Fallow brown, like he's poured his whole soul out through the gold sieve and lies in wait to be replenished.

2. The color of the ocean. Blue, I guess, but that’s not even the half of it. All the ruggedness of the waves—forming up, breaking, and forming again like life is only the motions. Her eyes are blue, but you could hardly tell.

3. A hand-painted bowl of fresh chocolate frosting from which the most immature hands soonest get a mouthful.

4. Beautiful. Like, drop dead gorgeous. I’d dig my own grave and stick to rolling in it if she ever looked at me some type of way. Their color? I don’t know. But most of all, I dare to wonder about the bludgeoned scar between them.

5. Sturdy cobalt. Far more indicative of her steady heart than gold could ever hope to be. Still susceptible to tear, but not so easily warped by heat or stress.

6. Simply brown. No, red? It’s always been hard to tell through the fog. Truthful like the rawest earth, I’ll call her mahogany.

7. Faded blue spray paint over a slate gray wall. Forcibly muted after her years of blasting music, but there’s still that rogue twinkle to them that I pray slips through the cracks.

8. Coffee, with all the vim and vigor to make you click your heels and fall in love.

9. Unripe lime seen lazing in the shade. Not fit for a margarita just yet, but straining at the bit nonetheless.

10. Hazel, although I still don’t know what the **** that actually is. Whatever. It looks nice on her resume.

11. Green. Or were they blue? The memories of her were too wonderful, too important, that I had to let the littlest details fade away first.

12. The crystallized seafoam that made me realize I deserved to feel alive, too.

She says she doesn’t have the strength within herself to write poetry.
Yes, her. The one who so often nourished me with song
til my soul began to learn how to hunt for itself,
whose word carried weight in leading me to pick my own instrument,
albeit one of a different tone,
as the key in keyboard became prominent for the first time
and the sound of purposeful fingers upon it could be considered,
only in the right light,
synonymous to the plucking of strings, just as rooted in emotion.

Yet she's the first to say that she herself can't do it.

Thing is, I suppose we’re politely at odds on the matter.
She favors poetry that’s sharper, with a cleaner cut,
that’s message is immediate and jarring
as a conduit running from soul through skin,
or a loose-lipped diary finally freed from lock and key.
And when she declared it, I started to consider what my poems seem to me:
Blackberry bushes (but kinder, I hope)
that snag and immerse just long enough
to make me feel I’ve had an effect.
I’ve used writing to expel my most gnarled feelings
to any passerby who’s maybe felt the same.
Like crying in a mirror:
alarming, but oddly refreshing,
and an indefinite reminder that our aches are never only our own.

Still, I'm not sure why it blows my mind
to hear that even the most glamorous hearts,
who wear confidence as a summer breeze that's always in their favor
and who inspire, from beau gestures to sleight of hand,
are included in those who find themselves pacing back, back and forth,
begging curbside at the dime store
for a scrap of the same feed that convinces a heart to pump ink.

But she says that any art that's enjoyed is worth it.
So while she seeks out words that bare the bones,
I’ll stay and make a meal of the marrow,
hollowing them so that the poetry may have a rightful place
to reverberate as hymns in a universal monastery.

But hell, like I’m any old soul.
I dress nicer than I otherwise would,
turn to the mother who told me I don’t meet her lowest standards,
and ask for a critique.
All for the moment when she greets me at the door with a legendary G#.

...Now please, could you spare a dime?

With hesitation do I dedicate to the half-empty,
but there's a vision of a girl I can't quite shake:
up to her Achilles tendons in rambunctious folds
of rank, grabby, carnivorous sea.
Disgruntled and shivering, but there all the way.

She’s the rare bird convinced of common feathers,
not so much ugly duckling as self-deprecating swan,
never so bold as to lock eyes with the water
for fear of seeing herself in clearest view,
and never seeing for sure that she’s a heart of beauty.

Not that she cares, anyways.

She's got the sappiest music taste—
though I’m not supposed to know that, either—
characterized by aplenty
of heartfelt bangers we loved in youth and pretended to be over.

She's no Mr. Brightside.
But ****, when she cleans up...

The only silver lining she believes in is her sharp-edged contour,
cutting as the retort she’s got ******* on the pulse of.
She just doesn’t need to shout to prove it.

I've the off-and-on friend who resents without saying,
no words to spare when she's busy as of late struggling to breathe.
The silence I took for elegance is suffocation,
but at least black lung is still the vogue, I’ve heard?

And through the struggle comes a wicked perfection:
the ability to lay waste with a whisper,
and revere only in the rawest quiet.

Her humor, sometimes for the offensive,
is the most potent sense of feeling
that doesn’t take looking at her own self.
She as herself could light up a room.
If only it weren’t so much easier to fall short.

Because never would she outwardly want to be on someone’s mind,
(little does she know she jumps to the forefront of mine)
yet in that same reluctant, teeth-grinding urge she denies herself
in the desire to find her good lighting,
I have in the desire to let her know she is beloved.

But to tell someone they’re poetry to you is a pin in the grenade
that these budding wisdom teeth just can’t grasp.

She’s there now in the sea I still liken to her eyes.
Windows to the soul akin to a place she hates,
just as capable of resentment.

All I know is I’ll be torn asunder if she loses herself
beneath the brine of a bottle or the message of faux-hope within it.
In a churning silence of the drink,
there’s no honest sentiment with which to compare.
Lost at sea, with no quality control,
fool’s gold is such a fine, agonizing release.

Yet on she heads, carving mountains in her path, for a swill.

Still, every time I see her again,
I know I’ll never help loving her some,
while I pretend there's comfort in the fact
that most of us had to sink before learning to swim.

To the girl who empowers me,
With a laugh, a glance, an honest word,
an unprompted touch of my shoulder,
to do the things I otherwise wouldn’t bother to:

Never have I been so brave as to hold a ball python for my own fun til she spoke of a snake who’s half her height
like an old friend.
That is not a metaphor.
Or to do that one pull-up more
and maybe one after it,
if there’s even a chance it’d bring me a step closer
to being the person I know I want to be.
And I’m definitely not yet a person who’s built for pullups,
but with her looking my way, doubt seems like a foreign word.

She told me she wished
that she could someday be the subject of my writing,
yet it seems every time I try to prove
that love is action,
passion eclipses intellect,
my paper folds itself into an airplane and flies by its own accord,
and I’ll be ****** if,
of all the things I can’t control,
my own words will be one of them.

I know I severed us for a while,
tugged too ******* the Jacob’s ladder between her fingers,
wanting more in the moment than she had to spare,
til her eventual reply was noble truth:
that her hands wouldn't be vacant for holding
while she had so much to set them to work on.

Her hands, her beautiful hands, were booked,
sometimes literally,
with her thousand different interests and commitments,
and all I could do was lay in bed at night,
sometimes tossing and turning at the thought of the time
where she took me in her arms on a whim,
and I was unable to fall asleep
for fear that, if she permeated the film of my dreams,
she'd be more nightmare than not.
Yet with time, she spoke to me by her own inclination.
Whistled to me like the stray dog I'd made of myself
and lay out a spot to sit next to her.

I never realized until now how much I respect her
for never playing nice with the boy who,
assuming we’re friends enough,
calls me a useless lesbian.
I guess that pound of a joke had some ounce of truth to it,
for all the times where what she and I had
felt like one great web of miscommunications,
and subconsciously I see her as the spider
or she sees me
or sometimes it’s us both this whole time.
But if there's any certainty in it all, it's this:
She'd been in at least the back of my mind
for as long as I'd known her,
asserted herself right away
as the kingpin of my flighty wits.
And I still dream of writing something that makes her heart beat,
even halfway to on par with all the stories that race
through her head,
in her wild blood.
I wanted to be her latest passion for even a moment.
Because the honest to god gleam in her eyes
when she tells me what’s really on her mind
made me so selfish as to want to be that thing,
for however long
or not-long
it could last.

Yet I've sometimes seen that fervor in her eyes waver,
like they're trying to promise something better.
Little does she know
she's already the best thing for me
just by being herself.

And I understand that she doesn’t love me
not in the way I once wanted,
but having her for however long in my life,
before she’s off like a free willed honeybee
with so much better to do,
that is enough and so much more.

Because despite how I’ve tried to deny the facts of the matter,
I’m firmly rooted for a girl who's bold enough
to crack the whip over my head if I ever went to war with myself.
A confidant that won't run,
won't offer half truth when the whole of it
is all that actually matters.

This was that paper airplane
comprised of eight months of the cheapest blood, sweat, and tears
from the first moment she set up camp
in the farthest reaches of my heart,
to where I was finally past the point of dreaming
of any future
where she may not be as happy with me as I am with her.

For better or for worse,
I've straightened my spine and let the honest truth sail
knowing full well that she doesn’t owe me a thing.
I'm still not sure if I was coming clean
or stating what’d always been obvious,
when I wished for her peace
among these watercolor depictions,
for her to find the rest she so craved and deserves,
and to wake, inspired anew, in a cycle that suited her,
whether I was a part of that cycle or not.

To the girl who helped me find the gall,
and who's going, going,
gone on to better things:
Gabriel García Márquez says I love you with all my being,
so maybe that’s why I'm finally letting you go.

When it seems all the world wants to sell me on painkillers, you face the troubled of all sorts with a scalpel and a wink. Even when those stitches holding your own spitshined heart together are looking a little iffy.

Since childhood, we’ve floundered like fish out of water both longing for the sea, but with age, I think that you and I have come to view the ocean in very different ways.

What I see as an adventure, you’ve always seen as home.

The sea could never quite mystify someone who’s strived to be more siren than human. No, unlike the flower from which you were named, your real garden patch is present with the planets.

You make me want to be as stalwart as Stonewall, and save my wishing well quarters for the pigs who tried to suss out every non-straight playing broad through her suit clothes, so that on the days where the face of my best friend's assaulter bears down like the man in the moon, she’ll preserve her beautiful, blessed hands by halting her fist before it can hit any wall.

Apparently, you’ve been learning Russian on a whim since age eleven. You love tattoos and art in it's sometimes most tantric forms. The firm and sometimes too-firm handshake between aesthetic and soul, and what, дорогая сестра, is more human than that?

And you called yourself cynical.
Yet when the life of a honeybee means so much in your hands, I can’t understand how you tried to scorn the weight of the world. You found beauty in banana slugs, and I have to believe you do not know your own self.

Seeing you make sense of other people, I now believe that mermaids are incredibly self-conscious, so when we asail our Somali plundered doubloons, blood diamonds, pearls of tortured oysters, and other ill-gotten goods back into the sea, may we feel we’ve done our duty when they see their own reflections for the first time and become narcissists.

Because of you, I tried for the first time to love myself, because like it or not, this is what I’ve got. What we’ve got. The most detached tag team duo the world’s never seen.

But on the day that I finally throw the dragon’s den fortune of our mother back into the mariana trench from which she and the sessions family came, I’ll think back to the time where she said that, as siblings, we’d grow up to be best friends. But let’s face it, we have both lost a lot of best friends, though you are the only one of all those come and gone who’s yet to steer me wrong. Okay, that’s a fat lie, because for a second of my life you convinced me to believe that you are cynical.

Comparing your stride to the rest of the world’s, I will never again judge somebody for the way they walk. Even if they have to drag themselves, kicking and screaming from point A to point B, the last thing a person needs is another stranger stepping on their lifeline.

I hear of everything you're doing, day in and day out, think of all the times this world’s nearly lost you, and I remember the statue in our neighbor’s front lawn. A little girl-an angel- with butterflies landing atop her precious hands. Then I realized that to be an angel statue means you can never reach out for more, and suddenly, I know why you always preferred cyborgs.

That my first love was the perfect blue eyed, blond haired cherub is the error of my socialization, proved by the stained yellow of my newly-dulled canines and how there’s ****** pestilence we know and deny that I‘ve come to love
All the rot
And the “Memento Moris”
Because they are all the stuff that I imagine makes the color of her grotesque foot, pressed plainly to my spine like to any ladybug she would’ve otherwise made Love to.
So you may understand that the most attractive thing in the world would be to see her undone.

I won’t say this isn’t perverse for Love.
I love her so much I can despise who she’s become, her skull, a tomb robbed of fresh thought, her gems scraped off like scabs to decorate a destitute grapevine, then plucked and fed to the Noble she owes her fair hair.

“Circumstance. There’s only circumstance to blame.” I once cried about it, my lips craving only to move in tandem again with hers. So parroting was the next best thing.
Until I crushed peaches to try and be rid of her, which is why my ***** tastes of them every time now.

I recall crow’s feet, pressed to my groin, apropos of all I didn’t escape.
So I say, “I adore you” to My Emetophobic Girlfriend to be safe, so Love can stay reserved for the fantasy,
Where “silver lining” is less often the sole, desperately perceived pretty glint offered by the carving knife, since buried in bleeding beef, the raw nerves chastened by death... or anything else so depressing.

My first love became a neutered pet,
Gutted of her Love for me by her best friend’s fishknife fingernails and steel-eyed judgement, instructed, “Be Better.”

She told me things she’d never told anyone,
Then told me, “Remember me as you wish.”
So I cling to the fleeting memory of her perfume, yet am haunted nonetheless by her last words.

Alongside the girl who's a home where the heart is and a rooftop escapade all in one, I learned while wandering like a stray dog through a French chateau that old folktales believed salamanders were born of fire.

I’ve always felt as if fire is a cliche. It bites the hand that feeds it. Beautiful, but destroys. We’ve heard it before.

But, no one strives to be a cliche, and no one would like to be born of fire, either.

Too often, when we hack the head from the hydra of our family roots, another tragedy grows in its place. A salamander might have poison in its blood, and bloodline, ‘cause this family tree was uprooted long before I’ve ever seen it in its prime.

Sometimes, it’s hard to use the brimstone on your tongue for good when those with a right to be pessimists seem to drag you down, but think before you spit fire at the cinderblocks round your ankles, because even under a cockatrice’s gaze, they’re people too.

In those long weeks where high school looks like a desert, we somehow learn to never be more fragile than the skeletons, or the eggshells we're walking on. But I’ve since learned and swear by the fact that life and living are two very different things.

I can't make up my mind if this is all more apology or anthem, but if I can recommend one thing, it's this:

Allow the complexity of language in the simplest of words to forcibly beat your heart. You won't always hear the words you want to, the words that might keep a desert salamander alive, and that would do the same for you if there were someone there to say them. So grasp at straws. Hear poetic words now, and poetic words later, no matter how ragtag they may or may not be, intricate or beautiful, both, or neither, and everything in between and not. Plaster in the cracks of your atrophied heart from those nights where your mother slams every door and threatens to never come back, and dear god, make use of whatever words in this world there are that bring comfort through even that.

When the drudgery of life interrupts the sensation of living, presenting you with a rigged inkblot that just won't do you right, look, in the absolute worst of times, rather than up at a sky you've seen every day of your life, look down.

When the inconsistent blue that you've seen on every week of every month of every year fails you, do not search for life saving inspiration in what you've seen a thousand times. See the intricate patterns in the wood floors you walk on. I know it feels so often as if the beam from the lighthouse has already passed you by, but a crack in the pavement, a blemish, might just be the greatest joy of your day when you spot the flowers that still grow in spite of how they’ve been tread upon.

Then, scan your neutral horizon to see the little people. The unprompted kindness, the shy smiles, and the people who never quite know what to do with their hands, because I cross my heart and hope never to die young that they've felt this way too.

A person ought to mean more in life than in death, so for the love of your own self, feel, even in the darkest of power outages, for anything that's always out there.

And it’s true, autumn leaves cannot save your life in the long term, nor even will the smile of a stranger. But as long as you keep saving room for the simple joys that make your heart beat overtime, you'll have the first ounce of leverage it takes to save yourself.

Tonight, I wish I knew who to blame, the crooked nuthatch responsible for the eggs I can see strewn even through sky from over hillside. Shattered before their time, now spilled sunny-side up, with innards beaten and assailed to the open air. Where, like a pact, each curbs their own messy shine before meeting eye to stormy eye.

I’m unaccustomed to it all. This unspoken honor system (or was it embarrassment all along?). I’ve never seen a people so wary to count their chickens before they hatch.

In the daytime, I still don’t know where I am, but am flooded by the fact that I have to see it. Where honesty with heft enough to knock the wind from any stray body is convection (sorry, convention), stowed near the bullets in every back pocket.

But what a good thing it is, to have a friend at the other end: muted in her gleaming, but gleaming just enough.

At least these lights are good for something.

Mostly, I miss those glow-in-the-dark stars.

They saw it all, yet gleamed for me still.

Maybe they were the best friends I'll ever have.

They'll never leave,
but I already did.