inky tendrils staining
lemon yellow and candy pink raleigh sky
smelling of sulfur
and drive-thru chicken

spectators stand on the side of the freeway
masked and silent
watching the glowing orb burn
beneath the overpass,
among the tangles of kudzu
while something blares in the distance

i drive by slow,
and quiet
and long to find this
in the evening news.

i start to say i love you and it catches in my throat, thank god. i used to say it so readily, compulsively like i was hammering on a thumbtack with a sledgehammer. now i want to say it low and slow, the same way our affection has simmered over hot coals, never quite boiling over, just the right amount of sap in our voices when we say goodbye. i wonder how much of it i’ve dreamed in these drunken winter months when i laid up in bed until i was stupid and drowned my loneliness until you called. remember when we woke up in the sun and you said you liked the the texture of my voice? the way i say things? they say we spend one third of our lifetimes sleeping and i think i’ve spent the same amount of time thinking about kissing your shoulder in the shower. just that one moment on repeat while i ride the train and walk to work, and stare out the window, and paint in the studio, and take a shower, and smoke a cigarette out the window, and, admittedly, probably the entire time we talk on the phone and you tell me about your day and tell me terrible jokes, and i can tell you have your face buried in a pillow.

blindingly golden hour
the overripe fruit bruises
against my bare thighs,
beading blood from
points of distraction,
they are my fumbled attempts
at asking for help.

the city grows stale,
no longer exciting to
pass unnoticed,
i resort to
easy means of
feeling,
or not.

"are you at
risk?
have you started
planning?"
i can't help but
laugh, nervously
perhaps. i have always seen
quietus
simmering on the back burner.

home is an
ex-lover;
i am learning
to accept his transience.
love is
strictly for the birds.
letters in the box
asking when i'm
leaving,
the sirens becoming
more seductive.

i keep putting these tiny little pills in my body,
the doctors say it will build a wall between me and worry.
with a little vaporized courage, the days grow shorter,
and my thoughts grow long and languid.

i reach into myself with eager hands;
a child trying to grasp onto every tiny treasure
with reckless, manic joy.

i miss those sticky sweaty lethargic nights,
when we would drink wine in the yard,
and both scheme quietly of how to touch,
sit just right,
justify a kiss on the neck,
forgetting that silence is a deadly giveaway.

my eyes bore into you, frustrated
knowing i had not stopped and could not stop
myself from loving you, not from a thousand miles away
and not with your face in my hands.

we are cold,
we bike together in silence and winter makes us short
and dry
and unsweet,
and i try to remember your face from a few days ago,
and i can’t.

when the sun warms us up again,
warm up to me.
love me like the pounding in my stomach that tells me
in your absence,
that tells me i want to live
forever and ever and ever.

he thinks i am cold
i won't tell him how i am hurting
his heartbreak, as big as a dirigible
and twice as likely to go down in flames.
he feels this now,
fresh and
unadulterated,
burning icy hot,
cold hands under hot faucet.

i wonder if south street ever sleeps,
or if the wawa glows eternally,
fountain drinks and day-olds overflowing
in perpetuity.

will i always be
homesick
for worse places,
people i jealously
/
indignantly
left behind?

when the shadows glow
electric blue
under orange street lights, warm
A. begins to weep
and i think,
have i made some mistake?
recallibration
still a miscalculation

wakefulness, always around the same time
no longer from despair, i simply
spend my days in a torpid state.
what is the need for sleep
when nothing has been spent?

i don't just love people that are hateable,
i make the people i love hateable.

what’s the point of
the everyday?
we can have drunkenness that makes
the nighttime more romantic
than our eyes will believe.

sweat on the nose,
honey on the tongue,
bitter citrus as it goes down.

i have to decide preemptively
to keep my hands to myself,
to keep my heart in my sleeve.

i think i forgot
what hunger is,
that's not a metaphor.
i've begun to attribute
the wailing in my stomach
to mystery,
to some
unknowable fear.

i used to live atop
nothing,
called myself well.
it was holy,
my sacred duty
to ignore desire.

my body, a cavernous hole,
a self-swallowing maw,
i can grow emptiness that
folds over on itself,
kneads itself heavy-handedly.
i can grow emptiness
that feeds itself,
a self-sustaining culture.

i am burying my luck.
clay sticks under my fingernails
as i try to unearth
something that feels like
devotion,
sculpt something that feels like
money.

all i've learned is that i am
"too cautious," and
"overly ambitious,"
as if i can afford to be
enigmatic.

i loved you with
open hands, hungry
hands, i don’t have much time
hands. the cure to preemptive
homesickness was belly-ache
laughing, bare skin on
muddy ghost river
beaches, watching court
foot traffic from the
roof, labatt blues
and t-pain.
you said cats have
the love we should
emulate, walking
fine lines, felines
assuming we have
nine lives, greedy
hands strangle the
love from me.

she does not mince her words
she draws out truths like my mother
used to comb out tangles,
those matted knots of wishy-washy
dishonesty,
self-trickery.
she puts me in a taxi and
kisses my forehead,
i want to tell her, a little
lower,
her silhouette in the
spring light, too cold for
bare shoulders,
see this heart
on my sleeve
i wore for you?

the cash saver i call,
a liminal space and
A. becomes flustered
a tower of chocolate-covered cherries
collapsing under love.

******* aisle five, tee reading
"our blood,
our sweat,
your tears"
poking at the tea
leaves, reading,
"time to leave."

we spent the beginning
hurting together
bloodied and laid bare,
sleeping and weeping and
bargaining.
you sob a request
for me to stay,
i've never felt so
despicable,
miserable,
a reservoir of love
for you
emptied out.

i am crying walking the dog
in broad daylight!
i have sticky, smelly armpits; i
still smell like last night
toothpaste and cigarettes,
from laying in the dark trying to
weep quietly, but something
has shifted.

my lower abdomen hurts from
numbing the knowledge that
i have become numb.
phantom pain
will still tell you truths,
self-medication,
is still medication.

what do i have to
say for myself
?
laughter is romance,
and it's been a while
since i let loose.
i can't hate ugly laughing
when it feels
so ******* good,
to pour out something sweet.

we are so strange we keep
saying, goodmorning,
blinking against winter
cold sunshine,
do we say
please and
thank you trace
patterns in my
skin
once again?

i wrote one poem about you
and the rest has been free-flowing prose
words like
future, and
comfort
drip from my lips like tree sap

i bloom in the spring
branches untangling
those ugly mangled masses
that we pruned together

it is not pretty growth
pushing through the dirt and sometimes
wilting in the rain and sun
the same things that make us strong

i learn the value of cultivation
the importance of hacking away at
that which promises to choke us
the aches and pains of taking root

i am the killer of my
future, the cold-blooded
executioner of my own dreams.
i feel relief wash over
tired eyes when the
knife wound weeps.
a mercy killing when i'm
being honest, not a hunter,
not a coward,
just brave enough to
accept
a misstep,
miscalculation,
the familiar embrace
of an ex-lover.

we say our morning goodbyes
tension in that
see you after work
i'll be on a flight home
and you know it,
but maybe before you know it.

our words were not soft,
the love was not soft
as it has been, as i have
grown to love

do we continue?
you stopped my running
but the threat still looms.

the only way we speak truths is through fridge poems,
the height of our vulnerability in
pre-written words,
mass produced magnets
holding together what's left of
you and me.

i wish i could keep my head
down, i wish i could keep my
nose where it belongs.

i am spectacularly good
at hurting my own feelings.

the sun shines cold
on my hot head,
i should be storing
fat for winter, hibernating
in some warm quiet cave, i am
instead marching along
on my unmerry way.

the clock falls back, my
hours lost
i sink into
the old ache in my gut telling
me, love is lost. love is
for the birds, and they've
flown further south.

you fool, you
honestly expected
honesty? the only honest thing
is snot freezing in your
cupid's bow, again
reminding you, your
entrails are
always right, your body
holds tension to render
you impenetrable, but no hurt
hurts worst.

poems make me want to
strangle you with my
bony stupid hands.
i confided in the god of
your heart and she said
you find meaning in
pain, that you're
sick when you're well,
you'll never love me when i'm
good.

i live in palaces built by your other lovers
ramshackle shacks made garish by your desire
we sleep in beds made by ghosts under sheets.
if i close my eyes,
i can pretend as well as you
that the darkness is empty,
that we are not being haunted.

i sit on your chest and
dig between your ribs,
a paralysis demon with trembling hands
malpracticing on your heart,
tiny fingers prying at
tiny doors,
masochistically longing
yearning
for proof
that i always come last,
that love only exists in your past.

crossed-legged, my
willow boughs, unsteady
fawn on my feet, graceless,
undeniably
tasteless,
grey matter
formed less.

spilled polish on the *****
carpet, china glaze, liquid
leather, among eyeshadow bruises,
shimmering blue.

i’m scrubbing at the
stain in the ****
in my dreams, hot
tears soil the blemish, i
wake up to the smell of
pure turpentine
scouring my nail beds,
in sunday school they
say discipline
is love. i learn not
to know
discipline from control.

tugging at those
ragged pieces,
brightly patterned
second-hand
vanity
to cover my shame
/guilt
/doubt
/resentment,
he says
you have to (have a) change
(of heart.)

he maligns me, my
mouth rinsed with
soap and holy water,
cleanse the spirits from my
daughter,
praises when she hides.
my soft lips recite
repentances,
indoctrinated
phrases.

o, be careful little
heart whom you trust,
o, be careful what you hear –
the cruel irony of
these words letting others
undress me, lay me
bare, to waste.

back where we kissed the first time
a gyro and a lemonade in hand
and a whiskey on my mind

i saw you in a dream last week
the smell of expensive cigarettes
bathed in **** boring in my mind

you were formative to say the least
moulding me to meet your every need

my seventeen-year-old frame
between you and a minivan
thrilled to find myself so kissable
consumed by the thrill of it all
missing the thing that everyone saw

i partake in small pleasures
none taller than a generous glass of something
shimmering and effervescent;
drunken couples stumbling into each other on the street,
off the stoop of the bar;
a text from someone about a poem,
or their quiet evening.

the words "low-maintenance" echo in my cavernous skull,
insulting me,
pace quickening.
indignantly,
i will make demands,
lay plans against my nature.
simple girl!
my lucidity you insist on being a weakness,
certainly feeble desires,
clearly having never seen me gnaw off a limb
for a moment of silence.

i watched man
that would **** me
in a matter of hours
from the safe distance
of the couch.

he was kneading
dough for a batch of
stranger things
biscuits,
i hear my
grandmothers high-pitched southern twang,
“light touch on your dough.”
he kneaded and kneaded
and kneaded,
and i said nothing.

we roll over, hungover,
he mounts the day,
and i lay passive and dull.
he moves with the seriousness
of a man who has
little time,
i move with the grace of
dried bones.

crescent moon waxing buttery over a loaf of bread
lonely, scattered in the parking lot
i ask the sky,
where do pigeons go at night.
five dollars buys me enough to sleep,
maybe even get a laugh in --
i feel thirsty for myself,
to know the me that knows
how to be fun.

in the line we stand
six feet apart, like
good little children
hugging our knot,
begrudgingly.
two girls with
eight braids between them
play-fight, step out of line.
the younger swinging punches
silly-slow like
underwater, giggly
never landing blows, like
girls do, too amused to
do harm.