i'll want you the way
i want coffee:
in the morning,
in the afternoon,
in the night.
all the time.

i crave you
but not wildly
and i don't crave a kind of love
in which i am madly lost in
(although i hope i am)
but i crave you normal
like waking up late on a saturday morning
i crave you steady
like your hand holding mine
when you're driving in the car
and i crave you simple
like ice cream and a movie
and i crave you
like you
like a kiss where my neck and collarbone meet
like my skin getting used to
the touch of yours
(although i hope it never does)
like my lips molding
to the shape of your own
and i crave you
i crave you
i crave you.

he said,
"help me remember."
and i thought he meant
something from my childhood
or something we did together
or something.
but he meant that i help him
make lists of the things he has to take
on his flight on sunday
and while he made lists
(cellphone.
charger.
toothbrush.)
i made lists too
(waking up every morning to his loudness.
breakfasts of cereal and milk.
kisses on my forehead.)

here we are.
drinking coffee at 9 pm.
i am reading poetry
and you are making lists about lists.
here we are.
trying to fill the distance between us
with something.
i do it with comfortable silence,
but you start talking to me
about how iPads could replace computers one day and about iOS eleven
and i nod my head and smile to myself
because i see you
and what you're trying to do:
trying to shorten the distance
the way you know how
and instead of nodding again
i tell you how my friend is selling her phone
and how i don't know
whether to buy it or not
because the storage space
is the same as my phone's
and while you talk to me about cameras and megapixels and iCloud space
the space between us is smaller.

i am sitting in a taxi cab
reading poetry
and thinking
that there must be some metaphor
hidden here
some deep meaning
something greater than just a woman
reading poetry in a taxi cab
a thought
something like
i am the only one who does this
and that my beauty lives in choosing
poetry to fill my days with
something like
this is what will make someone
fall in love with me
but maybe
maybe the poetry in this moment
maybe the greatest thing in all of this
is that i am a woman
reading poetry in a taxi cab.

do not let me
give you
anything less than
milk and honey.
do not let me feed your soul
with emptiness.
empty words.
empty beauty.
empty love.
let every space
that i fill
be occupied by a love
that was worth all we did
to find it.
let me fill in the blanks you keep
with words that come from truth
let the beauty that i give you
mean something to you.

here we are.
trying to fill the emptiness
the places where we hurt each other
with small talk
and offerings of cups of coffee
and slices of chocolate cake
and flan
as if the sweetness
is enough to cover our faults.
as if sugar is the cure
for the wounds we keep.
and today.
it is.
it is a place to start.