My teeth sinking into his chest
creates earthquakes,
kills worlds of microbes,
shifts tectonic plates and brings him rising to meet me.

When I lick his skin, a thousand oceans are born, and then die.

My fingertip dancing across his skin
blooms a forest where it lands,
which wastes away to desert
as soon as I have left him.

We are universes colliding, my love.
Let's see how big of a bang we can make.
Let's fling our stardust out into a whole other creation.

Hold onto the good thoughts
even though the bad thoughts can feel
to be sitting right beside you,
staring you in the face,
and you think,
"I must face the truth. Everyone else
is only fooling themselves."
But...
what is truth?
I only know two:
I am,
I will die.
The rest is as one makes of it.

You see these ugly thoughts right next to you
because they are at the bend in the river
you have woven into your mind,
centuries of glaciers going in the same patterns
and wearing deep grooves.
You forge your world anew every moment,
you that am I.
Don't let the past trick you into thinking
that it is reality.
Your fears of what might be for the future,
they too travel in rafts along those same canyons.

The only thing that I can prove is,
I am,
not, I have been
or I will be,
for nothing is so certain as to suggest permanence.

Carve paths that will lead you to the mouth of the ocean
where all becomes one anew.

I once met a man,
with a remarkably even brow,
who promised me we’d dance naked on the ice caps of Patagonia.
He swore it like I was the torch that lit fire to his blood;
swore it like he could already feel the earth beneath us melting away.
He called to me, “Kendra”,
and ate all the letters as they slid over his tongue.
I believed him only for the way his mouth moved.
I followed.
I poured myself into the stream of his praises, poured my breath onto his hungry tongue,
I poured, and poured, and drained myself empty.
I awoke alone
to my first crystal splintering: the crisp and brutal dawning
that most full nights will waken to empty mornings.

The nursing home smelled like ****
considerately covered with disinfectant.
“Thank god for small mercies”, I thought,
as I walked towards the one I love
who can no longer speak my name.
She had grown whiskers, when did that happen?
And the corner of her eyes were filled with decay.
Some things were the same, though,
Like the way she cried when I hugged her.
Like the way her hair smells-
like protection,
like childhood.

It is very difficult to converse with some one who can barely speak.
I pattered on about my boyfriend, and she asked,
“Jewish?”
I reply, “No Bubbe, he’s not.”
Her eyes fell, and how can I reveal myself to her?
That I lost nothing when I found that I didn’t believe?
Instead I smile and say, “maybe someday Bubbe.”
But she is not fooled, and my smile becomes plaster.
I stop filling the silence.

There is a woman screaming in the hall.
Not screaming exactly, but yelping
like a fox caught in a trap.
Thin, helpless cries so full of fear and pain
that I could reach up and feel her loss ripping the air.    
“She sounds like I feel”, I thought.
But then again, how must she feel?
I’m here for half an hour,
she’s here until death.
And I text my boyfriend, I tell him,
if you’re still around when we're old,
before you let them put me in a place like this,
put a bag over my head,
and slit my wrists.

Whosoever says that they have found love,
please, teach me the intricate habit of the lover
who does not want for more,
once they have found enough.
Whosoever searches for  
the pit of the plum,
how do you not bite down
to prove you have found
that which cannot be cracked?

If I must take another lover, as my lonely tells me I must, let it be Poetry.

Let her come to me naked
with wisps of music wrapped around her wrists and ankles,
with words woven into the waterfall of her hair.

Scorpion's milk will spill from her lips where they touch mine,
to fill my belly with her soothing fire.

I will lay Poetry down on the grass, beside the dogwood tree,
and sink my teeth into her soul.