Let's spend a week forgetting to be lonely.
I'll fly into Knoxville, drive east
until the roads run out. No one goes
to Harlan County unless they have to.
The mountains are giants, here, they almost
disguise the desolation-- the pieces
of people that got caught
when the mines collapsed.
You tell me to be careful, as if
this isn't my country, too.
As if I wasn't born with dirt beneath my fingernails.

I like how you treat me delicate.
I like to pretend I'm a flower.
You touch me like I'm breakable.
I want to protest that I'm not, but I'd be lying.
Look at me like you mean it, like I'm
the only clean water
you've drunk in weeks. The wells
have been choked with weeds.
So leave bite marks on my back as you
burn the brush.
There is a sweetness in me if you can find it.

Let's drink like teenagers; make sloppy love.
I want to *** at the same time and then lie around
giggling and smoking cigarettes.
Pull the blankets off the bed and trail them
through the house until we've ****** in every room, twice.
Let's build a pillow fort, drink cheap
wine out of mason jars, and then **** so hard
it falls down around us.
I want you to lose hours in me, whole days,
come up for air next Tuesday and we'll
cook breakfast at midnight. You make me so hungry.

Tell me about your childhood, tell me
the one thing you asked for every Christmas
and never got. I wanted
an Easy-Bake Oven. I wanted to play normal.
Tell me all the things you got but didn't ask for,
never wanted, didn't deserve.
I'll run my teeth across your earlobe
and let my hips listen to all the words
your tongue never learned to say.
We are both still just babies.

I like how you scare me.
How sometimes you hold my wrists together
when you tell me I'm beautiful
so I can't wriggle away, because you know
I've never been good at accepting compliments.
I can count the number of nights
we've spent together on one hand, but the months
of distance take more than just digits.
I used to think you hated me.
I used to hate myself for it.

I know the darkness in you. Three days down
in the mine with no canary and me just waiting
for you to reemerge.
You always seem to find your ways out of it.
I like to think of myself as a lodestone; you tell me
not to get arrogant, that being wounded and beautiful
aren't interchangeable, but I believe
they both can make us strong.
I want to write poems with my fingers
on the small of your back,
leave scratch marks as a reminder of
how far I've come. You make me forget to be sad.
You teach me not to take myself too seriously.
I want to be your canary.
Follow my voice out when it gets dangerous.
I'll only scream when I mean it.

Get a little lost in me. Undress until
I can feel the heartbeat in your **** reverberating up my spine.
So run your tongue down
my torso; forget to breathe, while you
Tell me the things that scare you.
Show me your seams. Somewhere beneath
all this rock there is a gold mine, so trace my veins
like a treasure map. Maybe someday
they will lead you home.

Dear Trayvon,

We should be rioting in the streets
But it’s raining.
We should be banging our fists
****** against the locked doors
Of state buildings screaming justice!
But the tea kettle is on and
I had one too many drinks last night, so.

I feel guilty for the protection of patriarchy, for never
Wondering as I walk home in the evenings
Who will shoot me
For my skin,
For never waking up at night from
The nightmare picture of my son’s killer
Smiling as he walks free.

They pretended this was
About youth violence and
Text messages and
Self defense, which is like saying
Matthew Shepard was about a broken fencepost
And the Holocaust was about the right
of innocent Nazis to collect gold fillings
From shattered jewish teeth.
You were black.
You were black. And being black
In America makes you threatening
And being scared
of a teenager turns ****** into
Neighborly behavior.

And I will never have to worry
About someone protecting themselves
From the threat of my skin.
So I will never have to question
My complicity in a country
That would rather shoot down
Than stand for
Its young men.
So I will stand outside
Drinking tea and letting the rain cry for me
While I beat my fists against nothing
And by the morning you will
Already be forgotten
Just like all the other
Beautiful threatening boys
We never cared enough to know.

You told me, once
when you died you wanted to be eaten
by a bear:
something used up and on the verge
of starving; something that would
feed on your for days,
savor your marrow.
Being a predator is terrifying.
You said, you are constantly
aware of death.
As if that made you brave.

I want to be eaten by something
more beautiful:
a snow leopard or a tree.
Dig deep roots into my hollow spaces
turn my blood to branches
so I can keep growing, growing
until I'm all
acorn bones and blue skies.
But maybe that's just me
being scared of dying.

Maybe that's just both of us
being scared in different ways.

Every story is a sad story.
Everything is sad.
Too many tragedies, not enough time.
They pile up on top of one another,
Clamoring for attention.
Bombing tops earthquake tops ****** tops ****—
Burying us under the weight of too many
Bodies, their cold eyes pleading
See me, hear me, remember me but

Every story is a sad story
So no one stays sad very long.
When sadness is ever-present it becomes normal.
So now we don’t even blink, just
Scroll through our newsfeeds thinking:
The world is horrible and what’s for dinner
Simultaneously. When reality is too sad
Sadness becomes a simulation, acted out
On the stage of nightly news broadcasts and
Candelight vigils, as if:
If we all just felt sad enough for long enough
That would solve anything. As if:
If we could compartmentalize our sadness into
New national holidays and moments of silence
We could stop feeling everything so sharply.
But I am running out of room in my closet for charity t-shirts.

Every story is a sad story.
I am starting to become cynical.
One child dead from a drive-by shooting is no longer newsworthy.
Give me more bodies, more pictures
of distraught mothers crying,
More suffering.
We have fought too many wars in too many places to remember
that the bombs in Boston that shut down the entire city
Are an everyday occurrence everywhere else.
Except sometimes they are our bombs.
But rarely are they our children.

Every story is a sad story.
Everything is sad.
I am not sure which is worse: constant sadness
Or no sadness;
Constant tragedy or constant denial.
I am becoming too sad to write anymore.
The world is too horrible.
What’s for dinner?

Teej.

God owes us an apology for this one.
It is a failure of the world.
If there was too much
hurt in the dark corners where
you were cupping your palms,
trying to light matches, then
there is too much hurt.

Jellyfish Baby, we could see
through your pinkwhite skin
to all the bleeding pieces but
not stop the suffering.
So you sliced a hole in the skin of the world
and leaked out. All the brightness of you
spilled like a slurpee on the sidewalk,
dropped by careless hands.
We should've been more careful with you.

We should've built warmer nests
in which to cradle your tender heart.
We should've whispered in your ears as you slept
that 'home' is not a place
in the sky but people around a table
and dinner plates for everyone
and no one going hungry
or alone.

It is a failure of the world.
There is
too
much
hurt.
And there are still dark corners but
we have
no matches.

This, my suitcase heart,
waits quiet outside your door,
preparing for flight.

All creation is an act of naming:
creatures defined by certain syllables, resting
safely within their own unique
boundaries of sound.
Only able to know themselves through
owning their own distinct definitions.

Without names, we are voiceless.
Without voices, we cease to exist.

When I first began learning the languages of hearts
my mouth was sewn shut by cruel hands,
careless with their stitches, until my lips
grew silver-smooth and tight
containing my breathe like a caged beast.
At night I used to dream in whispers.

But the act of growing up is one of slicing sutures,
carving away the scar tissue and letting
long-unused muscles shudder with the possibility
of movement. So teach my tongue
to sing a song other than silence, to wrap its longing
around the pearls of my teeth,
to view my lips not as cages
but as wings.

There is no shame in stealing the keys
to your own prison, so I am unlocking
swollen lips with stolen visions of a girl grown
so much louder than any pain could silence.
And I am beginning to name myself.

I am naming myself whole.
I am naming myself beautiful.
I am naming myself worthy of being heard.

But the vocabulary of my heart is still small.
I am only just beginning to learn what love sounds like.
It is not a word I heard often.
But creation is more than one singular moment
of definition: creatures named now name each other
their mouths like caverns full of butterflies.
So teach my tongue to fly.
Teach me to relish the soft strands of syllables
against my fragile wings, the wild rush
of words that sounds a little too much
like freedom, teach me how to hold myself together
even when it rains.
For it has been raining from my eyes for years,
each tear slipping into a stream of syllables
I wasn't allowed to say; so teach my eyes to pray.

Someone once told me that birds in cages
must think flying is a sickness, and I'm only now
discovering how sick I am of this.
They can't cross your boundaries if
you never learned how to set them so
build walls out of words and then speak your own doorways:
The only bird that sings for freedom
is one that knows its definition.

But I am singing now.
I am singing now.
I am singing myself wings.