for those who fell in love with those
who could never love them back.

she weeps for the gods that did not weep for her
and her tears become the sea
that drowned tomorrow’s heroes
in their own stories.

my poetry professor always preaches that brevity,
that specificity, is the hallmark of good writing.
this always feels like a slight to the inside of my head,
chaotic and chattering.
i wonder if he’s ever been to a poetry slam
and seen a sixteen year old try to fit their whole heart into three minutes.
i wonder if he’s ever written five straight pages free verse
and wondered at which branch of trauma to cut out
to fit the word count.
i wonder if he’s even been a thousand people at once,
crawling into stanzas from russian nesting dolls.

see, at concerts, i always have trouble deciding if i want take a video
or just let the night crystalize in my memory;
see, the problem is i'm liable to forget my heartbeat
if i don’t write it down in detail.
that’s my nature,
i am too much or too little
i am bad at letting things go.
i am bad at leaving things behind.
this is my biggest failing as a storyteller.
in revision, you always have to leave something out.
but when you cut the story in half, you muddle the meaning.
so i don’t tell stories,
i read eulogies. histories. anthologies.
i am not a storyteller, i’m a record keeper
and this is not dead poets society,
this a society of poets who wanted to die but didn’t.
i am always trying to explain
the inside of my head to other people who don’t think
in colors and disjointed poetry
and i am always falling short.

i’ve tried to write this poem a lot of different times.
my love poems are never my best work.
they always come sounding a little bit off,
like i don’t know what the **** i’m talking about.
maybe i don’t.
i’ve got an apology where my mouth should be.
i’m sorry i love you and i’m sorry i’m so bad at it.
affection tastes like blood in my mouth,
sometimes, and i try to talk in between it.
talking to you feels like open heart surgery,
sometimes, and i don’t have steady enough hands
to sew myself back up.
and sometimes i think of telling you,
when we sit together and you end up with my fingers
against your mouth in a parody of a kiss
and your eyes are somewhere else
and we are so good in the quiet that it almost hurts.  
i never loved someone so up close before,
so up close i can taste your name in my mouth.
i’m always too much with my heart, too greedy
and always reaching, and eventually people walk away
from that when they can’t stand the sound of
my heart beat in their ears anymore like tinnitus.
too loud. too loud. always too loud.
so maybe you don’t make everything about me
always feel quiet, but you never reach for the volume
to turn me down and that feels like the same thing.
no one loves me like you love me
and it always comes back to that, doesn’t it?
sometimes you love me too much.
sometimes i don’t know what to do with it.
sometimes i think i am an *******.
i want you, but i also resent being tied to anyone,
i resent feeling so in love and pliable,
willing to break and build the world for you
and i don’t know how to explain in a way that
doesn’t make me feel cruel.
in my english class, we read a story called
the husband stitch about a woman with a ribbon
around her neck and a man who wants
to possess every piece of her.
i think i was both of them.
in the story, they **** for the first time by a lake
and they don’t drown and all the ghost stories she tells
come half to life, like necromancy.
sometimes when i miss you, i keep you in my heart
as a zombie. reanimated. fictitious.
nothing more than disembodied hands in the dark.
it’s not pablo neruda writing free verse about your feet,
nothing so romantic, it’s just that if you were here whole,
i wouldn’t know what to reach for.  
sometimes i am a coroner.
sometimes i want you in bits and pieces,
can’t handle you all together.
sometimes i want to rearrange you, just barely,
and i know that’s not fair.
sometimes i still want you love me more,
love me differently, love me in way
i don’t think you love me
and i know that’s not fair, either.

1.  i get nervous sometimes,
i get a little too nervous sometimes,
and i don’t know how to explain that sometimes
my anxiety is like the third person in bed with me,
tugging on my sleeves, stepping on my heels;
i can’t outrun it.
i wish you didn’t know me while i was anxious,
it makes the way you look at me, the way i feel next to you,
different. i don’t like that.

2. i didn't think we were going to be friends.
it was like 0 to 100, you know?
i used to never talk to you
because i hated the way your eyes would wander off
and next thing i knew
you were leaning in next to me, whispering
your thoughts over the movie
and talking until 4 AM.
everything else is sorted into before and after.

3. after,
i knew we were still going to be okay
because you talked in that voice you only use
when you're uncomfortable with talking
about serious things -- you know
the one where your voice goes high and reedy
like it's trying to climb right out your throat --
and made me promise to text you
if i needed something.

4. i like when we argue our other friends
about what is and isn't white people *******.
i've always been a little ethnic dot in a sea of white faces
and it could be so ******* lonely
and i like having an ally around.
i like having you around.

5. you’re the first person i’ve ever kissed completely sober.

i’m back home for the weekend
and you’re in my basement like always
because, you and me, we’re creatures of habit
before anything else and my feet are thrown over the armrest,
spilling into your lap, and the episode that’s on
is one we’ve already seen
and i keep thinking about how it’s such ******* that we lived
fifteen collective years without knowing each other,
all this wasted time,
and i want to turn to you
and say, “man, i don’t know who’s ever going to love me
like you do,”
but i don’t because that would be too much,
that would be too much, and i don’t want things for us
to be too much.
god, it’d be so easy, though.
so ******* easy.
we have a scary big threshold for what’s “too much” for us
which makes me want things that i know i shouldn’t sometimes.
instead, i run my fingers through your hair
and start asking questions.
stupid **** about your day and your life when i’m not there.
i just like hearing you talk, i like hearing you talk.
i like the way you laugh at my jokes, even the ****** ones.
you always laughed more with me than you ever did with her,
i never understood why you only saw that in retrospect.
man, i imagine us dancing, reeling, singing like,
look at me, oh look at me,
is this the way i’ll always be? oh no, oh no!
and you’d say something like, “well, i like the way you are,”
because of course you would
and i’d do something dumb like tell you that
you’re the only person i ever really end up missing
and how it’s ******* hard to not love someone
when you know someone like i know you.
i’m not sure you’d want to hear that.
we always joke we know each other too well.
the shape of your hands,
the press of your mouth, sloppy and drunk and 3 AM,
the way you laugh and tell me i’m your favorite person.
i like the way you never make me feel lonely.
i like the way you make the unlovable **** about me feel quiet.
is that love?
you make my insides feel like the fourth of july, is that love?
****. you make me feel something, is that love?
but what do i know about love, anyways?
i've never even kissed anyone
sober.