i would dip kisses on your freckled back, as though it were an arched door of a baroque cathedral. i would strain my arms cradling the frailty of your sadness. i would weave to my lips your whispers, made of cold and lonely december rust. i would dust my bones and flesh, and i would lie there next to you — a clean slate, in silence and awe and uninhibited longing. my love, we could stay like this for a while.

the streetlights flicker and the sunset blurs. but they know —
my heart has always been yours to break.

i'll always love you like you were the fullest sunlight laid gently on the dark bruises of december. my crystalline hands are bound to start wildfires in your name. and finally when the world burns down, i'll mark your spine with these lips made of sunburnt flowers. in the ruins of it all, you still have all my misguided kisses — all my unbidden words. i'll always love you, until azaleas grow on the softest spots, in the mundane collision of our bodies. i'll always love you, until my ribs fall apart to your autumn eyes, like a babylonian temple that has seen the miracles of god. i'll always love you — in state of both madness and kalopsia. in the explosion and rebirth of the stars. i'll always love you — this is my bareness in the most prosaical state. this is my constant, darling — this is my truth.

and you ruined me,
way before those filthy hands
and forced kisses had,
way before cigarettes,
and hangovers,
way before my poems
fetishized
my unhappiness,
before best friend break-ups
and pretty boys
who couldn't
love themselves
and me.

you see, it was you
who ruined me first,
way before
all of them ever did.
it was you
who ruined me first,
way before
everything else did,
way before
life did,
and way before
i
did.

and sometimes, i still wish
you weren't my first heartbreak

unzip my wrists —
fragile, handle with care.

i am drunk with the thought of them breaking,
resembling quartz veins
down in the mines.

unzip my arms,
this is an enclosure —
it is safe from all-seeing eyes.

unzip my skin —
i am bag of sorrows and bones
waiting to be unpacked
in a new rental room.
the walls are white; the sheets are clean; the flowers are fresh
and i sit in the middle of it all:
a slashed, opened mail
spilling shadows —
like a ghost inside a house.
a parasite inside a host.

unzip my body:

i am strikingly
all things
anti-thetical —
old
dark
ugly
haunted —
a herald of infestation —
here:

the walls are white; the sheets are clean; the flowers are fresh,
the sunset is warm — comforting.
the world spins in a blur.
and i sit quietly, in apprehension,
stuck in the middle of it all.

a ghost.
a prey.

the room is spotless —
i step out of my skin.

With me, you don’t have to dip every word on a honeycomb or flip through tattered pages looking for unused metaphors or make sure that every line is in its most poetic form. Darling, I don’t even want poetry or structured sonnets and all that cliché crap with coffee cups and sheets.

With you, I want the raw — the grammatical slips and the illegible penmanships and the 3 am honesty and the ****** up, messed up thoughts when you’re angry at the world. Darling, with you, I want the things poets don’t write — things poets don’t read.

pour sunlight down my throat, it burns
like a whiskey secret taken to grave: my chest

is a bed of incarnadine moss
where i retire and lie, not knowing — waiting for
death or life, for
words to be purified by fire
the size of my live-coal heart;

what is there to write
out of it anyway? after all,
i am now incomprehensible to myself.

here, i confess my sins, absurd in their triviality,
but the sky hears, declares a sentence, unforgiving.
i cannot hear, for

i am now incomprehensible to myself
as i **** my nails clean of dirt, of meaning,
like a poem; emptiness is just a blank slate
not knowing where it's headed.

here, sunsets lick my bones clean — its tongue has long stopped burning
from inside the numbing walls
of a coffin: my skin is the pall draped over —
aventurescent-white under the fevered sun.

Your poems no longer talked about the way you fell so gracefully in the cracks of my collar bones — fragile, hollowed as the echoes of a priestess’ word — my chest is a shrine built just for you. Your poems no longer talked about the way I kissed the sunset lights, laid softly on your shoulders; this love has descended from the gods. Your poems no longer talked about pressed roses — dead and desperate on top of love letters, god was I high on loving you.

Your poems no longer talked about these. They no longer talked about us darling; they no longer talked about my rosewood scent on your pillow the first time we made love. They no longer talked about how we chased the sun and descended back to the ground, like cosmic dusts losing themselves.

Your poems no longer talked about us — we are dead. dead. dead — a forgotten language and its metaphors. We are walking on top of a new city, a pile of words buried underneath. Our love buried underneath. You are walking on top of a new city, all new words and a slim fit suit.

I am quiet as a Syrian poem. I am buried underneath.

dearest stranger,

i am too abstract now for my own good. i feel and hold myself, in place, in my hands and i slip right through like sunlight, like tiny moth scales, like the delusions of a sauntering ghost, like all things unreal and untouchable, like a madwoman, laughing away in her free fall to an unsteady ground.

and all the flowers are cheering in their surreal, psychedelic scarlets, and all the rocks are breaking, and all the words are failing to capture what i truly feel.

am i still despairingly corporeal, like paper napkins and panes of glass? am i still in actual flesh, now that god doesn't exist? am i still as tangible as this last, frantic breath of a letter?

am i still actually here?

bidding my farewell now,
ginia

i hold in my hands all of the sea’s sadness,
press it against my chest;
drench my shirt and then my being
until i resemble its loneliness —
the very depth of it.

soon, the ocean floor will claim
my driftwood bones.



but there are no sunbursts or naive greek boys.
just surreal june midnights.
just water everywere —
nowhere.

i hold in my hands all of the sea
but there are no sunsets waiting
to sink down my spine —
just the cruel way that my skin goes on and on —
its flat, certain vastness
and this ironic drowning.

i hold in my hands all of the sea’s sadness —
press it against my chest;
drench my shirt and then my being
until its loneliness fills my lungs.

​

​i come up for air but it’s just endless skin —
i close my eyes and dive again.

I know a thing or two about couple stuff, darling, and neither of those fits in the space in your heart. The rest of the world basks in love and all its typical aesthetics, you know, the usual; holding hands while overcoming fears and jumping off buildings, and sitting at beach under the midnight sky, talking while meteors come to listen, and staying in small-town bookstores for hours and seeing metaphors from the steam coming off their favorite coffee brew.

But then, loving you isn't all about walking down a trail of roses under pretty sunset hues; it's not sharing the same wanderlust and flying to countryside Europe. Loving you is writing alternate endings to a tragic film, only to find it even more frustrating. Loving you is getting ****** in wormholes leading to chaotic, parallel realities. Loving you is crashing on brick walls, and dancing under the falling debris made to look like a summer rain. Loving you darling isn't like love at all.

But if you give me a chance, I'll kiss you in the subways and make poems out of it, as if the meeting of our lips creates milky ways and all other celestial bodies poets write about.

So let me love you, darling, despite all of this.

Let me love you, the way you deserve it.

Let me love you nonetheless

there's a reason for all the midnight cigarette breaks in the fire escape while hoping my mom won't smell the smoke. there's a reason for every uneven haircut; products of sleeplessness or stagnation or something i no longer understand. there's a reason for the paperbags of dysphoria and cheap bourbons lying untouched beneath my bed, and for the days when my bed felt like home and home meant emptiness and emptiness was preferable to my favorite song or to the scent of the beach. there's a reason for letting go of all the obvious lifelines and deliberately sinking into this disarray of black holes. but you breathe marigolds and sunlight dipped in bottled petrichors

and tonight, i no longer know how to translate my storms into a weather you can understand.

i spent too many times trying not to love you, darling, but i know this now: loving you has always been in my very nature — repressed and buried in my bone marrows.

i'm sorry it took me so long to realize this, my love. i am coming home now. ❤️

i am a tender wound made of stitches —
bleeding at each
and every bit of touch.

so tell me, how far
and for how long
should I run
to escape from everything
that ever hurt?

how,

when I am everything
that ever hurt?

and how do i crawl out of this chest — this skin — this lonely, grave, without choking on all the dirt?

Find me tearing violets, my love,
in a manic daze; I am running out of softness and daylight,
like winter’s cruel hours


“but I will crown your hair with these torn violet tiaras
and your soft throat, twine with woven garlands”


and I will dig into my tongue for the remaining metaphors
beneath the bourbon, until odes drench my lips,
I will stitch my wounds shut and ready for your apricot kisses —
I ache to be kissed away,
to waste away before your sun-speckled eyes
like a tiny fae in your flower basket, I ache to settle
in your dainty hands,
in lithe fingers lost in my wind-blown hair.


My November, my gentlest love,
how I breathe you in like my grandmother’s letters —
how you consume me
in curious ways
and for the first time, I am not afraid of the softness
buried and warm inside my bone marrows.


Tell me, darling, will you stay?
Will we stay
this time
for more than a kiss?
Will we linger longer
than silhouettes in a dream?

It's been a year and the streets are a little brighter, and daybreaks are a little colder, and everyone seems a little happier. But forgetting has become way harder and longer, darling, and Novembers still feel like losing you.

i've always loved you one way or another. i break out of your ribs only to bury myself back in. i've always loved you one way after the other. everything else is a fleeting state — cruel, fluid transience leading me back to you.

some ghosts you just miss, darling — some ghosts, you'd die just to see again.

out there is the vast, primordial space. empty. infinite. timeless. and for billions of years, the stars had been killing themselves.

sweet one, isn't that very telling?

Her eyes are sinkholes in a quiet, sleeping state
and I was a girl, lost and misplaced at twenty-one,
looking for love in infinitesimal spaces:

on her palm creases and chipped, ruby nails,
and in the blown-out ends of her lotus tattoo
I find myself tracing a secret,
at the spiked tips of her hair tamed by fairy lights
and on the slits of her skin — a rabbit hole of wonders,
I always fall like Alice in sworn careful tiptoes
and crash headfirst; a broken wishbone, a tainted wish
some habits you just can't quit.
like —
October and her obsidian eyes, and the sunless ways we kissed —
being lost and misplaced made sense for a while in the detached comfort
of her cold bed, colder hands,
warmth has become an oppression.

But this dalliance has always been a disaster waiting to happen
and I am a paramour, a memory, a face in the crowd
swallowed in a seismic fall —

and losing October has always been a disaster waiting to happen —
this bed, always a site of a losing battle
and I find myself in a soiled, torn dress,
lying helpless on the other side of her war.

Tonight, I light myself a candle;
maybe one day, I'll finally learn to run away from a girl made of disasters

and not towards her.

And how do you tell them you feel so empty without making it sound so sad?

i miss loving you; i miss the calm and easy and content way of just kissing in the blue hour — clothes, falling out of flushing skin; mine was a map of scars named after estranged people, and yours, an anomaly of carnelians breaking at the softest touch.

and yet, nothing hurt enough. not the fading autumn days leaving us to fall apart in october. not the poems that painted this love to be more beautiful than it actually was. not the carnelians, breaking everywhere.

and i miss loving you, but this october rain isn't cleansing — it just falls cruelly on a heart too eager to break itself.  i miss loving you, but all these blue hours have corrupted what's left of your first tainted kiss. i miss loving you, but betrayal still rests comfortably on my skin: a map of scars named after people. a map of scars cut by carnelians. a map of scars named after you.

and this october rain isn't healing; it's just cruel.

it's just cold.

— fray narte

i wish knowing you're not worth the words is enough to make me stop writing about you.

but apparently, it's not.

i feel myself in gradual decay with all these hoarded sorrows: a bad habit i inherited from my mom, embellished with my own kind of crazy, my own kind of lonely. my own kind of wasting away. i am half a sigh away from breaking. i am half a word away from being the next dead poet. how can some things, so small, carry such gravity? how can some things, so unremarkably quiet, carry something as heavy as my weighted skin, something as breakable as my resigned bones?

i have written so many poems; out they flow so heavily. out they flow like liquid lead. yet i remain full. i remain immovable. i remain a contradiction. i feel myself in gradual decay, unrelenting. in place. in the agony of total awareness.

and the air remains heavy — it remains heavy with all of me.

Sweet one, do I still owe you the same dreams?

I've grown kinder and gentler — inward. I've stepped out of my bruises, barefoot and cleansed: a mortal girl out of ***** foam. I've learned to soften the aching. I've learned to let go of things, including who I wasn't meant to be. I am no longer you. I am no longer your failures. Why then, do I still feel the need to chase the distant dreams you wished for? Is it because I still want them somehow — or because I feel like I owe those dreams to someone I no longer am?

oh, to live with sadness, so deep — it has started spreading;
i can feel its crushing weight: a stampede.

my trampled bones have started to resemble
wildflowers as they decay
and the soil flinches at the sight
of something so pure —
something so tainted.

behold, the lamb of god
has become the big, cruel wolf;
this is what happens to delicate things
after they're done breaking —
after they're done rotting.
this is what happens to pure things
after the sins and sacrificial rites.

behold, the lamb of god —
the scapegoat
has become the wolf

and one day, it will outrun the forest fog — spreading —
consuming.
devouring.
one day, it will outrun the howling in its chest.
one day it will outrun the ironic aching of ribs, long emptied.

oh, to be a girl and not a wolf.
to live with sadness and trampled bones.
maybe one day, i too, will outrun myself

We were always so good at pretending, weren’t we? We would always climb rooftops and pretend that we were stargazers, christening constellations with our favorite songs. Look, there was Somebody Else. There was Nobody’s Home. There was Chasing Cars.

We would pretend we were souls from the 50s, reincarnated into another life — into another happy ending. We would pretend we were art critics, as if we knew **** about Klimt; as if we could tell apart baroque from classical. We would tell each other our weirdest dreams and analyze them, as if we were Freud or something, that misogynistic pig. Oh, you dreamt about us drowning together in the Black Lake? Oh, that means we were gonna have *** tonight, in the absence of the moon. We would pretend that we’ve circled the whole world and that Italy’s got the ******* blandest pizza. We would pretend that we were rock stars, surfing on the crowd.

We would pretend that we’d read the classics. Was that Harry or Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray? Yeah, Hamlet was pretty cool, but who was Ophelia? ******* pseudo-intellectuals, we were. Nonetheless, I loved pretending with you. We loved pretending that the whole world wasn’t crashing down — that we weren’t stuck in this ******* of a small town, and that the world spun for us. We loved pretending that everything would be okay — that we could leave someday without looking back. We loved pretending that our lives weren’t all over the place. We loved pretending that we were the brave ones, that we could **** ourselves by 40 because the world wouldn’t be kind when we’re all old and saggy.

We loved pretending that we were too cool for mental breakdowns and for any kind of feeling. Honey, we loved pretending that we were psychopaths, too voided for love and all that other crap — that we hated clichés, while doing the most romanticized clichés anyway. We loved pretending that this was where the chapter would end, and that we were together in our make-believe ending. We loved pretending that we were the ones who stayed and made it.

Now, sometimes, I would pretend that we did. Other times, it would be me pretending I was all there ever was — that you never were here to pretend with me, and that I was okay. I would pretend that the rooftop wasn’t too high, and that I didn’t need your help to climb — that the company of city lights and the empty space were enough, honey they never were. Honey, I would pretend too that I never missed you. But I did.

I always did. More than that I would ever admit.

I would look at the stars, the ones we named but I guess they all had already fallen to the earth. You said that when you died, you would live in the shooting stars so that you could crash to the earth and come back to me. But it had been more than a decade since the angels took you away and I no longer stargazed, except tonight. And maybe, just maybe, when I would catch a glimpse of a falling star, I still wouldn’t wish that you didn’t chase your meds with *****. I wouldn’t wish that we didn’t find bubbles coming out of your mouth, like they were a part of your soul. I wouldn’t wish that I didn’t see you die. I wouldn’t wish that you were okay; we both knew we wouldn’t have clicked if one of us was happy or okay.

Heaven, hell, we didn’t believe in those. But when a star would fall unto my chest, I would wish that wherever you were right now or wherever you would be in the next life, darling, you would no longer feel the need to pretend.

And with no lies, no masks, no pretenses, I loved you. Here. And in the next. And in the lives after that, until we lived in one where we would both have the courage to abandon all pretense and just sit on a different rooftop, sharing silence — sharing honest thoughts — sharing the luster of distant stars. And tomorrow, our demons wouldn’t rise with the sun. And we would be okay.

i have inherited pandora's careless melancholy, her tiny box of regrets, her white-washed, quiet horrors and terrible decisions — staining like a memory passed down from her reckless hands to my old, ***** claws, digging for something raw, something parasitic, something miserable, something always goes wrong beneath my ribs. it wants out, like a beast, a misplace fragment, an aphid. and these days turn their heads away — blur themselves blind before my many blunders.

before the wrath of a false god, will my bones ever learn the art of being unapologetic?

My hands still remember the quiet aching of these wounds — too deep and wide for stitches and shaky hands. And so, I never learned to unpack my grief. It still is in a suitcase with December dusks and dreary summers — shut in secret library walls. I never learned to unpack my grief because I'm terrified that when I do, it'll be way too messy to place it back where it belongs.


Some things, we never tell ourselves out loud.

pandora opens her chest at midnight:
it is a box left out in the rain,
a wound unstitched in despair for october,
a small voice hushed by forlorn hours.

and dead gods forget so easily,
but
pandora still opens her chest at midnight
and the walls huddle to look at an ugly wound
left open to bleed all over
dusty pink cosmos flowers.
and drapes huddle, too,
to look at a nest of sorrows creeping about,
as though a wake, a vigil,
a somber watch that only ends
with all of my bones breaking.

but dead gods forget so easily,
and dead girls forget so easily,
and i forget so easily
all the aching hours that had kissed my skin
and their graceless, moonlit pull,
and i am left to lie
languishing on soft, breakable spots.

and so pandora closes her chest:
a box to never be opened, a vault behind a frame.
a flash of stray light on a wound sealed shut. safe. secure.
there is no space for conspicuous melancholies.
there is no space for anything —
there is no space for hope.

and the gods forget so easily.

when will the world quiet down into a throbbing, feeble ***** that i can so easily crush?

skipping back and forth
the stages of grieving
but my body is bottomless —
endless where it hurts the worst.
it continues to grow
like a skin abnormality
over which i trip, head first i tumble down
these words in repetition
their despair, in repetition
in ever so artless ways.

too many indefinite things
gone too visceral
gone too deep these skin layers —
there is an (over)production of them,
to make room for
more. more. more. grief
popping here and there:
an obstacle course.
a grafted stem. a blunder.
what deformities might i uncover
as i dredge myself clean,
as i mow over me?

but my body is bottomless,
in perpetual, grave disquiet —
endless where it feels the worst.

i remember being drunk on
our rainy day kisses and the city streets,
the aimless drives and the stolen cigarettes,
gasoline and i love you's suspended in the air;
i remember wanting that day to last.

i remember all the poems i'd written,
my fingertips,
on your back
and all the caffeine we'd run high on,
shaking,
panting,
whilst making love.

back then, writing you poems didn't feel
like relapsing into self-destruction —
writing you poems didn't mean
that i had to break my own heart
just to keep our future whole.

but now, i am lost in a sea of poetry
all written after you;

darling, the last one you read —
the one before you left
wasn't even the last.

and now, i am caught in a thunderstorm
named after all your unsaid goodbyes.
and now,
you feel
like a pit of heartaches
i can sink into anytime.

and clearly, this isn't poetic anymore —
these are just words tied together
to poorly model our august sunsets.
and clearly, this isn't us anymore —
these are just bodies
buried in a pile of mismatched heartbeats.

and clearly, this isn't love anymore, darling.
this is just me, writing about what's left of it.