"6 years old, brunette hair, pink dress."
"I’m with the grandmother."
"Last seen?"

Later they found her by the moon star wall.
It sang her arrival to hold a stranger’s hand and, grinning, she skipped to her grandmother’s arms.

Hard Drawn
I found a hole in your ribcage

just above the hard piece of who you were

lodged in my throat

insects on my tonsils

and I found an eyelash on your cheek

just below the wire frames

beneath your perspective

I find myself in between the butterfly shoulder blades of your swan spine.

I think I might stay a while.

what if i can’t stop thinking about that day

when you took me to the feminist modern art exhibit at your favorite museum across town

holy ****

and kissed me in the starlight room

and i thought, ******* you are good.

I put dates on my wanting to remember my tactile experience at the expense of my memory

"that’s very meta, isn’t it?"

alternation

sublimation

consecration

They have spent their hours wanting for a moment

and They have spent their moments wanting for the hours

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.

i walked out of my house

half past midnight

in a short skirt and torn tights but

i was not headed for disaster.

i was on my way to sit in a circle

and dance in a triangle

and sleep

on a square.

mornings ****. mornings are the worst thing in the entire world. i wake up every day far too aware of your absence in my bed, on the window side. You’d face the wall and let me cuddle up and touch your hair until you fell asleep, snoring. I ******* loved your snoring, and I don’t really understand why. You’d lie down for just a few moments, and then fall asleep mid-sentence, parts of you still awake. You could be snoring and still braiding my hair, or kissing my hands. Sometimes you’d fall asleep on an angle and your breathing would scare me so I’d wake you up just for a second to try and get you to face the right way, but you never remembered in the morning, so I figured you weren't too bothered. when i told you, you said that you wished i were as nice to you when you're awake as i am when you’re asleep.  I wake up wanting to hold you and want to call you and say “love, i’m so so so so so sorry. forget it, let’s try again. one more time,” but you always said I was awful at apologies. i probably am. i don’t know, i haven’t apologized to anyone in a while.

You tip my femininity when you scratch my back with your stubble before you shave in the mornings and it is so lovely to be near one who can cry.

You wear heavy boots with the tip of the steel toe showing to match the glint of mischief bouncing off your eyeglass frames and i stand on your toes to kiss you goodnight on my porch in the snow where you brought me oatmeal cookies to talk with you about foundations.

I don’t know if you needed help with that paper, but I certainly needed the cookies.

is there a word for the way it feels to cry in front of the Water Lilies in the museum?

is there a word for when your teeth taste like blood from getting punched in the heart?

is there a word for the moment when you say the last words you ever wanted to say to the boy?

there should be.

maybe then I could understand what it takes to tell someone that you hope they wake up feeling alone.

Who I’ve become is someone I respect.

I miss taking the train in the mornings and the subways in the evenings when I spent last summer  in Philadelphia more than I miss you.

I’m more confused in a way that forgives myself and I’m more creative in the work that i do. I’m more honest in all aspects and more understanding in my suspects.

You ran the maze past sanity and doubt
as if
your skies with the stone rock

could speak past a whisper.

I hid in perfume bottles notes to my old self
and I buried the harbinger dolls.

I am told that my anatomy is the sheer academy of my lack of sensibility and that my sense of autonomy is just my way of rebelling against my own skin.

Because I was born in a body that is just a little too small to contain such an opinion, and so this must be just the remainder of some book I read, right?

I am told that at times my mouth traces outlines larger than my hands can, and all I know is that my fingers stretch to try and reach the cord that turns off the light on my porch so that I can find the streetlight shadow puppet.

Because I am at odds with the lightbulb delivery of my best friend’s idealism and my body’s realism and it’s all a sense of alchemism when I’m searching for altruism.

I’m told that I am too big for my body, or “for such a little girl, you’re very smart,”. I used to start in the plus-size section of stores, only to be escorted to diminutive floral prints and capri pants.

I am still mistaken for a lost child at the airport, I am still advised not to go out in certain areas after dark, I didn’t realize I was small until I wasn’t listened to.

Getting lost in a city that wears me too well

A man yells and a well-dressed older woman smokes a cigarette

and I turn left on fifth.

If you took a picture of this city,

an instant of stillness

no one would be able to tell if it was falling apart or coming together.

it’s the razor's edge of winter
and kissing you smells like mustache wax.

you drive me to the hardware store to pick up galvanized wire
so that i can build miniature shadow people
that make us laugh for hours

it’s hard to find the soft parts of you to rest my head on
but it’s always the simple parts that i like best

I don’t know how love works.

But I know I left you on a Sunday after spending six months trying to shove the words that escaped me into the dozens of envelopes that you had sent over the last six years.

I don’t know how loves works but I know that Christmas Eve, when you held me and I cried, it was because I was already losing track of your world map hands as you navigated the clams in the soup your brother made.

I don’t know how love works, but I know that over spring break, i bought flowers i knew you wouldn’t even like to say I’m sorry, even though I knew I was just trying to make things better temporarily until I got the courage to say goodbye.

I don’t know how love works, but I know that when you force feed yourself a certain amount of affection, your body starts to reject it. You can only fill up so much artificial substitute for love, like cotton candy filling up my head and grape flavoring spilling out of my mouth all over your bedsheets like the time i was drunk and spilled hot chocolate with marshmallows and you yelled at me like they would never be clean again.

I can’t love a terrarium. I get too frustrated with things I can’t touch. I can’t fill up any more phone calls with rainstorms and giving up.

I wasn’t ready for your sky-eyed nostalgia any more than I was ready for my suffragette seclusion.

I couldn’t have swallowed any more of my snake bitten hollow intellect than that which allowed me to kiss your throat to the stars skin.

So I’m hoping the ochre-rayed sun moon stars rain clock parts will aid in the time that can make things like they were in the gazebo with the puddles stuck in my shoes and your hat already full of thoughts.

And then can we spin around again?

I love roller coasters.
I love the old rickety ones that jar my spine and push me into my little sister and i can feel our ribcages collide with the
click-click-click as they slowly build suspense and propel me towards the sun.

my last boyfriend hated them. He felt that his stomach couldn’t stand up to the drop of gravity so he ran at the sight of the climb up to reason and fled the line when i unbuckled my seatbelt.

i love waiting in line for a **** good thrill, and i count down the minutes until the spill of my scream echoes into the hairspray of the woman in front of me as she holds the hand of her cut-offs husband.

i guess you aren’t one to pine for the wooden tracks of thrill, either. but last night i lay in bed, on my side, trying to memorize the planes of your face, trying to calculate the angle of your nose as it leans slightly to your right, you tell me it’s crooked, i tell you it is lovely. it is the finest architecture this side of eiffel tower and you run your hands from the top of my collarbone, down the valley of my waist to the top of my hip, and you tell me you wish you had a tiny car to run along the line.

most of all i love the fall.

I remember my primary school
which was all large hallways and shiny shoes

library
which was all popsicle stick projects
and a round reading room

after hours and finding a book about art.

I showed it to Mrs Romano
who was fat in a pleasant way and wore round glasses

and she said “Picasso?”
and
i said
"yes."

i think i meant to tell you that i loved you

but instead i told you about a dream i had where you locked me in a room and wouldn’t shut up about your socks.

i think i meant to ask you to kiss me

but instead i asked for a cigarette on your porch even though it was cold out and I wanted to go home.

i think i meant to tell you i trust you

but instead i told you to buy a notebook and fill it with lists so that your mind can work again.

It is the waiting which
makes people so vaguely uncomfortable.
So much so that
I think we all start to pretend
(as hard as we can)
that we are the only ones.

Or perhaps not the waiting.
But the lack of control it conveys
ushered in like a grey balloon  swathed in ugly red wool
and there is nothing I can do except to stare at the ceiling paint
peeling faintly slowly carelessly
to wherever old ceiling paint goes

Because after this layer there is another:
white like bones.
Next is red like candy,
then green like plastic trees,
until after ten inches of blue
you reach stone-cold metal, so ancient and unused to the air
that it might crumble if you sneezed too enthusiastically.

lightning bugs always know where to find me.

I mean this literally. I mean they consistently land on my fingertips when I’m gesturing, I mean, they rest on my shoulders when I’m dancing, I mean they find my knees when I’m wandering.


I’m perpetual motion.

They flit onto my skirt from my parents field in the forest, dozens of ecstatic chromatic insects, missing my tonsils this time and tickling the back of my neck.

And I’m clothed in phosphorescent resplendent incandescent light.

and inexplicably we jump
into the lake
though it is three in the morning and cold

i feel a young man's giggle on my neck
and turn to find buck teeth
odd-angled
too-broad shoulders for such a giggle

next to him the fog rolls off the water
and covers my chin like it covers the rocks
so i can barely see them
and she trips, tumbling, like she's a step away from an avalanche

pine trees reach up to the moon and down the water
and our laughter
meets in the middle.

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.

If today was for giant caterpillars,
giant crowds,
giant sounds,
and chaos, then this evening must be for

Blueberry fingertips
white wine in my glass
the music of an accordion
and a paperback novel.

Breeze in the window that waltzes with ribbons
and fills the bottles I’ve collected for the past six years.

(soft t shirt from the first time I fell asleep on his couch)

mmm, stop WORRYING.
It is no time at all for any of that.
Take the time to take the time to take your time.
shhh, brain.
hush, mouth.
Quiet Quiet Quiet

quiet boy stepped into my looking glass and handed me his helmet
years past until i noticed his long graceful hands in my hair
and i turned to see where he had come from

it was just past nine when i took the zucchini out of the oven and waited
it was half past ten by the time he rang the bell
and i sat nervous and shallow

he gets lost in his own world and finds his hands in mine
we stepped back from our maps and abandoned our ships
i sank in with the anchors

it was just last night when i realized i could love you
it was three junes since i first wanted to
i kissed you in the nighttime.

date a boy who owns a sewing machine
and takes you to feminist modern art exhibits

date the son of a librarian
who can tell you all your favorite stories
while you fall asleep

date a boy who wears a chalkboard helmet
to ride a motorcycle to the top of the mountain
to see the city lights

date a boy who follows you up mountains
to kiss you in the wind
and run his hands through your hair

and date a boy with glasses
who pushes them up on the bridge of his nose
after he kisses you

your voice still sounds like flowers
but now your hands feel familiar

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?"

I’m glad you wear a helmet when you ride your motorcycle because your brain is far too pretty to be splattered on wet pavement

I’m glad you take care of the humans in your life because your son is a genius trapped behind his own shaky hands

I’m glad you’re honest with yourself because your teeth hold so much truth that your tongue still astounds me

I’m glad you always ask how I’m doing because it helps me to remember to ask myself.

Strangers are nice to me because I’m pretty, but I wouldn’t be much without the rest of you.

crooked teeth houses push
"i love yous" to the front porch of my mouth
in an earnest attempt to
set the sun down to a slower tempo
hoping if i can hold onto this city
on the day we almost crashed
then i maybe i’ll be able to hold onto him

i can’t kick the words past my lips so i
try to keep holding his hand
even though he needs to shift gears

he tells me that he likes it when i kiss him on the mouth
i like it when he’s cursing under his breath because things are so beautiful
i want to see him naked every single day

he told me when he shaved his face
and even though i already knew about it
when i saw it in person i squealed
and i couldn’t stop kissing his jawline
even though we were in public
and even though i’m pretty sure i tasted like macaroni

I’m learning to travel light. A backpack, a mandolin case, and a water bottle. That’s enough. A black skirt, an extra pair of wool tights, and a teeshirt big enough to sleep in. Headphones.

my sister asks me when and where and why I’m coming and going and leaving and staying

I’m packing up

I’m always packing up

but my suitcases are getting smaller, more efficient, less attached.

I can’t keep track myself

Letting go of a round shouldered man who wanted to change my signature means touching the slimy parts of my bloodstream ink jar heart.

It means peeling back the window shade to smash the glass pane eyeteeth of my youth.

And remembering the key to unhinge my jaw tension voice sans stones and lacking sweetness.

It means saying goodbye today and releasing my ribcage parakeet hands to catch my own thoughts.

I am through with placeholding promises and biting through backwoods in order to forget the pieces of strength that I love so much.

I think we’re all just honest missing pieces

shoved under the couch or chewed past recognition

we fill these flaw with tact and with sarcasm

with extremes and shouts and prayers

and kisses and each other

The smidge smudge of pastel over my left eyebrow matches the wildflower I picked down by the river which matches the stray spray paint stain on my right shoe and I’m not one for symmetry, so it suits me just fine. Today is for letting go and for mailing things left behind. Today is for coffee and for Peter Pan Wendy Tiger Lily dances. Today is a blueberry day.

As you reach a mountain’s peak, your weight slightly decreases as you get further and further away from the Earth’s core and gravity loosens its hold ever so slightly. If you have ever felt this tiny change in more than a physical sense, then this is for you.

This is for train tracks and box cars, this is for every road we planned to trip but never departed, this is for the difference between August and October and the first snowflake on my sister’s freckles a whole week before Halloween.

Because nothing is as sturdy as uncertainty. Nothing is more constant than the ever changing blues right before dusk in the summertime, where the deepest blue is just over your head. It’s the untruth of the moving target and the integrity of the unlocked window and driving through mountains during a snowstorm on Christmas morning to be home in time for my brother’s favorite joke, but I take the turn too quickly and spin my mother’s car into the woods.

Because I can only trust something viscous and permeable, and there’s this moment when you first see someone push their hair out of their eyes, or take off their glasses that is so identifiably human that I can’t get it out of my head.

The arrangement of my mother’s garden isn’t one I remember because I want to. I remember it because it held her hands when I couldn’t and the hockey game on the car radio wasn’t important because my father said it was a playoff game, but because it was a place we could exchange our thin ice for someone else’s.

This paralysis of analysis lives in the heart of transitional phrases.

**** the way you say nonsense syllables because it makes me weak in the knees.
Your verbalization of a non-vernacular, space-filling, time-stealing thought
makes me melt like Popsicle Boy’s spine when he realized he couldn’t chase the lightning bug anymore.
You’re just two steps shy of blind in more ways than one, and your ribcage is such a terrible pillow.

Um.

I write too many poems about my body.

but it’s the only house my spirit knows

and the only movement is my own

I could write you a love poem

or one about the way the kids in my hometown

used to walk the traintracks like they led somewhere

but i’m completely obsessed with this idea of entrapment

that i could be more than skin and bones that i could be made of

ink blotch shoulderblades

ribbon ribcages

clothespin wrists

and ruby lips

that i could abandon myself and get out of this cage

that’s too big or too small or whatever the **** they tell me this week.

I hope you always remember

that time in Florida

when I came home from work

at 2am on our anniversary

to find you sleeping on the couch

I woke you up with flowers in hand.

I will never, ever forget the way you said

oh sweetheart

and held me like i could have been the only thing that mattered.

we kept the flowers all week,

and after you flew home,

I kept them on the counter

even when they were dry

and brown and shedding,

petals like promises,

and I changed the water daily (if i remembered)

hoping to revive dead flowers

and wishing you could come back.

Your voice is like flowers
Your voice is like Thursdays
Your voice is all the best kinds of ice cream
Oh please stay

Tell me more about that story
Tell me more about that day
Tell me how you thought you’d run
And how you ever convinced yourself to stay

You make my heart flip flop
when you open the door
when it’s cold and I’m waiting
outside on your porch
and you say always “hey”

When you first thought
that this might hurt
you went indoors
washed your hands of the dirt
just like we planned

i consume black coffee by the steaming mouthful
so i can stay awake long enough to do something useful
i am playing a waiting game with my feelings
but i have never been acquainted with patience
the way i admire so much in the humans who love me best

maybe all we all require is the opposite of what we are
to fill in the space between your fingers
is exactly what you can’t hold onto.

anyway i miss your mouth.

I lost my heart when I moved to the city

and I lost my Sunday blues

I found myself a new kind of family

and I found my way back to you

It was a long long road past the bones of the lonely

where my wandering soul met yours

there was a garden filled with the promises of Sarah

the day that we walked blind

to the ghost of the moon and the men that we left

but I found my way back

i have plenty of dried leaves and hot water at home, but my winter self hikes four miles in the snow for a cup of tea.
i know more words than i had ever hoped to understand, but i still shuffle them like tap shoes to place meaning on my notebooks.
i have seen mountain views that make me weak in the knees, but i still need to see what else the world holds, and if that makes me reckless beyond being someone’s wife, then so be it.
I understand that the life that I want is not one that should be kept up with or stood alongside, but one where I deign mystery into my own flesh and mysticism into my own sky

long fingers crooked with the holding

of the words of dead men and motorcycle handles

called me brave instead of pretty

and my whole heart took

courage by the throat and kissed it madly.

I'm not good at closing doors quietly.
So much so that my father made a sign to remind me.
It says:  

Shh!
Quiet Please!

in blue magic marker.
It's not that he's trying to stifle me, he's just sleeping.

My mother told me that she had to realign the door frames after I moved out, as they had grown used to my proclivity for slamming.

You are the velvet to my lace, the freckles on your face, the rocket to outer space when i’m forgetting why my feet need to hit the ground.


You are three seconds away from a sunrise when I desperately need the light, you are a cup of tea and wisdom, and you are a giggle at just the right moment while the blood exchanges ideas between my wide-eyed fanatic manic panic mind and my static acrobatic heart.

You are love and a smile when everything around has fallen dark. We fall down the seasons, each leaf turned to green as the time is subjective as valued.

we fall down the winter of broken glass and torn kneecaps and into the summer of understanding and patched hearts.

We fall down the stairs of the boy who was the blank slate and into the arms of the boy who painted his stone happy.

You are the living room of my soul, where all the pictures make us smile just to look at them and the quilt on the couch is beautiful enough to make up for the small tear in the corner. Where the cups of tea sipped are innumerable as the curls on your head and the watercolor windows open past our souls and into our worlds.

Someday we’ll be able to keep track of our socks and get enough sleep but right now I’m still figuring it out. I’m still trying to connect the sky to the tree to the earth to the tesseracted interaction theatrical statement of who I am and what I will be. We will become.