his sheets felt like the ocean on my skin
so i forced his head head under the surface
while i counted his eyelashes.

his hands looked like paper lace
so i grabbed his fingers tighter
and brought them to my lips.

his shoulders smell like the floor of a forest of pine trees
so i laid my head on his chest
roped my fingers through his hair
while the lights flickered in his basement

i wonder who let him hold the keys to his own chest
or the cradle for his own mind
his structure of patience is beyond architecture
and his touch of my spine is beyond medicine

I couldn’t stop crying when you played guitar on your birthday on my parents porch because it was time you chose to spend with me out of anyone in the entire world and it’s so rare that anyone ever gets to be exactly where they want to be.

He asks me to choke him about fifteen times a day. Fourteen times, I do, but the fifteenth, I take his throat in my hands and I kiss him everywhere he used to hurt. Somewhere along the way I lost track of what it meant to hurt. I tip toe tightrope walk across the tiniest line between good pain and bad pain and I am wearing the daintiest dress you’ve ever seen.

I wonder if a younger version of myself, even a year younger, could look me in the eyes and tell me what they thought they were doing this whole time. I wonder if I could hand that version of myself a sliver of a clock, a grain of sand from an hourglass, a tick of a kitchen timer so that she could have something to stand on, from a step stool perspective of what this year would bring.

When he grabs my wrist and pins me to the sheets like a butterfly, he uses his eyelashes to tickle my cheeks.

When he looks at me and my stomach drops, I tell him he’s handsome and he tells me he needs a haircut.

I knew when your skin stopped smelling like oak trees that it was time for me to leave you. I knew when everything tasted like curry and *** that I needed to run, but I wasn’t ready for months.

So I spent months. I spent almost a full year convincing myself I was in love, wrapped in plaid blankets and handmade ugly red scarves and even uglier red scars and I was just running through the motions until I gained momentum.

At the time, I taught art, and I’d come home from work with big, rainbow spills on my skin. Green on my arms, blue on my knees, red on my chin, and you looked at me and said
"Don’t they have a sink where you work?"

I guess I knew then too.

We got drunk before my bus left and I knew then.

I kept giving you pieces of me to hold onto. I’d hand you my thumbnail’s song on a mandolin, I’d give you my long hair to braid, I’d give you my toes to **** on and you carried it all down with you. I’m sorry for that.

The museum feels like heaven, feels like I could walk into the corner Pollack and the indiscriminate Monet, but there’s the characterization of Thomas Kane and you hate Mondays security guard.

The man with a beard followed me all the way from the Impressionist room to the modern films and when he finally made me lift my eyes from the canvas, his were turquoise and shook me awake.

I kept running up the stairs because I finally found out where they keep the hidden garden with the spiraled copper fountain and I laughed when I found my reflection in the Italian enamel.

You fell asleep with your head on my knees.
The weight of your skull was alarmingly heavy, so I played with your hair until you woke up. The moment of recognition on your face was so human I wanted to cry.

You scrunch up your eyebrows and touch your glasses trying to remember and a tiny echo of a perfect smile plays on your lips. You kiss me exactly and hum along.

You carried a contraband white umbrella into the gallery so we hid it under a desk. Your helmet was still blank so I gave you some concept art. Your languid loss of service as a multitude of goodbyes allow me to kiss your forehead right as your thoughts hit the pillow.


So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I understand why you tuck me into a warmer blanket before you leave for work in the morning with your heavy boots and your thermos and let me sleep while you shower and kiss me awake for breakfast with a cup of coffee in hand.

I smell like the zucchini bread that I spent all afternoon baking.
You smell like pine wood and soap.
She smells like lavender and lipstick,
He smells like rosemary and hope.

We all bike down the valley to get to the spring,
helmets on, eyes to the horizon,
the skyline, I swear, rose to meet us that day.

You and I get there first, we lay in the sun
by the river, dancing on the stones,
jumping off ledges in boots
til the wind chills our bones.

We warm up with blankets,
unpack our baskets
and settle in for the sunset over the river.

Illuminate the bridges,
halflight the buildings,
shine on the rivers,
the light stopped lilting.

Brilliant colors, then none at all.
It grew darker again and we said goodnight.
"Do you mind if we don’t go straight home?"

Not at all, not at all, not at all.

My nutritionist told me I need to increase my caloric intake and eat more carbs. I asked my nutritionist, “aren’t carbs bad for you?”
She said, “No. Carbs are not bad for you, carbs are an immediate energy source for your body to use, what’s bad for you is not eating enough and passing out at the end of the day like some ***** *****. Now eat some carbs and get some meat on those bones before I order you a ******* pizza myself.”

I should mention that my nutritionist is also my best friend. I call her Lady Reptar, because she is one. A lady, not a reptar, even though she’s twenty times more awesome than a dinosaur and fifty times nicer. She’s beautiful like a ******* daisy in the woods and she’s sharp and wittier than her cooking knives and she’s warmer than her father’s woodstove.

"So, do poppy seeds count as protein?"