i.
last week you were sitting by your window watching the sun melt into a thousand shades of darkness and you thought of her. you still remember how she always smelled like lavender and roses and peonies and freshly mowed grass and rain - a living breathing walking talking singing dancing growing but ever so slowly dying garden. you suppose she must've smelled like cigarettes as well, since she went through a pack a week, and the whiskey she laced her coffee with and the teabags she used as toothbrushes, but all you can remember is the garden of her mind and the green of her thumbs that planted flowers in-between your ribs and turned your blood to a breeding ground for aphids. a single lotus flower can live for a thousand years. a single memory can live even longer.

ii.
on the train ride to paris she didn't think of you, instead she counted all the prime numbers from one to one thousand and kissed a boy with oceans for eyes. you came home to an empty house in february, a receipt for valentine's day roses still fresh in your wallet. all of your belongings were still there, tainted with the memory of her - the set of calligraphy pens she got you for hanukkah, the sweater of yours she would always wear in the mornings after *** while drinking coffee and filling out the crossword. the endless number of bobby pins she'd left in your bedroom were still there, littering your floor like land mines. you found the flowers she planted in your veins tossed in the trash, and you spent hours pulling each petal from its receptacle and deciding that if she'd ever loved you she would have chosen something gentler than forget-me-nots to sew into your veins. the seeds of a lotus flower must be cracked before they can be planted, must be broken to allow the water to seep into them and breathe possibility into their veins. your heart is cracked, have you blossomed yet?

sometimes i put on red lipstick
and go nowhere
sometimes i wish you were here
take me out and paint the town
the color of my heart
did you know i've always
loved the way you say hello
these are things you should know about the two of us
sometimes i think
there must be a couple dancing
in a little snowglobe somewhere
and i bet they look just like we do on these nights
three am and nothing to do
break out your dancing shoes
i've heard there's a hell of a party somewhere
and it starts after we get there

i will wrap my hands around each of my organs and rip them out one by one. i will call it poetry and make you watch. i will blame you for the mess. when it rains, i will take you out to taste the thunder with me. we will dance until lightning strikes the ground around our feet. we won't stop until the flames kiss our skin. when you complain about the way your toes burn, i will convince you that this is called love, and you will whisper an apology into my lips. i will be thinking of metaphors when you touch me. and when the winds become too strong, when it is all screaming chimes and unhinged doors, i won't stay to clean up the mess. i will pack my things while you beg me not to go. all of my poems have sharp teeth and they are a warning that i do not do anything in a whisper. no. i am the type of person who comes in with a first aid kit. just in case you hurt yourself while loving me. just in case it almost kills you.

In my dream, we were ghosts together. Not really sure how we found each other, not really sure how long we'd been floating past streetlights and bus stop benches, not really sure how we got this way. We didn't talk about things that happened in the past, or how everything around us was changing faster than we could hold on to them, how their shapes shifted before we could get a good grip. I cried on your shoulder when you finally said "Baby, I think we're dead." We both already knew but we weren't ready to admit it. I guess we were just stalling, wrapping time around our necks as if the seconds would choke us back to life, but it was not the noose we were looking for. You said "At least we have each other." So we forgot our names and emptied our organs to fill them with forever. After that, time was water slipping through our fingers, time tangled knots in our hair. We traced love letters in the sky with time and watched them dissipate to nothingness, into thin air. It was all we could do to hold on to each other. And we still fought. Eternity was a rushing river we waded through waist-deep, pulling us apart and back together again, our limbs weaving, interlocking, before we broke off and swam in opposite directions. You were the first hopeless thing I wanted to believe in. You stepped inside me and held my lungs so I could laugh again, you called it home. When I missed things like coffee or rain, you sang until I couldn't remember ever being alive, and we were happy again. When I woke up, I felt older. It smelled like something had died in my bed and I realized that I am forgetting what it's like to be alive. I'm afraid we're becoming ghosts. But not like we were in my dream. I wanted to die with you, but not like this. I'm not happy anymore and I don't think you are either, maybe this thing's not working out. Maybe this is as far as it gets for you and me. Maybe time has been writing us love letters back all along, but we don't look up at the sky anymore. We don't step in puddles of rainwater, we don't know how to swim anymore.

if you're not sorry, i'm not sorry.
let's get drunk. let's get ****** up. let's forget each other's names and call each other charles and maude for no good reason.
let's go swimming in the river and freeze our ***** off.

this world, this world, this world. it's too big for us and we love disappearing in it.
if you're not sorry, i'm not sorry.
we'll write a song and these will be the only words.
we'll sing it sweet and out of tune around a campfire and watch our friends kiss the wrong people.

i wanna die smiling. i don't care when. i just wanna.
promise me you won't be around when i get boring.
promise me we won't even talk about it when the time comes for us to leave each other.
one of us will wake up and we'll just feel it. we'll just know.

that's how i want this to go.
a song with only a chorus. no bridge, no fade out, just a steady tune that doesn't get tired.

keep driving.
i wanna know what the air smells like in nevada. i wanna see it all.
if you're not sorry, i'm not sorry.
let's stop talking. keep this song on, it's my favorite.

You were always too good to me. I was a hurricane, a nasty one too. I ripped your heart of its roots and flooded your soul with my absence; a tornado of emotions that destructed everything in my path and flash floods were always spilling down my cheeks. You kissed me everyday and told me you would never leave. Remember that one time you sat up with me on my bed all night and rubbed my back just because I was sad? I remember. Remember that one time you woke me up because you had made the perfect cup of tea and you thought I would like it? I remember. It's all the small, little memories that are my favorite. And even though we have both grown so different (i grew my hair out and you cut all of yours off) I still love you. I love you I love you I love you. I miss you, too. But I know you are busy and having a good time with your new friends so I'll leave you alone and take another drink of this whiskey that tastes like you.

katie’s unraveling, but even that she does beautifully.
underneath her diamond-hard exterior, she’s all glass,
transparent and breakable like the rest of us.

scott hasn’t been sober since the drought began.
aunt kathy thinks his throat must be the wettest
thing in this whole **** town; i think she blames him.
every night she mutters that if he was a cloud, the
rain would come back ‘cause he’d be so heavy.

travis. at first it was just the knives, but lately
we’ve had to hide the safety pins and forks too.
anything even remotely sharp. he hasn’t
left the house since he got back from the hospital.
john still has nightmares of finding him in the tub,
open wrists. i couldn’t tell if he was floating in more
water or blood, it was that bad. now i just watch him,
so determined to destroy himself. nobody sleeps.

emily’s gone. she said this place was suffocating her.
all the sadness collecting in her lungs like a cancer.
evan misses her terribly and he won’t admit it. but i
keep thinking she left to find the rain — bring it home.

still, my hands have not stopped shaking
since they felt a body fall limp beneath them,
felt all the systems and mechanisms come to
a sudden halt, a full house become vacant.
don’t ask me why i think of angels when i hear
sirens rippling through the night, or why all my
nightmares look like ambulance doors closing.
you can only have what you love torn from your
grip so many times before loss turns into a habit.
letting go is a lesson my hands have learned
too well, they are careless with things like love
and trust. dirt under my nails. i killed the part of
me that wanted to **** itself and buried it in an
unmarked grave, there are parts of me i never
want to find again. give me the corpses of your
lesser selves and i will make graves for them
too, i will lay them to rest if you get weary
of carrying their heavy bones.