You still eat away at my chest
like a mole finding its way out of my body.


God, it’s been ten years now since you last wrote me a letter
sealed with a pressed, dead daisy
and a ghostly kiss mark,
yet they’re still dying under my thumb.


These days slip by and I can no longer write you poems,
my dearest, sweet September —
but still, I hope that you have in your chest
all my papercuts from unbridled letters,
all my quiet midnights,
and all of my unwritten words;
they are yours for missing.


Must you leave a girl then, darling,
whose only fault was being one?

Here we are as unclaimed lights fall into the room. Here we are with better names, old letters peeling after the other. Here we are, now made of changing lights and indigo dreams. In the very last month and for the first time, I claim the body of an Egyptian lad and you are the sun god, washing over me like a brand new day. For the first time, December doesn’t feel like choking on poppy blossoms. For the first time, December is freeing as scattered pastel lights.

For the first time, my love, December rests on my skin — and it doesn’t hurt.

today, demeter is nothing but
a bewildered ghost in a haunted meadow,
skinning flowers as they weep:
they're neatly lined as in an execution,
the creek, a boneyard,
a lair of sorrows for her dazed *******.

today, the sun desperately combs
through tree branches
for an abandoned nest of grief
but its hands just stray too far
and poke at a meadow's wound —
nails cutting through graying skin.

this is a poem written by a bystander.
this is a poem written by a witness.
this is a poem written by the victim.
the world blurs its lines today
and demeter is nothing
but a forgotten ghost
in a town painted new.

out there wafts jupiter's quiet grief as it loses its moons — does mine ever compare?

i toss my sighs into the thinnest air, like a brief lesson on how easy it is to vanish. how doable. how hard.

And maybe all I need is my 30-year old self to come here right now and tell me that everything will be okay, and that I made it.

— “I would’ve totally done that for my 13-year old self”

I'm drunk and the skies are a little hazy, and the stars, a little like Van Gogh's, but tonight, I'm still an astronaut angling metaphors from the mesophere and you're still the moon to which these poems orbit around.

But my sadness no longer
feels like being drowned.
It was just sinking
and sinking
and sinking.

And sinking some more.

Maybe I left my dreams in the last song I sang in the shower. Maybe you left yours in your first, half-empty cigarette pack, still hidden beneath a pile of clothes.

Maybe somewhere along the way, it wasn’t our dreams that died, darling — it was us.

i had missed too many sunsets hurting in silence. to this day, the sky is in a graying shade of blue. to this day, it is mournful and decaying over me — or inside me, i do not know. i had lost count of the months i shunned the sunsets and headed straight — disgracefully, to the arms of the dusk. besides, falling apart looked harsher, and messier, and more vivid in the light. and so i had missed too many sunsets; this too, is becoming a wound.

i wish i were kinder to myself.

i wish i could forgive myself.

sad poems look a little like you.

put me, lovingly, in a hearse, the way the dusk lays it shadows;
the night threatens to spill off my pores
trying to run from lonely places —
now, it bleeds all over me.
a sight of a mess.
a sight of horrors
and no napkins for wiping.
no napkins for grieving.
some just don't
make it out alive.

tell the daylight i cannot come.

put me, lovingly, in a hearse.
no, i am not made for burials —
it's for the ones left behind;
tell them all

i cannot come.

leave me, my sweet one, lying in this hearse,
the way the dusk leaves its shadows in the arms of the night.
sweet and fragile.
quiet and gone.
send me off, softly.
send me off, mourning.
send me off, for good.

tell the daylight i cannot come —

maybe i'll see her too, so soon.

— fray narte

Writing you poems seemed like a good way to break my heart.

My own skin — a skin that’s worn me out, I have scrubbed it raw and dry like a sorry imitation of Capitoline Venus, but statues manage to crumble so quietly, draped in wood dust and without so much as a heartbeat. And girls like me don’t know yet the weight of the things they have to lose: such as, 100 pounds — all bones, and coffee breaths, and yesterday's light straying, forgetting, falling off.

Now it has buried itself.

There was something bittersweet about tangling my arm with yours as we finally crossed (or zigzagged through) the lines that had been blurred for quite awhile now. It was nowhere near a fairytale. Maybe it was something about you being the most beautiful, saddest thing I’ve ever seen, and maybe it was me being drawn to everything sad. Maybe all we had been is a cocktail of alcohol, terminal loneliness, and pent up ****** tensions, brewed somewhere between these nicotine-scented sheets and a series of bad decisions. It’s not love, just wanton desire, I’d say. And you’d agree in the mid of hitched breaths and sloppy kisses. And that was the last thing in our minds before we fumble over the zippers and get lost in each other’s uncharted skin.

Of course deep down, we know that you’re everything that’s bad for me, and that I’m not the type to stay naked in bed the morning after the night to make you pancakes. But the way your lips drugged mine into kissing back, the way we said things we’ll never say when we’re sober, the way there was suddenly too much clothes and too huge gaps between our bodies all seemed comforting and sinfully magical. Of course deep down, we know that we’ll never stand a chance out there doing real-life romance; I wasn’t the one you were looking for, and you were just somebody I found.  But right now, in this cramped apartment with leaky ceilings and creaky floors, all I wanna do before sanity rushes back give in to "**** this", make all the wrong choices, and self-destruct with you.

february is inside me like a cursed fetus. it eats away at my ribs, making a gap big enough for me to sink into a quicksand of motionless hours and crumbling bones. i hate myself for having written these words, but february beckons with ghostly arms and i shrink to myself like a well-trained beast — step into my hollow chest and crawl farther and farther than before never to be seen again.

and how brave you are, for getting up and breathing again after the night had shattered your ribs.

this is love stripped of poetry, so here darling, i might as well just rip out my chest because not loving you is the last act of self-inflicted violence. how i rue the days. i might as well just rip my chest out and give you my heart — burrow your way under my skin, like wood dusts drawn to the wounds in my heels. i will give up poetry to be loved by you in ways not dreamy. in ways raw. sober. aware. unadulterated. lawless. infinite. in intense, longing gazes. in ways that stray from falling apart so beautifully, in such chest-tearing grace. in ways that stain tenderness. in ways that crash and burn.

my love, catch me. watch me tear down the world in the name of your eyes. watch me tear down poetry. i have no need for it.

Such a classic mortal blunder to lay
my spine as it erodes, graceless, inelegant
on Galatea’s cold, ivory arms;
such delicate carvings can never be human, look human,
feel human under my lonesome bones.

I long to see you flinch and break
into fine, liquid, rain of dust blinding me,
covering the walls of this room
in a blameless shade of white: a new asylum ward
for my kind of insanity,
you say.
It envelopes like light around my awe
and my forlorn limbs,
tangled with Galatea’s unmoving ones.
I look for comfort within brittle carcasses
scraped of everything they could ever give.

The quiet persists eerily.
But here, Pygmalion’s gifts remain untainted:
the apex of auger shells, the beak of a songbird
the blunted ceriths, the rusty chisels
all impaling my spinal bones.
Yet the sculptor’s kisses, long erased,
the careful carvings, long defaced,
long reduced into a Grecian ruin.
I bury my body on your arms yet they find no rest
against the ghostly pleas of mammalian tusks.

How many for your fingers?
How many for your hair?


Tell me, Galatea, were you carved to bear the weight of
all the sea salt I swallowed as I drowned?
Soften under my meandering thoughts; I long
to see you flinch and break — like all the dead elephants —
any reminder that you yield pliantly to the voice
of the love goddess, that you were once turned human.
Break now, your solid arms, under my own collapse
over the sea foam caught on fire.

I am no longer bending and weeping to pick myself up.
Here it all goes down and ends:
my bones,
and yours,
burning,
snapping.
Nothing —
nothing less glorious will last after us.

— Fray Narte

our falling apart isn’t like having heartbreak lines sitting on my chest, waiting to be written when i wake up and realize you’re gone. it isn’t like sinking into the absence of your coffee-scented lips on my temple, or walking into a dust storm caught in the sunbeams in your room. it isn’t like those cold, two a.m. nights where you find yourself singing stay with derek sanders and breaking down into a puddle of unbearable pain, hoping that each guitar strum will take you away from our memories.

no, our falling apart isn’t like that. it isn’t immaculate.

it isn’t an indie-film-kinda-heartbreak, nor is it poetic.

you see, we fell apart simply because you loved me — you loved me so ******* much, darling.

and i wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

i lied there on the pavement, eyes fixed on the big dipper, waiting for the stars to fall apart all at once, or for a car to run over me, whichever came first. and there i was, staring at the space and the emptiness looked back at me, and for a second, it felt like looking at my own chest; the stars, my bones, slowly coming undone. i wondered if someone felt that way too. i wondered if someone else gazed at the constellations and thought, maybe the stars are disillusioned with the galaxy and so that’s why they fell during meteor showers. or maybe they were lost causes dressed as angels jumping off bridges in heaven, ever the cynic. maybe it wasn’t something poetic. maybe it was watching celestial bodies

i lied there on the pavement, under flickering lamp posts that looked bigger than the stars. the poems always said that stargazing is romantic it wasn’t. ironically tonight, i lost count of the falling stars while wondering why they’d gone too soon. wondering if they’d survived the fall. wondering if they knew that their descent was burying me in the sound of my breath. maybe in an hour, the black space in my chest would consume me and then i too, would be a shooting star lost in peripheral views.

and i hope i would survive the fall. and i kind of hope i wouldn’t.

my wasting bones are unsettled by kisses. how your lips graze my paper skin and i am an origami crane — catching fire in waking sunlight. watch me love you terribly. kindly. fatally. watch all of my shadows burn bright for you, my darling, into the sweetest, sun-soaked surrender.

and my fingers will trace these scars on your chest — they're no fault lines but darling, i can fall and fall and fold myself into wildflowers on which sunlight unfurls. but this world, it's a battlefield and red roses bloom not from the soil but from the skin and every death feels like the first.

every kiss feels like the last.

and darling, tomorrow, we have all the time to be broken. we have all the time to grow up. but tonight, let me hold you close; my hands are weary of writing elegies. tonight, let me drown in your seastorm eyes; i am tired of looking for temporary ports and for all the wrong shades of blue. tonight, i will read you poems about a girl named helen, who loved despite the war. tonight, the world can crumble down and i can stay right here, safe and sound in the comfort of your sighs, like a girl resting against bruised lilacs. i can stay right here watching you sleep until the earliest hours, forever asking myself how can someone so ******, so broken by this world possess this much softness.

this much gentleness.

this much peace.

regardless, rest your weary bones, my love. morning still is far away.