1.My mother's favorite color is the palest blue, the same as her eyes. For years, my favorite color was hers because I wanted to be just like her. At nine, I fell in love with green because everyone else loved blue and I wanted to be just like no one. At sixteen, I fell in love with a boy who had green eyes. And skin the color of sunshine and honey. I thought it a coincidence his eyes held the orbs of liquid green in the very shade I found so enchanting.
2. At twenty one, I have been hypnotized by and loved romantically and loved platonically and ****** a sea of green and still think it a coincidence because I am oblivious to eye color. I did not notice my roommate's eye color until our second year of sleeping on mattresses on the floor, laid a yard away from one another.
3. My roommate has green eyes.
4. I am writing this, like the Duke's servants who moonlit as actors, in a green room, behind the scenes. The room where actors reside during a play when they are not on stage is called a green room. Sometimes this room is painted green, sometimes not. This green room where I wait is green. The green room took its name from the fact that its walls were often painted green to rest the eyes of actors after exposure to stage lights. The green room may also derive its name because the London Blackfriars Theatre has a room in 1599 that was green where the actors waited. The origin of the term has been lost. There is no definitive place from whence it comes.
5. Acting is almost lying. In acting, one is meant to become a different person, not quite a lie, but not quite honest. Actors have the ability to become different people, consider motives, achieve an objective. Subsequently, many actors are brilliant manipulators. Many actors are brilliant liars.
6. I am not one of these actors. I am a terrible liar.
7. A wave in that sea of green was a terrible actor, but a brilliant liar.
8. One day, we took a walk just before it rained when the sky turned a gray-green and streaked with gold. A man stopped us and asked, "Hey, what's your favorite color?" "Green," he said without missing a beat. "Your favorite color isn't green, it's black." "I know." "Why did you lie?" "I don't know."
9. That was the first lie.
10. I thought it was a coincidence that he had green eyes, just like other people I love and loved. Mere coincidence. Or divine intervention. Or a sign. It started to pour right after that first lie. Mere coincidence. Or divine intervention. Or a sign. After him, I ****** blue eyes. I sought love from brown eyes. I kissed anything in between. anything but green. I wanted the company of brown eyes blue eyes anything but green. My roommate's green eyes are the exception.
11. Green eyes. Honey, you are the sea upon which I float and I came here to talk. I think you should know, the green eyes, you're the one that I wanted to find.

Mine is indecisive skin:
somewhere in between yellow
and off white,
mottled with red at some times,
mottled with scars at all times.
Yellow enough that when mono
ravaged through sixth grade
with symptoms listed as yellow
discoloration of the skin
a kid pointed at me and asked
like that? of it.
I do not write it beautiful
the way Rachel Rostad does:
“[my skin] was pacific sunset,
almond milk, a porcelain cup.”
I prefer to indulge in the comfort
of sweaters and long pants and hair
framing my cheeks, hiding
what my eyes my hair my name
give away. Joseph loved me
for my eyes my hair my name not
my skin, said
I don’t like your skin tone,
and I took this criticism as cruel and probably
fell a little bit out of love with him that night,
with his asian anime schoolgirl fetish
with his white boy privilege
but do you really think I’m talking to you about my skin?

I stopped loving you
The moment you stopped loving me
And I wonder what this says about me
That I do not love other people
Unless they love me
And I do not say I love you
Unless they say it first.

How can you say I go about things the wrong way?

Do you remember the summer night I pulled you
by the hand to find fireflies? I could not believe
something so small, so delicate, could hold
so much light. When they went to sleep we laid
on our backs with a bottle of wine between us and stared

at the stars. You used your scientist’s eye to show
me the constellations I’d never been able to spot
before. I loved the idea of a story unfolding
in the stars and you loved the idea of us.

When the wine was warm and I could find the Big Dipper
without your help, we undressed by moonlight and jumped
in the envelope of the lake. We pretended everyone
else was asleep and could not hear our words of ***
and love and mortality. Just as they could not see my legs
wrap around your waist in water too deep to see

the bottom. That night I asked you how you needed
to be loved. You said you didn’t know
how love felt until we met, but sometimes, you would lie
awake next to me at night and wonder, “is this it?”

And how can you say I go about things the wrong way
when I did the human thing and loved you in the only way I know?

And we are humans and need to be loved, but just because you love
someone does not mean they have to love you back.

And just because you once loved someone does not mean you should continue.

I am a poet who fell in love with a scientist.

I wrote him odes and pulled him through the grass to look at the stars.
He read studies on how to love me and pointed at the placement of the planets.

I saw his traits as the ingredients to compose a flawlessly flawed face.
He saw them as biological components to create a recipe for evolutionary disadvantage.

I knew that I loved him because I felt it in my bones.
He woke up beside me and pondered, while I slept, if he truly did me.

I saw him as the perfect person.
He saw me as trial three in this experiment of the heart.

His hypothesis: I will always love you
The results: Hypothesis proven wrong

My head is floating and balance shaking
And my shell is cold to the touch.

The skin under my fingertips is tingling
And i cannot tell if it is the cold from the balcony thawing,
The rain dripping through the slats freezing,
Or the memory of your heart in my hands.  

I think of how tempting the offer is to climb
Into another and another and another man’s bed.
And so I charm and dangle my body and words,
Angled so they will drip into their open palms
And they will drink with reckless abandon.  

And I hear them still outside, words oozing in,
And I hear them devise plans of your demise
And I still hear you echoing endlessly in my ears
And somehow you win.

Or maybe it is the smoke still in my lungs that i carried back inside.

I knew that I was beginning to care about him
when I asked him about the train tracks on his wrist.

I noticed them the night we met,
illuminated by flickering candlelight.
I asked him about his mom and his dad,
his sister and his friends,
his high school and his college,
trying to find the moment
where life twisted and turned wrong.

The question spilled out of my mouth.
I tried to catch it, but it had already overflowed.
He clapped his right hand to his left wrist,
as if trying to stop the no longer flowing blood.

The last boy I loved stared with sweetness at knives
and he sliced his skin as a sacrifice
to the man he wanted to be.

We sat on a park bench the summer we were seventeen
and he grabbed my wrist and he drank my lies.
But he did not mention it. And I did not mention it.
And we raced each other to die.

I have found that there are many ways to hurt yourself.
I have found that many people I love are hurting themselves.
Writing about being desperate to die,
trying to expedite the process.
Hiding weapons under pillows,
pressed like petals between the pages of books.
We do not see one another.
At least, not in time.

When I am at his left side,
I run my right hand over the inside of his wrist.

I want kind fingertips to have touched
the painful spots although they cannot erase.
I want his skin to know it deserves softness
and not sharpness, not all the time.
I want to thank him
for letting his cuts become scars.

I want to thank them for staying alive.