you warm me to the bone,
and then there is fire in my veins,
and it’s never enough,
I’m left with a raging need,
boiling and bubbling,
I want more,
more heat,
more warmth,
more life,
-----
pooling warmth,
nimble fingers,
a heat in my heart,
my mouth,
a pulling feeling,
a savage need,
touch me.

i’ve never been religious but i’ve always known how to pray,
words worn down by my tongue like a security blanket.
it’s been years since i’ve thought about what they actually mean;
it’s like my pledge of allegiance, i don’t pray,
i recite.

repetition repetition repetition
my brain’s in fission
i pledge allegiance to the flag--
we only loved behind closed doors
of the united states of america--
i’ve heard if you say something enough times it stops sounding like anything at all
and to the republic for which is stand--
i love you, i love you, i love you, i love you, i love you
one nation under god--

i usually leave that part out.
close my mouth, stand silent.

silence is for sinners and we are losing battles of people.

in my history textbook there is a picture
of a man shoving a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle.
just the same,
you’re the kind of person who’d go planting flowers
on the side of the road just to make it prettier,
you’re always wasting your time caring about people
who couldn’t give a **** about you
and it’s probably tragic or something
but words like tragic and poetic are for different people than us.

i am so ******* bad at gentle and you’re deserving of delicate.
i think some people are less impressionable in the way the take up space
than they are in the holes they leave when they’re gone.

i used to imagine that there were phantom versions of myself,
standing everywhere that i have ever stood
like ghosts or maybe more like placeholders.
waiting.
it’s like how when i was a little kid,
i would try to picture what the spot i was standing in
looked like a hundred, a thousand years ago.
who has treked through through the same places
that i go everyday.
i still like to think like that sometimes.
i like to think we leave behind echoes of ourselves
in the places we’ve been.
i like to think that a hundred, a thousand years from now,
there is going to be a little kid trying to do the same,
picturing me standing here.
i still like to think there is a version of me
hanging around in my childhood home, six years old with
missing front teeth.
i still like to think there is a version of me
wandering around all my favorite cities i’ve visited.

by this logic, there is still a version of you
in the room i last saw you in,
still framed by the light pouring in from the window.
by this logic, there is still version of me
in the room i last saw you in… waiting.
for something.

i can see the fight within you,
it tears you apart,
are you a monster, you ask?
will you allow yourself to be a monster?
your hands they can create,
but it is much easier to destroy,

i have been where you have been,
pushing feeling, down
                                     down
                                               down
but please hear me out,
they will only come bubbling back with a vengeance
you try to shield yourself,
from the hurt,
but you’re only locking yourself away,
from all you could know,

on sunday, i sat in our kitchen with my dad as the pale april sunlight streamed in and we watched as the brasilian government held the vote over whether or not to impeach the president dilma rousseff.

my brother’s at college, my mom was at work; it was just me and my dad.
a family friend told me once that my dad loves his country more than anybody they'd ever met.

i remember, we ate apple slices as we watched the government vote on the fate of the country. i am 17 and my dad still slices my apples, cuts my grilled cheese sandwiches into triangles, calls me querida.

my dad gestures at the TV, we both talk with our hands a little too much, and tells me that you can tell which way the politicians are voting based of the color they’re wearing.

the worker’s party, partido dos trabalhadores, called the PT is wearing red. they're the ones that vote against impeachment, eu voto não.
my father marched for that party in the 70s, 80s. they were born of the opposition to the military dictatorship of his childhood. he glares at the TV screen, now, like he’s angry for the promises they broke.

the TV in the kitchen is practically a relic, a boxy fourteen inches, older than me. we have a satellite dish in the backyard so we can get globo, the biggest television network in brasil. neighbor kids accidentally chuck their ***** into it, hitting the dish and scrambling over the fence to collect their toys.

on the TV, ricardo barros walks up the microphone. he’s a congressman from my family’s home state of paraná. my dad says, “hey, i went to college with him!”

they both majored in civil engineering, went to university in maringá.  
i remember i laughed. my dad knows so many people that he can find acquaintances on the TV. i asked my dad if they were friends. he laughs a little, too, says it depends on how ricardo voted.

ricardo voted yes.

my father was 7 years old in 1964 when the military took over brasil’s government in a coup. sometimes i wonder if for him this whole thing feels sort of like de ja vu, history repeating with a new face.

i don’t ask.

they say in history,
behind every great man there’s an even greater woman.
so think of it like this:
do you know who marcia lucas is?
it’s okay if you don’t.
there’s a reason for that,
until a few months ago i didn’t know her name either.
but you probably know who george lucas is.
biographer dale ******* once said that marcia,
george lucas's first wife who he was married to throughout
the production of the original trilogy,
was his “secret weapon."
and the operative word in that sentence is secret.
because i have been watching star wars
for just about as long as i can remember;
growing up, my brother and i owned not only
half a dozen plastic lightsabers and a box set of both trilogies,
but my dad even likes to mimic yoda’s voice and speech patterns
when he gives me motivational life talks.
but i never once learned marcia lucas's name.
i know star wars super fans who can spout out more trivia
about wedge antilles,
an x-wing pilot with 2.5 total minutes of screen time in the entire saga,
than marcia lucas,
the women who edited the film together
into the cultural phenomenon we know.
marcia lucas is the woman who edited starwars
from a mess into a masterpiece.
the woman who has be described
as the “warmth and heart of the films”
who carved out her husband's characters into people
and developed with much of emotional resolution of the series,
coming up with the idea of killing off ben kenobi
when george lucas couldn’t resolve the plot line himself.
her fingerprints are all over these movies,
she shaped these stories and us with them
yet we never talk about her hands cutting the film.
the woman who edited the scene
where luke skywalker destroys the death star
from a 45 minutes crawl into the fast-paced moment
when the good guys win,
the woman who sewed together
the magic we watched on our screens
is nothing more than a footnote in the credits.
she has been erased from the narrative.
and as i write this poem,
i know that only some of you will never think of this name again.
and if you do it will probably be as trivia,
a fact to spout in a conversation about george lucas
or while you pop in a new hope into the DVD.
but sometimes you have to think about how many people’s lives
end up on the cutting room floor.
they say in history,
behind every great man there’s an even greater woman.
margaret hamilton is the lead software engineer
whose work took apollo 11 to the moon.
do you know her name?
you know the man on the moon but not the woman who put him there.
sybil ludington road twice as far as paul revere
to warn the local militia of the oncoming british attack,
fending off a band of highway robbers as she did.
do you know her name?
long before little richard and chuck berry
were ever even strumming at their guitars,
sister rosetta tharpe was pioneering a genre
with the first album ever labeled as rock’n’roll.
do you know her name?  
rose mccoy wrote the words to the song “i beg of you”
that elvis presley crooned,
along with countless more that other people sang.
do you know her name?
do you know any of their names?
maybe spotlights cast more shadows than they give off light.
we are a culture of people who forget everything out of sight.
they say in history,
behind every great man there’s an even greater woman.
we just... don't know her name,
no one ever bothered to teach us her name.
no one was supposed to.
history is not always about who you remember,
sometimes it is about who you forget.

one of my best friends told me that
the first time she got high that she focused in on little details,
almost compulsively.
that she was scared of accidentally stepping on
the all snails on the sidewalk so she stayed frozen in place
for what seemed like hours.
paralyzed.
i was scared of loving you and accidentally ******* it up
so i stayed frozen in place and just… watched it slip past me.
paralyzed.
my finger still stretching, like they were planning
on catching… something.
now, i’ll never know what.
so i guess what i’m trying to say is
you can’t focus on the details so much that you forget
about the big picture
and you can’t love, you can’t live,
being afraid.
because sometimes being in love is kind of like
drowning while you're on fire and getting punched in the face.
repeatedly.
and yet you want it all the time.
handing half of your heart over to another person
and expecting them not **** up is insane.
and you’ve told me before to stop making
metaphors out of moments.
not everything is poetry somethings just... are.
but i love you as i imagine icarus must have loved the sun
before it swallowed him whole.
we are beautiful because we are so doomed.
life would not be nearly as incredible as it is if we got to live it twice.
living is sort of like dying with a seatbelt on.
we are a moment like a movie
where they kept the camera running for too long,
where they didn’t leave all the awkward false starts of conversation
on the cutting room floor.

i knew a girl once,
she got a tattoo stenciled “tabula rasa”
and could never see the irony.
irony is cruel, after all, and there’s a lot of things
we chose not to see, obliviously.
irony is a musician with a deaf daughter, a painter with a blind son.
but this was just a metaphor, what we’re headed for
always heading home in the wrong direction,
but i’m not a suicidal head case,
just a dreamer who got high on outer space
and this was what i wrote for icarus
before he gunned me down out of the sky
i don’t why, but my wings tend to get tangled whenever i try to fly.
typos slip past my copy edit and sometimes i still feel pathetic;
i am a gallery of scars.
if life is performance art then i’m a ******* masterpiece.
it’s all growing pains,
knowing better doesn’t always mean you do better.
so pain is necessary. so pain is unavoidable.
but i don’t wanna to live a life where every single week is
“i just gotta get through this week”
but good things don’t only come from pain
and poetry is not sad by definition.
i know we tend to romanticize the tears in our eyes
but i wanna grit my teeth into a grin,
i wanna know about sinking because i'm learning how to swim.
and gravity was never the enemy,
at least not how i thought it would be.
gravity was just doing its job,
it didn’t know the way it was weighing me down like quicksand
and making it so hard to get up out of bed.
i will never understand
why happiness is so attainable for some
and so unattainable for others.
but maybe that’s just the hairline difference
between happiness and joy --
one is more circumstantial that the other.
lately, my brain’s been stalling like an engine on overdrive,
it wants to die out but somehow the heart’s keeping it alive.
so this is the sound two hearts make when they collide,
we write poems and never talk about it.
i write mile long poems and i’ve got a tongue like a riddle
and love’s just a word, but don’t you dare tell me
that words aren’t important.
you know better.
smashing hearts like hundred dollar guitars,
we all wanna pretend we’re rockstars.
you know, some people get drunk just
so they can see something in the sky.
and i need these lines,
they build up the structure in my spine
i don’t know always who i am
but i know who i haven’t been.
i know who i want to be.

i’ve planned out my whole funeral.
which probably makes it sound like i’m a lot more interested  
in dying than i actually am
but i just--
i think my problem is that i was never the type of person to plan ahead.
i never have imagined my college life,
or my future career, or how many kids i might i have.
i’m one of the only people i know
that has never tried to picture their own wedding.
my mom says that’s a good thing,
keeps me away from unhealthy expectations
but she’s my mom
and it’s like how your mom always tells you that you’re pretty
because what the **** kind of mother
doesn’t correct their kid’s self-loathing or at least try to?
my mom, she’s pretty used to me lying on my kitchen floor
in the throes of an existential crisis
because existential crisis is sort of my nom de plume
and before anything else,
i am afraid to be someone disappointed by my own dreams.
but i think because i never tried my hand at planning
i have no idea where i’m supposed to be in my future,
i have no idea what i want.

see the thing is,
i’m afraid i’ve never really fit in comfortably anywhere in,
i’m just really good at pretending i do.
if i wanted to swan dive into my psyche a little bit more,
i’d chalk it up to all my biracial bicultural biwhatever *******:
that feeling that i’m two things at the same time
and i don’t know where i fit.
in simple terms:
i’m too white for the latino kids
and not white enough for the white kids.
in complicated terms:
i’ve got close family about 4000 miles away
and i feel really ******* guilty for not loving them
as much as my family in the next state over,
and i resent them for not getting who i am
like my family 4000 miles away does.

i don’t think i know anyone who worries quite like i do.
see i’m not unhappy, really,
but maybe i’m the saddest happy person i know.
i try not to think about it too much,
but my brother tells me it’s because i think too much;
he’s one of those people who is frustratingly self-assured
even when he’s not.
i told him to play highway to hell at my funeral half as a joke
but mostly because i can’t even stand to imagine
the thought of outliving him.
we’re the weird kind of siblings who adore each other senselessly.
identical, two halves of a whole,
we are the same person a so many ways.
he’s the reason i exist in a completely unpoetic way --
he wanted a little sibling so much
that i joke that he begged me into existence.
he is the only person who’s ever laughed at the right parts of my jokes.
he tells me to stop worrying about tomorrow like he already has.
i think this is our key difference.

i like stories because i like escapism,
i think poetry is the only time i’m really… myself.
it is what it is and it isn’t what it isn’t,
and i loved harry potter because i wanted to be magic
and i loved star wars because i wanted to be a galaxy far, far away.
and i love how i met your mother
because everyone loves lily and marshall, right?
and everyone wants that, right?
to love someone that much,
to be so ******* sure about somebody
even when everything else is ****.
i’m just afraid that i’m never going to get that.
which is cliche but all cliches had to start somewhere
and i think people actually hate cliches
more because of the fact they’re so inescapable true
rather than the fact that they’re corny.
i’m mad at the TV for selling my a dream i’m not sure i get to have
and i’m mad at life for not imitating art well enough
and i’m mad at life for imitating art too well
and i’m ******* ****** at whoever told me that
i could be whatever i wanted when i grow up
because they were ******* lying.

so i tell you that at my funeral
i want everyone to get really ******* drunk.
and you tell me that jesus christ, daniela,
most people don’t spend their free time
thinking about their own funeral.
and it’s a matter of perspective, i guess.
some people never see the meteor coming
and some people can never tear their eyes away.
death is always walking towards me, the bus is always coming,
it’s just that sometimes it sort of speeds up
and everything else slows down.
so at my funeral, i want there to be an open bar
and i want to have someone collecting
other people’s stories about me at the door as admission.
i am not obsessed with my legacy,
just my end result.
i have never known where i’m going to end up
but i’ve always been willing to find out.

and at my funeral i want everyone to dance.
sloppy and uncoordinated.
i don’t want my funeral to be sad.
i can’t think of anything
less fitting.