A year is not that long
A day is gone in a breath
and you can barely blink in between Mondays.
Four weeks in a month,
and only twelve months this year.
A year is not that long
But a year can change everything.
365 days from now I might be asleep
In your lap at last.
My face in the crook of your neck
and my breathing is slow and deep.
There must be stars in my breath
And forgotten spells in your hair
because this moment is magic.
or maybe you’re sitting on your bed alone
turning over a letter
knowing you shouldn’t do this again
But you trace your hands over the print
Still smooth and undisturbed black
Because you were always careful not to cry
on the last thing you had left
since I never made it home to you.
Maybe you and I hug before we part in the mornings;
we do it every day but it never feels routine.
I remember a hundred times I cried to be held like this
and you squeeze me tight like you’ll never let go
And then we break apart and you smile as I pick up my coffee
because it’s so good to be together.
Or maybe you nod when people say I’m in a better place
and make jokes to crease worry out of their brows.
But at night you send messages to an inactive account
about how much you miss me
and if you could have any miracle it’d be another chance
to make me laugh again.
The messages never read “seen” anymore
Because I’m under six feet of dirt
and typing ellipses are just a memory now.
Maybe you’re worried
because you really need at least a B on that test
but I sneak up behind you with tickles
and you scream that you’ll ****** me
but I get a piggy back ride around the living room instead
Multiple choice and essay questions forgotten.
Or you’re staring at my smile
Fondly remembering how much I complained about braces
But how pretty it is (you won’t say was)
and ignoring the thick ache in your chest
imagining me pressing the shutter button
to capture a selfie
that would last longer than me.
You won’t let yourself think about
how the twinkle in those eyes
will never again exist in this world.
A year is not that long
But a year can change everything.
365 days;
Only God knows what shall come.

I’m overwhelmed
(but that’s nothing new)
only this time by
a strange desire to burst into laughter
half-delighted and half-hysterical
This holiday season,
December is a gift
and one I didn’t think I’d get.
Sweat, blood and tears, baby
Waking up soaked at 4 AM
and once or twice screaming
******* sticky red
my throat raw from the dig of my nails
Because I’ll feel better after I puke.
All that oh-so-dignified naked crying
because you know nothing says fighter
like slumped over in a ***** shower.
But here I am;
Happy New Year, me.

Don’t you ******* dare
to romanticize me
Don’t act like my ribs poking through my skin
And wrists so frail I’m half-certain they’ll snap too
is beautiful
Because that’s exactly what you’re doing
through your glossy magazine pages
and water-and-kale only lunches
Making it seem glamorous
that I lay dying slowly at my own hands
Don’t paint over my
sallow complexion
And hair falling out in thick strands
As I tried to put up a ponytail
Here’s my thigh gap
(it’s writing my obituary)
but isn’t it just #goals
Don’t make me
the reason a twelve year old girl
is squeezing her tummy
I did not fall for that trap
But I’m in the same pit anyway
I am not a costume
Not the “**** anorexic”
Don’t tell me to learn to take a joke
Because it isn’t a joke
to make my best friend sick with worry
Because the pounds keep peeling off
I’ve felt sinking in my (empty) stomach
when friends ask me “how do you keep so thin?”
in pale green tones of envy
when their bodies are so full of life
and mine is withering
and I’m crying over a stupid ******* bowl of soup
that the same girl (but a different one)
would have drank in two minutes
soaking in the warmth in a full tummy
But that I heated in the microwave
three, four times,
forcing down spoonful by spoonful
just to have something in my stomach.
I just want to eat pancakes that don’t taste like dust
but all my meals are tainted with self hatred
and how ******* dare you
teach them that hatred
like it’s *pretty?

Standing at the kitchen table
Breaking broccoli into fegs
There’s a child clinging to me
And I think
This could be my life.
There’s the background sound of a child saying mommy
And she’s not calling to me
but she could be.
I snap a broccoli stalk
And think of letting a little girl’s dreams flutter away
Of being what was expected of me
A pretty wife
with a husband she grew to love
Trading recipes and not research
Good women
don’t have careers.
I could be happy, maybe.
Snap
another piece of broccoli in the ***
and four children
maybe five
My mother smiling at me
saying I knew you’d be okay in the end.
I don’t know.
It might not be what I want
But it’s something I know I’ll miss never having.
Snap
Last piece in the ***
And I leave it on the stove to simmer.

It came like autumn
It was summer;
and then it wasn't.

No such thing as
too pure for this world;
there's nothing we can't taint
with our salty sticky sins.
Milk-white stones from heaven,
now charred remembrants
of the divine.

All I want to be is
a woman to behold
but I am a little girl
in tears again.

Yesterday I begged of Allah
(as only the truly desperate can)
for His all-encompassing mercy;
that for whatever wrong I committed
I might find His forgiveness
to bring me back to his embrace,
away from This Cruel World.
It may be this isn’t punishment at all
but perhaps I’m not through serving my sentence
for the misdeeds of an unreined nafs
and maybe he’s not even listening
to the pittances of a ****** soul.
Oh well
As long as no one tells my mother
I’m still praying for death.

It burns inside
my secret flame
What I hide
I can not name

It aches my heart
Colors me blue
Tears me apart
And fixes me new

When all is still
and none shall know
It's my favorite thrill
To dream of my glow

I ***** it dark
But I'd rather see
my little spark,
my wish, set free.

I love you
because I know
you want
to take this from me
and say
“Let me do this for you.”
even though
I know and you know
you can’t.
It’s a nice sentiment, though
made nicer by the fact
we both know
“It’s okay. I can.”
Just hold my hand.

All those irregular verbs
and the difference between au and de la;
Vocabulary forever just out of reach
and trying to wrap my tongue around foreign vowels.
Baby, that’s what loving you feels like
because I’m not fluent in whatever language this is
so all I know how to say is I love you;
How you make me feel is a universe beyond the observable
and I’m trying to cram stardust into three old words.

Earth,
Geospace,
Earth-Moon System,
Inner Solar System,
Solar System,
Solar Interstellar Neighborhood/Local Interstellar Cloud,
Local Bubble,
Gould Belt,
Orion Arm,
Slightly Over Halfway to the Galactic Center of the Milky Way,
Milky Way Subgroup,
Local Group,
Local Sheet,
Local (Virgo) Supercluster,
Laniakea Supercluster,
Observable Universe,
Universe.
Boom.

Please don’t tell anyone;
but I’m scared
Eyes once creased with laughter
now open wide with apprehension
There’s a fast paced drumbeat in my head
and my heart is pounding against the walls of my chest
because I’ve been signed up
for a job I’m under-qualified for.
Please don’t tell anyone!
But I’m sad
and there’s nothing beautiful or romantic
about how my head aches from hours spent crying
and hating myself for tears and everything else
about trying to remember to love my skin
and everything else in it
but failing miserably
and tasting salt.
Please don’t tell anyone;
but I’m empty
My stomach’s been hollow for hours
and my vision’s starting to blur
but I don’t care
Because I’m devoid of the will
to carry on
uncaring of what happens
to this shell of the person I once was.
Please don’t tell anyone
all I’ve got left are thin deceptions.

As a seven or so year old
I hated windy nights
for how they whipped
the poor trees about,
their branches flailing,
because it reminded me
of being dragged by my hair.
And that's how
a bleeding heart is born.

Sleep
is a cloud
fluffy and pink
which
wraps around me
Softly
encompasses
all but my hair
which hangs
from the edge
to catch
tangles

Tell me, beloved, how many people you have killed
in your mind, over and over
Tell me of the throats you have twisted
and of the deaths you have relished
whisper them into my hair in the dead of the night
Tell me of their perpetual last breaths
So I may know the darkest parts of your soul
and love them also.

"Maybe you were right
maybe you were wrong
but I can't stand this fight,
not talking for so long.
My words were unkind,
I regret everything I said
but time won't rewind
here's what I got instead
Just my humble apologies,
with a side of shame
Guilt and fresh strawberries
and a forfeit of this game."

No one is scared of heights
we're all just terrified of falling.
I am not afraid of being loved
I'm just saying the bitterness of betrayal
hasn't quite been scrubbed off my tongue yet.

I remember wondering
why anyone would smoke
knowing it would **** them.
I suppose I assumed that
it was for an Instagram picture
of a morning drag and coffee;
for friends and ten minute breaks
But I think it might be learned apathy
because who the **** cares about lungs
when they won't be the first part of you
to crumble into useless, unbeautiful ruin.
Nowadays I feel a lot like a smoker
for someone who's never touched a cigarette.
I'd end the poem here
but I wish, I wish, you wouldn't smoke
and I hope I don't die.

I write poems for no one to read,
and that’s how I know they’re true.
Here’s sadness for no one’s benefit
a determination to continue that
does not ring hollow in these empty halls.
Genuineness is the bedfellow of solitude.

Born of a country I barely remember
I did not spend a childhood
sprinting across fields of sugarcane as I maybe could,
but my legs are that sweet brown anyway, of the earth
of a land of Always-June and Never-December.
I wonder if the rainforests remember my name
or how, when I was born, they wove into my hair
that deep-dark jaguar-black I’ll always wear,
which millions of miles away, is still the same.
Maybe had I stayed a few years more
I might remember the smell of midnight rain showers
Of golden afternoons and those Caribbean flowers,

that in this house, only my mother longs for.
But instead I know only what came in suitcases
that relatives brought, of achar, casrip, curry powders,
pepper-sauce to make your stew a little louder.
Foreign things finding homes in faraway places.
This land I left behind;
is it still mine?

3 AM is a time that doesn't exist to you
but I'm a night owl.
You laughed at that once
and said vampire sounded cooler
after which that Arctic Monkeys song always reminded me of you
the one on my Halloween playlist,
because it was autumn then.
It's the summer of another year now
and things may have changed
but the nights still find you asleep
and me awake with you in my thoughts.
I'm still just as confused
And your breathing's still just as steady
But something's slipped away
And I'm not sure how.
There's no one to send you middle-of-the-night texts
that jolt you awake
because I'm binge watching that show you told me about
connecting us for a second before you roll back over.
You're not religious
but I was told our paths are as predestined as the planets’ orbits
And I'm dealing with the fact our circles might be tangent
And the intersection's gone.
You're where you belong,
which is miles away, in bed,
not in my head,
and certainly not in my poems.
Come daylight you'll be gone.

I’ll be fine, I guess.
So would you.
How soon
depends
on how we broke.
In half? Rough and jagged at the ends
With you clinging angrily to your end and I to mine?
Angry, stubborn tears stinging
in your eyes or mine
That’d be a while
But you’d be fine. I’d be fine.
Or maybe
the courting of Death
Seductive caresses across my wrists and lips or
something sudden and final
In screeching brakes and the smell of rubber tires
denial
and hollow ringing
as I think for the first time in my life
God, I wish I wasn’t wearing black.
It doesn’t matter.
A fight
An illness
A drifting? eventual (we had nothing left in common)
You’d be fine.
You’d remember me in fleeting moments
Flicking past a space documentary on Netflix
or pausing over a box of creamsicles in the frozen aisle
And I would see you
In the golden yellow hair of a passerby
But it would pass every time
One of us might laugh at the thought once we said
you and me
to the bitter end
That a teenager knew what forever and always was
and chalk it up to youthful naiveness
And we would be fine.
But I don’t want to be fine
I want to be laughing so hard my stomach almost lacerates
Because you know exactly what to say
And I want to be pressing
Kisses to your cheek and passing you hot cocoa
Because today we’re staying in and watching Disney
(singing along to every song of course)
I want to introduce you to everyone
Have you met…?
And tell strangers in the grocery store
About the most wonderful thing you did
And watch them smile kindly
over me gushing about you
across the stacks of tomatoes.
And I want to tell you over the phone about that stranger
So you can say
ew, tomatoes.
I don’t want to be fine, I want to be the kind of ecstatic
That only comes from us
From discussing everything from lipsticks to physics to musicals to dying
From knowing that when I am so tired I can feel it in my soul
You will hold me and let me cry
From believing it will always be us against everything
From living happily ever after
Because what is fine
Compared to this?

I summoned the devil
in all the coaxing dulcet tones of a lover
to make a little trade.
He appeared to reply
in something sounding suspiciously like amusement
that contrary to popular belief,
he did not buy souls.
Why, he wondered
would he bother with such trivial humanities?
so I plucked from my chest
the thing in question
that he might know
there are not so many stars in the sky
as neurons firing in my mind.
and I showed him exquisite pain
and deliriously beautiful sadness
anger so searing I shook to contain it
All the things a devil delights in
cannot be felt so deeply as by a soul
that has tasted misery again and again
and lived to wish to tell the tale.
He moaned in half-ecstasy
tones thick with desire
to name my price.
I asked only for peace at last
How cruel!
he cried, not un-admiringly
To make one long for something so desperately
and name a price they cannot pay.
For peace, he said
Can only be found through one's own demons
It comes from acceptance
of one's self entirely; not absence.
So I left,
having wrung good advice
from the devil himself.

Hummingbirds are supposed to be a sign of hope
but in December I think they might just be
global warming saying "y'all ******."

I write a lot of poetry
when I have Math homework to do.
I did a lot of Math homework
trying not to think of you.

My body remembers yours
like the rains remember the soil
that they come back to, monsoon after monsoon.
sweet, alive kisses-
the beloved your lands always knew would return.
And one of these late nights
My angry tears will remember your name
as they did once before.

I don’t want to go to Heaven anymore
because Heaven is an eternity
and I don’t want to be me for even a second more;
Not for all the bliss in the world.

Corduroy jacket
purple skirt
Sunshine in a packet
Barefoot in the dirt
stars in her eyes
twinkle bright
Knows no lies
In a world of right.

My mother tells me stories of when I was born
how the doctor said I looked like her (I didn't)
and my brother cried in the lobby
Listening to her, I wonder
if she had known I was born to be a warrior
would those tears still be of joy?
A warrior in training every day
to not let the pain of illness show
because we all pity a sickly little girl
but nobody loves her
I was to be taught not to beg for mercy
even though the bruises would be shaped like belt buckles tomorrow
What I learned too was
every battle in a war ends
(although they leave marks)
And when the war was in my head
in the shape of forbidden curves
and feminine guile that tainted me with love
forbidden desires of the unholy misguided
the smile could never falter
because we all pity a sickly little girl
but nobody loves her
Sickly little girl
Nobody loves her
His wandering fingers left streaks of misery on my skin
******* me he put lead in my stomach
When he asked I closed my eyes
and thought of bruises shaped like belt buckles
(don't beg for mercy!)
And said "It's okay"
I was okay after too
Ten little pills lined up on the bathroom counter worth of okay
If you say a word enough it loses meaning
It's just a funny little sound
That can smooth worry out of brows
And ease smiles into eyes
It's okay. I'm okay.
Stop saying that word! You must stop
for the meaning to come back
in the tears you finally let yourself cry
and the words you stopped stifling
the pills you threw away
Mother,
Do not waste those tears now.
These were my battles
and maybe I was born to be a warrior
But I fought to be a champion.

My brain said no
But something felt right
So I prayed, then let it go!
The darkened night
Was a pond, standing still
And it was a ripple of light!
A single sounding trill
Or a streak of white and gold
Dashed across odes of grey!
It left the world astounded
Powered by belief
And all logic impounded
It erased the grief.
Then, vanished without a trace
Before our watching eyes
But it's not gone, just in another place
Because such beauty never dies.

There are, I think, a lot of love poems
and I wonder why we ignore redundancy
to thread our heart’s beatings
into a tapestry already hundreds of feet long;
Must be that human urge to
shout into the void
“I am here!”
For one flickering cosmic second
a hand to hold made you feel like you mattered.

Sea is the sister of dear Mr. Skies

Who looks upon her temper with kindly grey eyes

And listens to the music of her cries.

I've been cheated
out of my youthful infinity;
that precious folly of belief
one will never grow old,
a chance to think
that I know everything.
To be on top of the world
before I have to realize it doesn't
revolve around me.
I'm hyper-aware of
the beautiful arrogance I lack;
I can only be jealous
of your sweet haughtiness.
Meet me on the corner
of wisdom and resignation
when you lose it too.

I never write poems about my anger,
maybe because I can’t find anything beautiful in it;
there’s something about sadness
that makes the poet dream in similes
probably since it’s such a crystal-clear reflection
of what you care about.
There’s no hesitance to write about love, of course.
It’s a victory, because the sheer numbers
set the game against you; what were the odds
in millions and billions of people,
you’d find happiness in that second soul
and how could you keep that out of your poetry?
But there is nothing romantic about anger
and I cannot find a reason to detail
a soul in havoc; his or mine.

Math homework
(the hell is a rational zero?
are some throwing tantrums?)
and a glass bowl of yogurt which I’m eating
even though my fingers are cold,
since I’m too lazy to get a sweater.
Mundane moments
a dime a dozen,
but I’m trying to wrap myself in them anyway;
I don’t know,
there’s something comforting in
slowing down the world,
as if it’ll make my life a little more
worth living
if I pause to appreciate
the delicate tanginess
of off-brand Mexican dairy.

"I", said the apple, "am the body of temptation."
Blood red poison, source of expulsion!
"Oh", the strawberry cried,"And I, infatuation."
Bright ***** pink, I am compulsion.
And so every food clamored to make a claim.
All but the quiet brown staple stone.
The little potato wept in his bitter, cold shame.
"I am useless, unloved, quite alone..."
Ah, but fear not, although you are quite plain,
You are durability,  crucial, the go-to.
You are esteemed, and rather good for the brain,
So don't worry, I love you, little potato.

I fancy there's music in my veins
for I must bleed in melodies and sonatas!
to give you such pleasure in hurting me.

A teacher once told me
I should never begin a sentence with
“I think”
because everything you say is what you think.
But somewhere along the line,
I stopped saying “I think” instead
because I needed to fake something like confidence
state every opinion like a fact
Bold, built up brick walls
making my every statement that much stronger
But there’s something to be said
for sentences that start with I think
I’m starting to wonder if it doesn’t take more bravery
to be tentative
that you might begin to say
I could be wrong; I am sometimes.
I’m not unfailing,
I hope that’s okay.

Growing in the greenery
you criticized my wildness.
Plucked me from my bush
and stripped me of my thorns;
On display on a mantlepiece
you said,
“There. That’s better.”
and slowly but surely
I wilted.

What is joy, if not a butterfly?
Born from long struggle that gives him strength to be
Elusive if chased, but unpursued, he alights on me.

Flowers are the Earth's laughter
Clouds are the smile in her eyes
Rain is the smell of tears that come after
And the ocean is her fiery cries

She sees me when I see she
Big sister, big sister, love me no less
My hair and her dirt and tree
Oh sweet Earth, mother bless.

I googled my username
and the word "poetry" together
to see if you could find my poems
to reread when you miss me.
I paused a second too long
over the bottle of painkillers today;
I'm frightened.

Silence is best for thinking, you know
Dim the lights and the dull shall glow
But too much medicine will make you ill.
Be wary what you'll hear in the still
For there's nary a truth so awful a fright
As one you didn't know you sang in the quiet.

Sometimes people tell me to say happy things,
Conversations of spring and diamond rings.
Sometimes they take my black and brown away.
And hand me yellow, red, when I'd have gray.
Sometimes, they scorn my dress of blackened blue
For sparkled tops and flowery skirts in pinkish hue.
Sometimes, they don't want the mystery of night.
They'll have glittering doves in harmonious flight.
Sometimes, they "improve" me, and dub me a swan.
But  the mirror shows that my reflection is gone.

Love is a verb-
abandon your adjectives;
It is to melt.
To hold and be held,
To treasure, to linger, to smother-
And oh, God, to ache.