Happiness comes slowly
weaving its way through the butterflies in your stomach
as you step into the hall, seeing
all the open doors
wondering which to knock on, who to know.

Then it’s diagonal crossing
and shaking fish. It’s a group picture that still hangs in your best friend’s room to remind you of how much you can age in a year.

Suddenly it’s the ballet and lingering looks. It’s drunk astronomy videos, and tea with second intentions. It’s well developed boys with delicate minds, who are more hurt by misthrown words. (I’m sorry, still. Those months of silence did a number on me too.)

It’s red lips and falling leaves. It’s pulling yourself together out of the pieces spread around campus, and creating one rule: don’t **** DSig boys.

Then it’s floorcest, but this time more wholesome. It’s meeting the man who’s sure to be your best-man at your wedding, and wondering how you could be so similar, could love someone so much. It’s being scared that people aren’t puzzle pieces and losing one to gain another is never the same. But then realizing that maybe the original piece didn’t fit that well to begin with.

It’s a long night at the hospital, because family is family even if you never share secrets. Because sometimes cheez-it crumbs can heal souls.

Then it’s snowstorms, and gossip nights. It’s living with your best friends 24/7 and picking each one up as they threaten to unravel. It’s chugging earl gray and crying over gluten free brownies. It’s getting used to a pseudo-something only to have the ground shift under your feet––again. And then it’s growth. It’s loving other people enough to know when you’re wrong, when to let go.

Finally it’s peace, and midterm cramming. It’s shedding layers of skin and coats so the sun can finally scab over your innocence. It’s making the exodus from your room to hole up in a coffee shop and write, because the school listens now. It’s knowing that so long as you know how to cover a hickey, you’ll never really lose your status as mom.

It’s loving. Happiness is loving. Every stolen moment and stupid, idiotic escapade; every too big personality surrounded by too small quarters.
It is holding fast to the spirit of youth, letting years to come do what they may with the tattooed six on your heart.

And what of the thick-thighed woman

            who held a dying god in her lap?

            History has silenced her grief to stone.

But what of endurance as sharp as love?



Do Zeus’s tears still stain her dress?

            Her atlas hands guide thorned crowns

            To rest, as the weight of heaven

forsaken, collapses.



Womb made machine;

           Reach out your hand and feel the crimson––

           Hips that birthed the civilizations of the world,

I worship the god called woman.

I keep this love, my dear, in my back pocket.
Neither a prologue, nor epilogue to my thoughts, it
simply resides in the middle of the flat high-way distance
and sky-scraping time. A pocket of feeling; the ghost
of possibility clings to my breast, where your hands grasped
my heart, once––our sighs but passive resistance.

Some days I want.

I want so much that my bones crack and my muscles cramp and my breath feels too shallow

Like me.

Not enough

Not enough

Not enough.

(potential is the kind of word that suffocates you)



Some days I don’t want.

I don’t want so much that I lose myself in the hollows of my back and let myself echo in the folds of my skin.

It is too much. And still

Not enough

Not enough

Not enough.

(Want is more of a volume than a light switch)

I think I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
And lifted honest eyes for you to see,
And caught your hand against my cheek and breast;
And all my pretty follies flung aside
That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,
Naked of reticence and shorn of pride,
Spread like a chart my little wicked ways.
I, that had been to you, had you remained,
But one more waking from a recurrent dream,
Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,
And walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme,
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two.

Zeus’s golden scales are hanging

around my closet doorknob.

The satin ribbons straddling an uncertain fate.

Two such similar– such distinct

entities

You could say I fell in love with your differences.

One side is bold

all caps writing,

spelling errors and innuendos.

I pirouette on my right foot.

The other is softer,

delicacy in strength,

precision and restraint.

I developé with my left.

And how easy would it be if I only needed one foot to dance?

If balance simply happened by willing it so?

But feeling comes first

and the relationship is symbiotic,

and I–

I am stuck,

waiting for the scales to tip.