I long for what I’ve never known: a word
that captures the foreign feels of speech surging
from my throat, the ways they shake and crack with
fury and failure as I break away
from the safety of silence, in jagged
and fragmented sentences–I’m desperate
to seize meaning, trying words like puzzle
pieces, I’ll force them to fit together
to form the spaces of pieces missing.
My greatest fear is to be incomplete.

And I’m constantly reminded of this
over coffee-talk and shared politics
as I recoil shyly in forced defense
of each vowel, and every consonant
and the myriad of their constructions:
they are stuck behind my eyes. I am left
apologizing for my vagueness and
for the grey shades of embarrassment and
finite language–when a dictionary
is never a long enough read for the
lone, longer walk around the circumference
of my head–or any red eye flight I have
ever caught that takes me from thought to thought:

the moving belts of baggage claim don’t
have to tell me of the luggage I lost.
As possessions were plucked from circuitry
I clung to the emptiness as if it
was mine and took it home as leverage.
I write in circles ’til I’m motion sick.
I write myself into thought-asylums
where silence is another language:
a slow germination of roots lacing
down the bell-curve of my spine.
A foreign tongue, An othered alphabet.

So long as there’s society there’s much to haunt
and hate. So long as the world has its cages and
everything has proper place the future is no option
until the streets are dressed in flames with torn
pavement roaring as loud as the voices dancing

where nothing’s left empty–their bodies, the buildings–
all glowing, negating the inert night. And when
the walls turn to ashes, they’ll dance in a flurry
to kiss the ground as if smudging their past lives
off surviving maps.

What I would give to
be a lone grain within a
Sahara sandstorm
a fragment of drought
scattering itself across
nowhere, singing with
the slow erosion. I long
to be this, to be loved
despite it. You’ll always
drag your fingers through
me

how many grains can
the gusts steal before
a dune is gone? There’s
no such thing as a static
state: Everything dies
still nothing rests.

It was in the way your chest
concaved, convexed with my pulse
and with our ******; our bodies

beat rhythms into the walls
and floors; I was shaking
as your hand held up the arch

of my back. I looked up and wished
it wasn’t you so badly, I cried
and you wiped away what you saw

to be a bead of sweat from my cheek.
It was January and the heater
was broken.

I fall in love quite
frequently, in glances with
those I’ll never know.

To exchange awkward
advances while predicting
this too will plateau

When I am around you,
I’m confused like the way
cars curtsey at one another
at four way stop signs
when no one’s really sure
who got there first,
or if it’s their chance
to go next

And then before anyone
has a chance to blink,
some will say **** it
and the curtsey contorts
into a slow motion collision
that leaves people crying,
saying sorry, and momentarily
their lives pause for each
other as they evaluate
their damages

apparitions and
how they’re haunting:
because I feel like
I am scattered across plains
as if my cortex was tossed
into a disposal and shredded
so all could have a piece
of me to pick

I saw you and slammed
my fists against the tabletop
because I just wanted
a moment for our glances
to meet and ricochet–
but all I got was my beer
to break the imposed
inertia of its pitcher.
And so it poured: all over
me and mocked the way
I spilled myself to you,
desperate for you to love
me back. You give a fierce
beating for a heart so weak
and it’s funny, because you
never had to raise a fist
to get me so defensive–
and it’s funny, because I had
to fight back before I realized
I will never defeat your silent
treatment, no matter
how eloquent my words.

You’re a cold nostalgia
because you’re still my
this time last year
sitting on the Pendleton
stoop asking me why
like you always would
and I’d always say
because. I never really
knew an answer, I only
knew I did.
And in this way we were
good but I always knew
I’d end up ****** and
without you. I cried when
I moved out the studio
off Euclid Avenue. I sat
by myself in a different
emptiness than the one
we moved into. Then, I too
left for good.
And in the ways the night
is wanted, I never sleep
alone. And all the love
that I’ve had since, I tell
them why because
I don’t.