you always ask me about love when i think that we are creating it.
when our entwined legs mimic the twin quotation marks encircling
a silence, your fingers tracing out crop circles onto my chest as if
they're attempting to communicate every scar across the galaxy.
i will answer with an alarm clock heartbeat and a tongue that glides
through your ear like honey: some people only love in the dark.
it's guarded with a harlequin smile but what i wish i could say is this:

i believe that people's hearts meet like plane engines on landing pads,
crashing down just long enough to leave trails on the concrete before
they realize how much they miss tasting the air between their toes.
i believe that when sid first saw nancy, his bloodstream confused her
smile with the iv that supplied his starving veins punk rock & poison.
i believe that love either leaves you to bleed or to wish you still could.

but i also believe that love can last. for nine long years, hachiko
nuzzled against packed concrete and waited on empty railway cars
because the odds were, his dead owner would have to come home.
there is a man who serenaded his shower walls with the name of a
disappearing girl; i hear he still makes love to her ghost every night,
surrounded by a stadium-lit choir who wouldn't recognize her face.

the last time you asked me about forever, i realized that stars don't
even last that long, let alone feelings we shove inside pericardium.
what we deem unsinkable can hit one glacier and send a thousand
into the sea; forever is three syllables that even titanic can't touch.
my nineteen years are a paper anchor if this ship ever goes down,
but i'll be ****** if a psychic's visions of fire and ice and endings
stop me from falling in love on deck until the band stops playing.

i.*   i've always loved the way the earth looks from an airplane window, small enough that i can filter through an entire city with my fingers and never encounter a single face that inhabits it. but this time, i looked out and could see nothing but green for miles. it was as if god himself could put his infinite hands together and they would still fill with trees and branches and coffee-stained rivers instead of people. i didn't know it was possible to drown in so much color.

ii.   a man who spoke in splintered english and carried a machete told me that he could survive in the rainforest for a month without supplies, that the jungle ran through his bloodstream as he imagined gasoline and city lights flickered through mine. the day he took us hiking on the trails, he glided through the understory barefoot, pausing just long enough each time to see if we were keeping up.

iii.   some mornings, i lay in bed still wishing i could turn the chorus of car horns outside my window into the songs of howler monkeys echoing across the treetops and into my dreams.

iv.   at night, we walked down a beach, dragging sand and weariness in our socks and watching the waves crest along the shore. i looked to my right and the stars leaned so close into the forest that they simply became twinkling electric lights atop palm tree lampposts. my feet even tasted the stars beneath them; when i kicked up sand, tiny constellations startled scurrying ***** into the tide.

v.   you will always be the first country that trusted me with a bottle in my hand, as i stole through the midnight streets of san pedro with the taste of *** mixing in with the laughter i felt hidden under my tongue. and in the morning, i awoke to a faint dizziness and the memory of boys who bought me drinks and asked for nothing more than a dance and a handful of stories in return.

vi.   *muy exótica, they murmured as i walked down the road, my heartbeat syncing with the wheels of my suitcase as they rolled over the uneven dirt. a pair of enamored scarlet macaws held no magic for them now; the real exotic specimen was the girl whose almond eyes were filled with desert sand, whose skin only became mocha when the sun stared at it too long. they couldn't turn away.

vii.   i still have countless bug bites that dance across the backs of my legs in tingling trails. i hope the scars stay long enough for me to trace them back to the place where they were choreographed.

viii.   only one of a thousand sea turtle hatchlings will reach adulthood, yet i watched one of eight make its way from my hand to the ocean until it caught the sunrise and disappeared. i kept my palm open as i waved goodbye, hoping he would someday be able to read his way back home.

ix.   the last night, we danced under a shower of stars and you told me about a time that you smoked until twilight and saw sea turtles dancing on the beach to bob marley. while we were sitting there wishing the storm would swallow up time, i imagined piro beach was littered with the shells of sea turtles using the moonlight as it pulsed off the waves to teach each other how to salsa too.

x.   i've never written a love song, but i spent my days in a hammock wishing i knew enough words in spanish to weave together one for costa rica. i wonder if i will spend my life falling in love with places and scattering pieces of my heart across the continents like turtle eggs without ever finding the one location i'd like to bury them deep into the sand and wait for life to dig its way back out.

every three seconds, a plane makes
a landing somewhere in the world.
still, i wonder whether the hundreds
of people perched inside each belly
are coming home or merely touching
the ground before leaving it again.
and i wonder if i'll always be the one to
memorize time zones instead of faces
and leave a carousel of empty suitcase
hearts forever circling ground behind.
i only take what i can carry and a love
of that size has no hope to cheat gravity.
eighty percent of the population has a
fear of the world beyond the altitudes
but somewhere down the line, my heart
was made a compass pointing due north.
in another life, i think i would've worn a
perky blue hat and crimson lipstick smile,
pouring drinks and charming passengers
if it meant that i could call the sky home.
when i was a child, my mother was made
to gate off staircases and barricade the
stepladders so that i would not mistake
them as pathways leading up to heaven.
i used to imagine she'd open my chest
to find nothing but clouded blue air and
hollow bones, my pulse tapping out in
morse code the only wish i've ever had:
please, make me a bird and let me fly.

i am not the girl your mother warned you about.
you know, the one with the pierced lip and a glare
that could start a fire during the monsoon season.
the girl whose arms are inky wings entwined with
weeds and paper chain reminders of past loves.
the girl whose name tastes like smoke on your lips
and whose report cards are littered with the one
letter that begins her most favorite swear word.

i am not the girl your mother warned you about.
the only relics that i carry on my body are scars
from playgrounds that kissed me back too hard.
my lungs consist of both words and silences,
neither of which i have found a way to control.
i am a few inches short of dangerous and about
nineteen years wiser than a pack of cigarettes.

your mother warned you about the girls who
are hurricanes, that will see your body as a stone
they can toss across the oceans without a second
glance. hearts going seventy miles an hour have
no time for regret. but there is always a sign
or a season that brings them; each one you meet
will be mapped out on a list of broken promises;
hazel, audrey, katrina. they won't let you forget.

but i am not a hurricane; i am a california earthquake
with a 7.8 on the richter scale of volatile personalities.
i will come without warning and dissolve the earth
into dust under your feet. there will be nowhere for
you to hide; your body will unravel into war with itself,
and your mother, wide-eyed, will wonder why you
let me in. but i know better. she taught you to train
your eyes to the sky when not even a seismograph
could pick out a heartbeat buried 1800 miles deep.

i used to think i was the bravest girl in the world, the one
who was going to reach her arms out to grasp sunbeams
and absorb hurt like inverse constellations into her skin.
i'd go up to doctors and dare them to stick me with their needles
and diagnoses, taunt coaches to push me harder in practices,
shed tears like fallen leaves to humor myself on occasion.
i was a tiger shark, alone and comfortable in my shadow, but
knowing that any pause could stop the water from becoming
air in my lungs; i'd kiss and sometimes i swear i tasted blood.
but now i know friends who have lost things in darkness that
they can never reclaim, no matter what lights they turn on,
and nineteen seems closer to both everything and nothing.
now i love like someone who is more afraid of drowning
in her own cup of water than the ocean, even though the
waves have never been anything less than welcoming.
i've seen talent and courage drain into a needle and bottle,
a hoodie and dark skin become the uniform of suspicion,
a country of the free bleed onto its own striped flag.
listen, it's forgotten the words to its own national anthem.
so then where, in the mix of war paint and firewood,
is there a place for the fierce but not fearless,
the ones who want nothing but need everything, and
who are still sometimes afraid of their own voices?

do not fall for a boy with a pirate heart, even if he will
cross five thousand miles of sand and ocean to be with you,
carrying nothing more than loneliness and longing in his cargo hold.
those things will bond you both together like an oath, but
blood is thicker than water and soon, the promises will weigh you down
like rocks in your pocket, keeping your lungs and heart empty.
he will not stay, something will always call him away in the morning,
even after you've spent the night wrapped in his strong arms,
counting the stars from the undersides of the highest sail.
you will listen to his stories, for they will stretch beyond the decks
of his ship and make you feel both empty and full at once,
but you cannot rely on a tattooed smile to forge you a key to the world.
eventually, he will leave you on stranger shores, soaking and breathless,
wondering when the next tide will bring him close to you again.
but you are not a ***** he found bar-side, never call yourself that.
you must be unpredictable and wild as the sea itself, bottling storms
into your heartbeat and braiding a barrier reef into your hair.
you are calypso, dangerous and beautiful and unyielding,
and if he comes back ten years from now to set foot on the shore,
you will not be waiting. you cannot always be waiting.
he might tell you he loves you. but even then, he is only speaking
about the seventy percent he is familiar with, the part that is pulled into
rises and falls by the moon, a dna sequence patterned by the earth itself.
do not answer him. steal his ship by sunrise instead and plan to follow
the treasure map that you've long since forgotten. never come back.
leave him with a seashell at his side and he will remember at last
that the reason he loved the ocean was because it sounded like you.

you think i will love you less if you reveal more of yourself,
but i've learned that people aren't built like magic tricks; their
enchantment doesn't come from what's in front of your face.
so throw out your deck of cards, let loose the chains.
set your rabbit free. you don't need to pull something out of a hat
in order to keep me mesmerized. the show i want is less
illusion and more introduction. waving a plastic wand and
counting to three can't conjure the words out of your throat;
only you can do that. you've sawed yourself in half, tied your
wrists with a burning rope, escaped from tanks of half-frozen water,
all to convince an audience that you exist to disappear, to dance
among flames and never tell anyone how you escaped the burn.
but i did not volunteer to take part in this trick; i would rather
hold your hand than find out what's hidden up your sleeve.
at night, you hold me and whisper in my ear, pick a card.
but even i can predict the one that will appear in my hand.
a seven, for the number of times you've refused to turn on the lights,
even after the smoke has run out and we are completely alone.
and a suit of hearts, namely, my heart, the one i must settle for
when i ask for yours and you offer me a mirror instead.
a magician never reveals his secrets, this much i know.
but i've long since learned that fireworks are packages
of gunpowder and lights stained with chemicals, not magic.
i'd love you even if i opened your chest to find you the same.