I am made of quiet storms washing themselves away.

I used to be that girl who believed in staying close to the things and to the people who make you feel human — make you alive. But these days the book clutters look just like a patch of misplaced stars while the dusk crawled in my head, and the poems look better when they're crumpled or written in red inks and on my wrist, and all the songs just come and go. Today, I let all four of my cacti die. Today, my eyes took the form of the nimbus clouds, and my body reeked of petrichor; maybe it has returned to dust. Today, I felt too empty to even mind the emptiness. And today, I would've written a eulogy to that girl who used to believe that we should all stay close to the things and to the people that make you feel human and alive.

The thing is, sometimes we're not alive anymore.

Where do I start in letting you go?

It's not in the ruminations. All they'll long for are simpler, purer times, back when loving me was everything you ever knew — back when sighing your name didn't hurt. Now it's a whisper, settling on the ground long after the woodsmoke has stopped lingering. Now, it's just a memory settling deep in an open wound.

And love, where do I start in letting you go? My hands are still bruised from writing poems, when you already were handing me crumpled paper roses — all etched with endings I was afraid to write. The moment you kissed her lips, did you already let me go? Now here on my shoulder rests the weight — the mess of it all. Tell me, what do I do with these words, falling helplessly on my lap? What do I do with all this hurting? What do I do with all this love?

And where do I start in letting you go, when my shaking hands still refuse to confront your absence? When my throat still refuses to abandon all yearning — a wounded huntress that still screams for the moon. And I'd hoped it is easier to stop loving you after your skin had been tainted by her lips, ghosting gently — forming into the sweetest of smiles.

And I'd hoped it is easier to stop loving you after you had drowned August's promises against her hair when you'd deepen your kiss — after you had surrendered September's 4 a.m.s, November's love letters, December's midnight rains, January's stove-lit dances, February's moonlit walks, March's Irish teas and solitude, and April's quiet peace — all of it, spoiled, in the name of her kiss. Now all of it — in ruins, lying, waiting patiently for a can of worms, burrowing their way into everything I held dear.

Rome didn't burn down in a day. I wish I would. I wish we would; what's left in ruins won't ever hurt.

And so love,
where do I start in letting you go?




// "Tell me all the ways of letting you go."

1
my spine is a bridge that burns —
bones most breakable, like memories of
driftwoods
collected as a kid,
i now feed to a bonfire
of blistered cyclamens.

2
my spine is a bridge
of no certain grandeur
nor history.
it burns away
and falls,
quietly in the night,
like an unknown laborer.

some of us die this way.

3
the reason for this poem
evades me,
but the heart must write of its sorrows
undisclosed to the soul.
they remain to be
unrecognized parts
of a burning town.

4
now, i speak in tongues
unfamiliar to myself.
i write a poem i'm bound to forget.
i stand in the baptism
of a child i do not know.
i do it anyway.

5
i bring her driftwoods
from the water, mourning under
a burning bridge;
soon the last beam falls apart
and i fall apart
in a forgettably graceless light
this: a sorrow with no name,
i write it anyway.

this: a sorrow undisclosed.
i tell it anyway.

this: a sorrow unrecognized.
i feel it anyway.

you —
kissing the scars on my skin;
such a delicate, carefully crafted
form of poetry, honey,
i will lay it down apollo's altar.

your lips.
my wrists.

again.
and again.

and for a moment there,
they don't look like
a bedlam of veins cut open.
for a moment there,
they look nowhere near
the metaphors
used in place of my self-destruction.

Someone mourns and I am terrified: my skin, shrinking — closing in upon myself, for how can they break and not break at the same time?

— “I am sorry for watching you watch someone else die”

it's been ten years — ten long years but all around me lies this casual atrocity of how easy it is to slip back into sadness, as though it’s the only thing my body knows well

i'm still building myself up on top of breaking skin. oh how easy it is to slip on this shapeless, humming loneliness until it takes the form of my skin. i'm a forsaken deity, learning to come to terms with what's left of her ruins. crumbling, i tie them together — they buckle in place like my knees: a sight too fragile to be a worldly wonder. i'm still learning to be gentle. i'm still learning to forget all the ways i have ever hurt myself. and beyond this corpse-cold bed, these corpse-cold hands — the world goes on spinning. restless as my thoughts, yet immobile as my feet. it goes on spinning — leaving, never slowing itself down for anyone.

these words come out of my tongue, in fragments. i pick them like aphids on a rose — maybe it's the closest thing i'll get to healing.

lost souls don't end up in asphodel meadows, honey —
they end up in your apartment;
a messy, poorly-lit place.
or so i did.
our systems filled
with nicotine and other bad ideas
i will for sure regret.

well, truth be told,
you're mine to regret.

well truth be told,
you're not.

but there we were,
flung in a den of frenzied kisses —
skin next to a black hole,
a black hole next to a skin
guess we'll never know which is who.
but tonight break me —

we both know this isn't your
watching-sunset-and-gazing-at-stars
type of love.

so tonight stain me,
and i'll call it a pseudo-romance, darling
and maybe after,
we can smoke cigarettes
or watch the city fall asleep
or stare at each other's empty eyes;
maybe somehow that's more of our style
darling, than staring at the sunrise is.

but at this moment i know,
in this poorly-lit place,
dripping roofs,
***** sinks,
that i will waste my words writing
beautiful poetry for you,
even if i'm not that beautiful myself.

even if you're not that beautiful yourself.

even if we're not that beautiful ourselves.

and i will wait for you here on the other side, where the earth and her fields await the footsteps of that girl who dared to swallow pomegranate seeds — each one holding a tenfold of unsaid apologies. i will wait for you here, where the storms i brewed found themselves pressing against the softness of lilacs, where the nightfall forgives the sunset for leaving, where morning smells of teakwood and rain. and you will realize that each sigh does not have to weigh like a thousand bent bromeliads — that each breath does not have to ache in the presence of morning light. you will deserve every bit of softness you tried so hard to ****. you will deserve every bit of moment that doesn't hurt — someday, you'll get here and you'll know. you'll know.

— to my younger self

august is a map of my fullest aches. it always has heartbreaks for me to feel. it is all the wrong lights hitting all my wrong angles and now i'm facing a mirror of my body covered in torn traces of breaths — an empty space, a backdrop for a sight of star dusts lingering. august is a map of my feet where the sea has buried technicolored glasses — all swelling, all wounds dulled by the salt and the summer rain. soon, august will all wear off like a cruel high; it's done seeing me mourning, and i'll be an empty shell for september to wash away.

walk past me in the shallow seas. walk past me in full aching state. walk past me — look past; i long to be a ghost of something delicate, something not terrifying, something that doesn't haunt.

I name all of my lovers after months now
and all roads lead to August and
the Roman cities we’ve burned —
how she walked on crumbling streets as I held the matches —
this poem is a page for burning at its tip:
a lone match, scalding — a firelit kiss
but the flames have always been a hypnotic sight
like a woman perched in your sunlit bed —
her hair, red as flames licking my neck,
red as love that bleeds on itself;
it leaves a stain on pretty things.

Now her skin has silk sheets burning away
like banners in a Roman cathedral,
her half-breath kisses, dying — now embers,
tainting my dress black where her lips had staked a claim.
Now her touch is wildfire crawling on my skin
and I am a wounded doe — waiting. waiting.
waiting.


The only world I know burns to the ground
before my very eyes
and we are no phoenixes, darling; all we do is burn.

And I hope you miss her so much; I hope the warm glow of her skin, and the aimless walks, and the sound of her laughter, and the blackberry kisses dipping on your tailbone were all worth it — spoiling what I'd hoped was pure.

Delicate.

Home.

And I hope it's hauntingly beautiful — the way she looked at you like you were all the sunsets I've left behind. I hope you would run out of breath everytime she smiled against your neck. I hope the mere way she said she loved you unsettled your knees. And I hope it hurts — the mere thought of her not saying it — no longer saying it. And I hope you at least loved her so much, for those stolen times that you were together; I hope it was beautiful. Magical. And I hope it felt like coming home. Otherwise, you broke my heart for what wasn't even worth it. You broke my heart for nothing.

Somewhere in these long, midnight drives, somewhere in these litters of I love you's I never said, in the creases of my month-old sheets and in the calls I never made, somewhere between the daybreak and quiet Sunday mornings, between the lamp posts in the streets, between tonight and the first night I knew you, between the sound of hello's, and the sound of things ending for good — somewhere out there, darling, is a place where we've never fallen out love.

the butterflies and their dusted wings — they're sore under my tongue. i inherited the sting of my mother's wounds — her sunday madness and propensity for hurting. but not quite her bravery. not quite her capacity to carry such wounding weights. i am a washed-out silhouette. i cower, with lips blood-red from a tourmaline graze. i shake, i buckle, i drown, and sink. how then, do i say my words without turning them into a gospel made for wasteaways? how do i become half a woman she ever was? how do i live with myself?

long are these cold, clear nights of sobriety and awareness. long are these cold, oppressive seconds. i pull this dilapidated skin — wrap it all over me, resembling an unclaimed body in a morgue. solace exists, but solely outside these walls.

hey.. i'm sorry i didn't call. i actually wanted to, but, well, you know me.

you remember that first time we stayed up until five in the morning? i told you that i only know the kind of love that slowly rips your heart. maybe it's because all i've ever known about love was from the kind that came from ****** up people — my mom, my estranged dad, charles bukowski. her. there'll be always be something in me that will crave the recklessness, the emotional distances, running red lights and messing around. you see, to me love was walking straight into greek fire, but you make me feel like it's divine — just staying put and watching the flames with your head laid on my chest.

so it's not that i don't want this. maybe i do, with a newfound intensity that terrifies me. there, i said it.. and it's unsettling, you see. cause i don't know how to love you with the kind of love that doesn't involve destruction. i don't know how i can love you without greek fires burning us — sinking us. so it's easier this way. telling you that this is going nowhere and that i can't love you. i can't love you. *******, i can't love you.

please. forget i ever said anything.

and i love you like this:

in these freshly washed sheets,
with our limbs tangling,
with your breath on my skin where my shoulder meets my neck
under your gaze,
under what's left of the stars,
in the air, the scent of coffee, and apple crisps, and something that's just purely you,
in these cold, quiet hours before the daylight,
in the every silent ticking of the clock
with newfound honesty
with newfound softness
with each calming of my breath,
with each time it's taken away
with the high of knowing you're here and we're here.
and with the fear of that high,
with the sunrise so far away
with us just lying here in the stillness, in the dark
in the inadequacy of poetry — darling this is peak experience. this is perfect.

i stand in a pit of deep anxiety,
its shapeless form outweighs
all the sunsets i stored
inside my skin —
for keeping,
for the dark.
my arms outstretched towards its colors
are last bits of innocence
the only part untainted,
the only part that doesn't flinch —
at the voices,
the movements,
the arms clawing from below.

six feet deep —
maybe a higher number,
people cannot mourn what they cannot see.
soon these spare lights, these spare words, this spare comfort,
they will all dissolve into a shapeless, formless,
state of corruption;
i am a body, hazy in a jar
dumped at the back of an anthropology museum.
preserved, not rotting —
people do not mourn things that do not rot.
and mourning is all i do in a suspended time,
in a time that moves and doesn't wait.

i stand in a pit — on my feet
with twisted legs and washed-out skin.
i still, as though before a mirror
seeing this weight in full clarity —
it shows in my face, blank as a sheet of ***** ice
where i am buried in.
i still, in my pit, my feet, staring:

the rest of the world is shapeless as it moves past me,
formless as it walks by.

Tell a little girl that her coily hair is beautiful when all of her playmates think otherwise. Marvel at a little boy’s drawings when everyone else he shows them to is too busy to spare a glance. Compliment someone’s floral dress in the subway; compliment someone’s smile, someone’s art, someone’s cooking, someone’s gumamela flowers soup they made especially for you. Thank someone for the songs they introduced, for the songs that now have become your shower jams and lullabies. Tell someone that you think they’re amazing and smart, especially if they don’t think so of themselves.

In a world where everyone looks past a street singer and ignores the old man painting sunsets in a park, be that someone who isn’t afraid to tell people about the beautiful things in them. Be that someone who isn’t afraid to be soft to others. Be that someone who isn’t afraid to be kind.

1
i am the space expanding non-stop at the risk of losing history
and what remains of its stardust.
my sorrows expand with it; my vastness grows wider,
deeper by the day to accommodate
an uninvited houseguest.

2
i fear the act of going through my bones
like a bundle of endless, wistful letters;
some for burning.
some for throwing away.
some for breaking through
my ashen skin.

how can i be both limited and boundless —
it is no magic — just mundanely human.
the thought descends like poison eating at my backbone
until i am no more than a bygone, spineless caryatid.

3
yet again i take down the cosmos,
pick it apart
and in my hands, manage to turn it
into something distastefully prosaic —
turn it into a disassembled being.

all this wordless sadness has made me ancient. alien. unidentified.

4
i am the space expanding non-stop at the risk of losing history;
i have long stopped trying to make any sense to myself and
there is no greater joy
than to be a perplexity.

amid it all, i tiptoe back and forth
between the ice-thin parts of celestine silence
and the static ringing of incomprehensible poetry.

the ground where i stand on breaks;
i float with no direction.

5
i am the space expanding endlessly; i grow wider and deeper
to make room for vaster sorrows —
if only a sigh is enough to hold me
as i tear it all down. tear it all quietly. inward. once and for all.
if only a sigh is enough to hold me
as i implode in tragic,
breath-taking cosmic colors.

i am fluent enough to understand emptiness when it speaks to me; if you dust off my skin enough, you'll see traces of the sighs we exchange — spilling down gracelessly, they bruise a fragile skin. i have mastered the art of naming them after wild lilacs.

maybe for once, i can say that i am soft enough to grow flowers on my wrists. my lungs. my sternum — all the parts of me that hurt.

but i know too well all about screaming in barren lands. i have thrown my poems in a forest fire. i have forgotten how to breathe without hands around my neck. i have wished to fall on a sword, way too many times to still call these open wounds as bruises — these bruises as flowers — these flowers as soft.

i am fluent enough to understand emptiness when it speaks to me — kindly, and yet, how can i tremble over gentle things? maybe pain isn't what it always is, and i wish to unlearn this language — the mother tongue, whose every word i know by heart. and maybe one day, when it sighs my name, i finally will stop sighing back.

but now, this bed is caving in under all these lilacs and glassy, distant eyes. oh, such a classic case of a girl gone mad at the sight of sunbeams on dying flowers — aching in silence, as she watches it all.

i am fluent enough to understand emptiness when it speaks to me. and outside, the sun rises in vain.

And I hope one day, you meet her in some historic street, or in an old bookstore, or in some countryside field, and I hope she loves the way you speak with your lisp, and I hope she likes the films you like, and I hope she writes you poetry at 2 am. And I hope her words finally feel like the kind of home you’ve been looking for — the kind of home you’ll grow old in and never leave, and the one you never found in me.

his chest was the ground caving in
in a matter of seconds;
it was the streets' sudden tremors
the wall cracks
and chipped rocks.
his gaze, hauntingly sad,
it was almost inviting.
and i was a girl,
all white dress and wide eyes
not really knowing any better;
steps, too careful
walks, too slow,
tracing the faultlines
misplaced on his skin;

it was an open field —
an open target for the lightning to strike
and leave its marks
and i was just a girl,
looking for poems
where they shouldn't be found;
on the palm creases,
and the curves of his lips.
i walk,
all tentative tiptoes
and a wrong step;
falling into each hollow,
each crevice,
each slit.

he was an earthquake, waiting to happen
seismic and sudden,
taking everything down.

and i — a nameless girl,
an inkblot for face and limbs
a paramour,
a secret,
all wrapped into one.

i — a doorstep kiss,
an uncertain touch,
a bedpost notch,
all wrapped into one.

and i — a jamais vu,
a face in the crowd,
a nameless casualty,

all wrapped into one.

i’ll waste all my chances at heaven darling — i’ll waste all my chances for the midnights we spent dreaming, stranded inside an old lighthouse as the waves crashed on the shore. i’ll waste my chances for a mouthful kisses, dissolving the gaps between the stars. i’ll waste my chances for a sliver of early morning poems, for sunsets dripping on our skin, for seconds where i can hold your hand — free and unafraid, for minutes where i can be a sinner and you, my capital sin. for hours where i can melt all the world and its hurtful words inside your arms.

darling, i’ll waste all my chances at heaven if i can’t love you way past its walls.

i’ll waste all my chances at heaven — and i’ll waste them all on you.

so that’s why you settle with friends who treat you like crap. that’s why you chase after heartbreaks in the form of long hair and lop-sided smiles. that’s why you’re on your seventh cigarette. that’s why you don’t want your scars erased, why you stay in a place where nobody asks if you’re okay and call it home, why you write wretched poems about bleeding wrists and tripping on *** bottles from last night.

darling, you hold onto pain. you hold onto pain, because you no longer know what it feels like living without it.

and i wish i was sad enough or hurt enough or broken enough to actually feel something, and not just emptiness after emptiness after emptiness.

i mount my heart on a wall,
still and discolored
where my taxidermist hands had pressed.

it breathes life into dead walls:
a hanging irony made of
soft cyclamens
and the closed, white fist of a tormented girl.

i mount my teeth on a wooden wall,
write my letters,
pour salt on spaces where i used to stand;
may i not stand here
once again.

i mount my hands on a wooden wall;
they do not knock. i do not answer.

silent as a lamb — down to a pit,
i watch the sheer cliff of my back
from where i have jumped
and the sundry sorrows shrink
into black, blinking dots
like a hidden villain
exposed.
i fall over myself
like in a slow-moving dream —
lead-like it flows like the acheron river.
and here comes the ferryman.

you always ask why i always stay in my room, in that voice that always made me feel small and vulnerable — the one that always made me feel like a five-year-old girl wishing that the blankets and the stars will hush the thunders.

you always ask why, dad, and yet you always find ways to hurt me the moment i come out of this four-walled shell, ashen and gray from all the storm clouds circling over my head. you always find ways to spot the cracks on my skin, like i was just another wall in this crumbling house. you always find ways lasso your words around my throat — tighter and tighter, i can no longer breathe. you always find ways to unhinge my mind; to unbottle all the tears and all the loose pieces of my heart hastily stitched out of place.

dad, i am caught in a trojan war brewed by my demons, and you are paris, piercing all of my achilles heels; stitched; tender; still healing from all the poisoned arrows you shoot — a year ago. two years ago. three. four. and for years and years, you always find ways to crush me, like the cans of your empty beer. you always find ways to crack and snap this bent framework; my bones are broken from the weight of your words. you always find ways to hurt me and hurt me and hurt me and hurt me again — like i was never the little girl you played dolls and cooking sets with; like i was never the little girl you watched disney movies with. like i was never the little girl you used to love — dad, i am still she, now trapped in the body of an adult. i am still she, now trapped in the prison of a dusty room you unknowingly co-erected. and i guess i'll stay right here where i'm trapped, but safe. i guess i'll stay right here where the voices only come from my demons.

i'll stay right here where you can't see me.

i'll stay right here where i'm not hurt.

the stars weep over all the terrible ways i have loved you —
dress you in their light caught
in my aprium kisses and cigarette daydreams.
empty my ametrine veins,
disembodied to hold your bones together —
kiss you, break me, leave me
burning and trapped in a lantern room; watch me
sink ships to come back to your arms; you've always waited.
and they all still weep and fall
over all the terrible ways i'll still love you

long after they die.