We sat crisscross applesausely beneath a secret cave sheet fort.  
There was just room for the two of us,
To roll around and kiss
To pretend.
Shape shifting walls
warm lights and soft shadows
We kept warm with laughter and nostalgia and liquor
I could stretch and push our temperate hiding spot from us like lungs
and you would swallow me like air till I contract
We should be built into a statue, sitting here
So young lovers can relate to something concrete
And write poems about how special they are.

Call me a knockout
and make my smile diminish
because you're my boss.

Sir, you're mistaken
I don't feel more attractive
when you honk your horn.

Whistling at me
only allows one of us
to show true colors.

Drive by and holler
void of personality
I'm just a figure.

Your blood may pump blue
But your soul is neon sign
broken and ugly.

A haiku for you:
Corinne Elizabeth Parke,
***** little *****.

lol

There is a dead rabbit in my garden
This isn’t a metaphor
There is a dead rabbit in my garden

I put it there myself,
I didn’t do the killing, just the commandeering

I rode past it on my bike in September
There was frost on the ground
And in its fur
Matted from the performance of death

On my ride home the world had melted
But rigor had set in like ice
I scooped up the morsel in a Subway bag

I watched for months
As the body decomposed through chemistry
Rather than biology
Enzymes were at work, not insects

The bunny still rests beneath clover
But it is a black cave now
With walls made of bone

With the sun came scavengers
Though only a thin layer of meat remains
Just enough for the fur to cling to
There are flies
So full
They walk

I wrote down my sister’s name
I erased it
I couldn’t stand the curves of the letters
It looked like phlegm caught in the back of your throat

After her husband died
She mourned
In a way so foreign to me
And conflicting to the way I needed her to mourn
My heart broke and she carried the pieces home with her
Held them next to hers, I thought
And the countless other broken hearts
We all mourned so severely
I thought she’d hold the pieces close for warmth
But our portions of heart were swept under the bed
Which she now shares with a new man

Ryan’s death should have been about him
But it took less than 2 weeks for it to be about her new boyfriend
My sister
Went from “widowed” to “in a relationship”
In 36 days.

When we were 5 and 6
We created theatrical productions on our trampoline
We performed them for our neighbors
I just want to write to everyone
And tell them to erase the memories
Forget my smile
Forget my silly voices
Forget the dandelions I threw at my sister when she bowed
My sister would not take my heart and throw it like a ****

I do not know this person
Who no longer identifies as widow

Tonight, we took communion
We drank deeply from salvation,
Taking long gulps of escape
And bit hearty bites of forgiveness;
Amnesty tastes so good some nights

We didn’t take the bread out of the bag
Until there were wine stains in our bellies
Stains all over our bodies
Our mouths so profoundly red, when we blew kisses at each other
we left perfect lips on lips
Our tongues red like ink pens
We penned in cursive, our names onto each other’s chests
Like all the other things we ever wrote were wrong
My fingertips like raspberries
My fingertips like spring time
Tonight, we celebrated surviving winter,
Toasting to its defeat
Our sadness has left us, replaced by rosy cheeks and hiccups
I have held my breath for this

I have allowed you to stain me so red
an autopsy will show internal bleeding
Tonight, we became blood brothers and sisters
My heart has swelled too large for my ribs
Broken from this cage and cried out
I will bleed like this long after the wine is gone.

We think big thoughts involving omnificence
This water has become wine
This bread has become flesh
My soul has buried itself inside of my nooks
I think
Every time you touch me, you find where it has snuck off to
Like hide and seek
You are the very best at finding me
I can find shapes in the clouds
In your freckles, and in bread crumbs on your shirt
You **** ****** lips like a beast
You tousle up my heartstrings with ease.

I am good for nothing
But art.
To witness
Is to paint a life into color
To witness is medium.
I will let my hands get *****.
I have the ability to mold
And therefore the responsibility to
I shape
I stretch
I manipulate

And I expect much of the same in return.
Get your hands *****.
Dig your fingers into my knit
Tousle up my heart strings
Get me all knotted up

There is no embarassment when you have a baby.
This is the wisdom given to the teen dad on the bus
He practices his Arnold accent
And ever so gently shakes the baby
He holds it like a bomb
The stranger shakes a pooh bear like she has the mitus touch
But where crying babies hush at her touch
I half hope the baby gets louder