There are seventeen knobs in my room
and three doors
that I open and close over and over again in my mind
when I can’t sleep.

Sometimes when I nudge my face into the
hollow of your neck
I count how long between each breath.
And sometimes when we walk together
I feel like the sidewalk is chasing my feet.
Like every day is an endless game of hopscotch
against the cracks in the cement.

I wish I didn’t feel like the ground
Was quicksand
And that I could pretend that
when you hold me
I don’t worry about the symmetry of your touch.
But for now,
I am grateful that you’ll sit with me
Opening and closing those doors in our minds,
Holding me so tight that all I can feel
Or think about
Is you.

Finding you in the same place
5,660 miles from home
Was like returning to a book I never finished reading
And forgetting why I ever put it down.
Like losing my place
And retracing all that I’d read before
In hopes I could find where we left off.

Stay the night and
We can watch the checkerboard of light
cast from the windows
disappear
as the sun relinquishes it’s hold on the sky.

Stay the night
and we’ll never have to find a secret place
between the gaps in the ticking of a clock.

Stay the night and
My heart will beat against you,
A crescendo against my ribcage
And for fear you’ll wake
I’ll do my best
To silence it.

Everything I feel explodes into tiny particles,
spinning through the air like maple seeds
and settling at your feet.

I stood with you on a windy day
admiring how the seeds took off into the air like mini helicopters.
My hand wandered to yours,
A second snuggling into the space of an hour.

I was not born to love you
our initials are not etched into an eternal tree
my blood is not fermented with your name
and the curtain of the sky does not pull back to reveal

you and i
under a spotlight, on a stage
this, i am sure of
i was not born to love you.

i was not conceived to listen to your breath
as it falls against my chest
nor to end up on that rooftop
shivering not from the cold but from the way
your skin felt on my fingertips.

i was not made to stay up
and listen to the crackle
of the phone line as you draw
a heavy breath across the screen.

we are not eternal lovers
declared by the stars
but that does not mean
i love you any less

for i have chosen to love you
it was not fate but the patterns of your speech
the persistence of your heart

nobody, not the universe could predict
for i was not born to love you

and yet how fervent
how coincidental
how gentle
it is that i do.

Uploading a poem I wrote my freshmen year for the nostalgia of it. I graduate in a month! So happy to say I am much more confident and comfortable in my self now.

I am a little blue house
with orange pots beside my door.
I am a darker blue than the other houses
and I have dust on my wooden floor.

Sometimes people don't notice
my curling paint and broken sides
but the people who look closest
see the ugly I try to hide

Welcome to my brain
please leave your shoes behind
naked toes sink into carpeted thoughts
oh the terrible things you'll find.
phrases sit on wooden chairs
awaiting their release
anxiety clings tightly to my neck,
my thoughts are a disease

lets travel to my heart
it's placed inside a box
with tissues, apple cores, cough drops
and all the love I've lost.
my heart a petal of a flower
to be plucked by someone new
and afterwards it'll stand wilting
from love i thought was true.

further to my stomach
let the door click neatly behind
a jail i've always hated
here, i am confined
like looking in a distorted mirror
there’s always a dome of my skin
people tell me i'm skinny
but to me I'm never thin.

I love my little blue house, i say
but I know that's only a lie
i hate the picket fence
and ***** puddles slide from my eyes

I may not like my roof
(it's covered in raindrop spots)
But at least I like my color blue
and i like those orange pots.

You're sitting in the old rocking chair
that once belonged to your sister,
suffering under his gaze,
watching as he treats her child
the way he treated her
and you'll tell her to sit up and
think of her mother
how she would have been proud to see her
between this man’s teeth.