I read the obituary and think of you.
I think of us together and how one day,
we won’t get to choose life or death.
It’ll just happen and one of us will be left
without the other. When I read books
about lovers trying to move on after
their sun goes out, I can’t handle it.
When my grandma died, sure I was upset
for losing her, but I was on edge by the thought
of my grandfather sleeping alone from then on.
And I know it’s so far away and I know
that it doesn’t make sense as a twenty-something
to think about it. But I want to tell you I love you
every time I hear someone has died. I want to run
my hands over your skin and make it permanent.
I want to believe that there’s an afterlife and we all just
become reconnected. When I hear someone has died
I want to hear your voice against my cheek, sighing my name,
over and over again.

I want to imprint on you. Just as the girls before me.
Don’t lie at me and say I can’t see the sharpie marks on your skin.
I got drunk because I knew I couldn’t kiss you sober.
I stumbled into you like you were the bathroom at a bar.
I took a look around and I couldn’t even miss them: drawings, words,
phone numbers and lipstick kisses. **** the mirror; don’t look at me.

Don't make me read a biography.
They're always such a tease and I
always want more. When did your
first tooth come out. Whose been lucky
enough to kiss you. Don't tell me where
you went to school. I don't care what
year you graduated: tell me where you
ate lunch, tell me what songs got you
through that bus ride home.

You're telling me the skeleton, give me
the flesh, give me the intricate details of
your nerves and cells. I don't want no
flashcard facts, give me that scrapbook
your grandma made. Let me see you get
embarrassed. Just let me see you.

My mother brought down the storage
box from the attic. I swore it was bigger.
I went through every single picture,
pulling aside all the ones I wanted
to bring back to Tallahassee with me.
I didn't think it could mean anything, but
I have no proof to show of my vacant father.
No picture of my clumsy, pre-teen years
where I weighed more than my mother.
When I pick out the pictures I want on my wall,
it's the past that I created for myself.

You left faster than the door
could open from its hinges.
It swung while the scent
of blueberries and milk
and the memories you held
diffused throughout my lonely
room, on my lonely bed
where you had just slept --
where we had slept, but
don't come back.

I will hurt my boyfriend the most. But he started it and though he thought
we finished it together, like civil adults talking about how to better
our relationship. I finished it later --
alone in my room, crying and pleading for something better, different.

You gotta understand --
When it's good, it's so good,
but when it's bad,
I have to write about it.

And I will find a new boy who doesn't care about that,
                                                           ­       I respect the art, he'd say.

You gotta understand --
I will do this to you, too.
You are my next poem
and it will probably be ****** and make you cry.

Not in a sense that I want to own it, or
that I want to take it away from others and conquer
the ways for which it stood and whoever might
have been there before me.

But I want to name an island.
A cryptic, unforgiving name and not in a sense that
I’ll be leaving it, because of the harsh and abrasive things its done.
Not because I was ready to be left standing there
not knowing the starting and ending point,
like how I was left in your bed.

You didn’t make coffee or ask me what time
it was or if I wanted a shower.
You don’t black-out the sun anymore.
Now at nine in the morning the sun shines early through the window
and the aqua walls flood and I’m stranded on
your brown-plaid bed, in the middle of your room and
you just swam off.

And I’m naming it nothing,
because why would I name an island when I have no one to share it with?