I saw you a week ago
Your hands in the bread box
Fingers flipping through the slices
Like folders

You pick one
And pinch the barked color crust
You lift it from obscurity
And secured it in-between
Your rose petals

Crumb glazed fingertips
Dirt on your cheeks
You looked around
Made sure it was safe
And then disappear into winter

Coal covered flakes fell from the chimneys
And the snow needed cleaning
Furnaces burned all day like Hanukah oil
Rib cages grew out from their shyness
And your topaz eyes did well
To stand out from the sea of blue and white

If they tell you there are showers here
Don’t believe them
There’s a reason why it smells like skin
On Sundays

Those ******* with their black metal suits
Raising their hands towards the heavenly sky
In front of them
Making gold out of our bones
And lampshades out of our skin

Yesterday, I kissed you in front of the bread box
Felt the grime on your finger tips
And tasted the bread in your breath
I ran my fingers down your brittle
Spinal cord
Climbing and descending mountains
One finger at a time----

We dissolved into the winter

Made angels where no angels could be found
Danced in our skeletal forms

We both had seen death and his attempts
To lure us with hot showers, warm food
And an oversized fire place

He had made this hell on earth
And we chose to decorate it with bread
And angels

We were content with that




But today when you didn’t show up
I went outside

I saw him guiding you into that burning house
With a grin on his face

I ran as fast as my bony legs could
Trampling over the angels we made

And carelessly slipping on our frozen crumbs

All I could do was stare helplessly at the chimneys
Cement and vicious
Piercing in to the sky
Black smoke flooded the clouds like night

Grey and black crumbs rained

And somewhere in the distance
A train had stopped

I’m tired of these poems that talk
About dissolving in to the bed together
About spaceships on the ceiling
And dust on your forearms
I’m tired of these poems-
And tired of the crushing weight-
These poems that talk about love
As if it’s something we can taste
Or touch or smell or melt or dissolve
Or fly or crash or destroy ourselves into
I’m tired of these metaphors
The double entendres
The verses
The prose
The ulterior motive to sleep
With the girl next door

Stop talking about love likes it’s tangible
Like it’s something you can find
In the creases of your sheets
Or the pores on your skin
Like it’s something you can hear
In the tone of his voice
Or the pitch of her laugh

Stop looking outside
Stop telling her she’s an ocean
Stop comparing him to a rain storm
Stop howling your stanzas on rooftops
When they leave you
Stop expecting for the wind to be there
Love does not exist in the air
Or in your heart

Love exists when you learn how to-
When existing becomes the only thing you love
When you stop setting yourself on fire
To keep him warm at night
When you stop letting her freeze you
Just so she can keep you there

Enough of your Nerudas
Your moons
Your suns
Your mountains
Your stars
Your inhabitable forests
Your deserts
Your fires
Your oceans
Your seas
Your lakes
Your rivers
Your Niles
Your Paris
Your talk of good destruction

I have seen them throw their voices in to caves
Desperately wanting to hear an echo

Toss aside your shallow skin and knee deep words
So you can no longer hurt and no longer drown

There is a train filled with the thoughts of kissing the sea
It doesn’t stop at a station but at the toe of a boot
It shrieks its wheels to a halt near the cliffs of the Mediterranean
It gazes upon a violent shore
The waves pillage the roman sands
The flame descends
And with a whistle it collapses on the tracks
Healing its rust
Tasting the zephyrs with its skin
Yearning for the ocean
And then
With a thunder-
It rips its metal against the earth.
Coaling onward in a furnace

Never to leave these tracks
Never to kiss the sea

I left it back in high school
on the bench near the gate
behind it were some red flowers
and I always thought they were nice
standing out from the green
surrounding them
I left it back in the library
Near the encyclopedia labeled
Firsts , I was on my way to you
when I dropped it
Back in middle school
on the 5th field during P.E.
he was beating me senseless
when it came off
I was bleeding everywhere
he told me to pick it up
that day I decided to walk home

You texted me this morning
When the trees were being assaulted by gales
And the coffee in my *** had been sitting there
For weeks now collecting poison.

It had been a month
And I too, had collected poison
In the form of underage drinking
Tiny piercing viruses, bottle after bottle
In attempted to eradicate brain cells that held a picture of you
On their nucleus.
It didn’t work.

So I tried inhaling glass in to my lungs
Tried passing out so I could land in a coma
But I missed two feet to much to the right
And landed on my frontal lobe
Where you proceeded to dissect me with your tongue.
So when you texted me this morning

Memories came like cancer



I remembered that car dealership
Where you bought the 1960 sky blue Volkswagen bug
With rust on the side,
I remember driving to North Carolina with you
On a Monday morning.
Blistering cold at twilight
And all we did was whisper and hum
To each other
As we drove on empty interstate highways

You taught me how to cross state lines
And eat food so volatile that radioactivity
Spewed from my taste buds,
Down my throat
And in to my rigid spine
Where it shivered like arthritis.

My body isn’t hollow; it’s just frozen
Because tiny tundras fill the fissures in my rotting skin
My bones are brittle ice cubes bulging out from underneath the surface

And if people were snow, I would be a particle on a flake
And you would be Antarctica: vast, mysterious, uncharted, vicious, brutal, untamed,
And you would have had frozen me in to an arctic sculpture
To be hung over your brick stone fireplace
As you stood there watching me melt
With your blue corpse eyes.


It’s 8:34 now,
I’ve stood here for thirty minutes remembering what you once were
A continental mystery on my western cerebral hemisphere.
There was America,
Specifically Georgia
But you spoke Alaskan.
Talked about going there like 18 year olds talked about Europe

Everyone wants an adventure
But all you wanted was to know how it felt like
To have mountains under your palms
And snow peaks over your head.
They called it climbing.
I called it searching.
But those who climb would inevitably know how to fly

If they knew how to let go

So let go darling.
Stop calling me in December to tell me all the great things we did back in August.
If I’d had written down our phones calls
It would be enough to fill a notebook full of parentheses
Because all we did was whisper and say things we didn’t mean.  

So don’t come back and try to freeze me again.
I won’t melt this time, I’ll disintegrate.
I’ll fuse with my fissures
Become tundra and dissolve in to the soil


Where your body is, buried
Beneath layers of cement,
Dirt
And ash.
I place flowers on your head stone every week
But you still keep texting me and texting me
Telling me how great our trip was to North Carolina
And how we can do it all over it again

The whispering, the humming, the parentheses

All I had to do was drink the coffee

I want to wake up
With a voice on my back
That traces all the bruises
And the scars
That I’ve had from
Turning away
From things and people
Because I was too afraid

I want to wake up with a forest
In front of me
And the knowing
That I’m not yet done
Exploring
I’ll walk to the end of the evergreens
Feel the fall on my bones
And eventually
Find the courage
To turn around

Afterwards we were glazed
With them
Shot down like arrows
From an Indian mountain
The roof tops did not budge
Nor did the sides of walls
They came again
A hail of themselves-
Everywhere
We walked on
The collective of them
The ones that refuse
to be arrows
But lakes instead