I am the kind of girl that boys dream
about. A subconscious afterthought who arrives
in darkness and idle, lazy ambling. I am not
the kind of girl boys think about. There
is no conscious decision made behind my arrival,
no, I am under the cloak of dark and sleep, too
muddled and nonsensical to possibly be
a product of waking musings.

I am accustomed to being a first
love. This is not an infatuation with pure
or loving the untouched. It is
an infatuation with the losing
dogs. In school, my best subject was always
English, my second best subject:
history. The past is important. I only
know how to work through my history
with words. I cannot work through
someone else's history with my
words. When I am not a first
love, I want to write to the loves
who came before me. But how do
I write to a love that was not mine?
I imagine it would start with
an apology.

To say our love is in its death throes
is to give it the gravitas
of a body. And like a dead body, it is
slowly bleeding out. But when a body
reaches the end, it has lived
and our love has hardly taken shallow
breaths. maybe it was never born.
Our love is closer to an orange left
in the decorative bowl of fruit,
not in my own home, but my mother's, too
long and forgotten until it begins to smell.
This love-is it rotting or soft.
Or maybe not at all.

How ironic that your most played songs are an ode
to the devil, and my most played songs are an ode to you.

Our love was punctuated by music. You held it so close
to your chest, I had to peel it off your fingertips.

From the moment I met you, you were linked to an album
of *** and lust and love and guilt. You listened
to the whole thing in one day. Your favorite was the song about doom.

You always handed me your phone when you drove, “Play
something new.” When you liked the song, you drove slower. If
the roads were quiet, you would drum on my left leg
with your right hand, putting my song in your body, you always

kissed me at red lights. You picked the music when we cooked
but it was always an album I had shown
you. I cooked and you cleaned, and you always worried when you ran
out of things to clean, but I never gave you a task because
when your hands went idle, they locked around my waist

and these were the moments I fell in love. Our love stopped
quietly. Music poured from your bedroom that did all the yelling
and wailing and pounding for you. You played drums

at your church and on me and on you, and I wonder if this pounding
on your legs is too your chosen self harm. Was loving

me your chosen religion? Am I more heaven or hell?
I left church and only fondly remember the music.

Your favorite band is Make Them Suffer, which is how I imagine
Hell and how you imagine our love.

Relationships are religion and I don’t wonder
if there’s a god when I’m in love.

You and him would sit side by side
in a classroom arranged alphabetically
with your last names falling C D and first
names sharing a J. Although I try not to sometimes
I cannot help but see the other things
you share: the fall of your hair the green
of your eyes the music you love the ***** of your chin why
you like me. Five years stand between you two and I fear
only one year will stand between the mistake
of you and the maybe mistake of him.

For the first time since childhood my bed was in the corner and this felt safe to be tucked in by walls.
Sometimes, I woke up with bruises from hitting it, but I never moved my bed.

You have thin walls and broken blinds and crumbling brick and leaking windows and I cried when my parents first walked out your doors because I fear people walking out on me.

And you became this one place of safety and home.

There is the living room where I sat with two strangers I was suddenly contractually tied to.
There is the bed that I sat on the end of with my fingers measuring my wrist one morning and Clara suddenly said, “you’re going to be fine” and there is where I realized I do not hide so well as I think.
There is the tile I stared at when I purged the last time.

There is where Jack read my poetry.
There is where I lay laughing and living like my younger self dreamed.
There are the stairs we tumbled down, high and happy, and there is where Clara and I sat talking until four am.
All around is where what happened at the party stayed at the party.

There is where I had *** the third time and the two hundredth time.
There is where I popped the shame and admitted it.
There is where I asked Joseph where his life turned and went wrong. And there is the spot where I fell in love for the second time. And there is the spot where Sam almost caught us, like suppressed teenagers, skin to skin.

There is the picture window we loved to leave open while we cleaned and cooked and baked.
There is the door we left unlocked for Michael and Sam and Sarah and Tommy to breeze in and out of.
There is the window and door we kept closed and locked from the prying eyes of the neighbor downstairs.

There is where I sat when I looked Clara and Abby in the eyes and lied.
And there is where I stood when they caught onto the truth.
And there is where I cried when the second love shattered.
There is the spot on the floor I talked to when I said, “maybe this is what I deserve.” And there is what Abby widened her eyes towards when she said, “I wish I could make you see it’s not.”
There is the wall I leaned against when I told Michael and Bret, too drunk to know my words from each other, about the moment of force. And there is where they said, “do not ever date men who treat you like that again when you deserve a perfect one.”
And there is the corner where Michael sat months after I admitted I had done it again.

There is the spot where Conner said he was falling in love. And there is the spot where I did not say it back.
There is where Andrew picked me up to kiss me in the glow of the street light before he went home.
There is the front step where Caleb said, “Wait, first, will you kiss me?”

There is the floorboard where Abby set her laptop and we drank whiskey and ate clementines and watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower on her last night.
There is the counter where Michael taught me how to do tequila shots.
There is the parking spot where Rhiannon and I unraveled our lives and then intertwined them to put them back together.

You have seen these broken hearts and drunken nights and ***** filled violence and maybe I am walking out with more bruises than I walked in with, but you became this one place of home.

A / Korean / friend of my mother’s returned
from Seoul with a gift for me / a Hanbok /
glowing with violent shades of pink and yellow

when I settled the / chima / on my shoulders
and tied the / jeogori / around my waist
I felt like a / white girl / in an / oriental costume /

The year I turned six / my white brother /
brought me to his school when they talked
about / South Korea / a real live / Korean /

to ooh and aah at while a map on the whiteboard
displayed my far off land for them to ogle
with / wide eyes / I leaned into the mirror

that night and ogled my / small eyes / that no
amount of widening could make / white /
All those / white / kids called me / ***** /

Like / ***** / in your armor? I thought
When / my white brother / got married no one
thought I was there for him everyone

thought I was there for his / Vietnamese /
wife. We’re here for the / white boy / his / Korean /
friend drawled. My ally in this sea of / white /