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.

Grief is not a song you wrote once
Nor the padded, downturned corners of your face.

Grief lives below your footsteps
A black hole with mass
in the shape of a giant ape.
Each of your labored steps begets its sweeping swing below.
Your soles are its vines.

Between each footstep, as it moves with you
you think the weight of it might be gone.
Grief delights in this deception
as it seizes up-down once more,
reaching into the core of you
and pulling it to the bottom of your shoes.
Some part of you, torn away, lands with a leaden thunk
and cramps the delicate inner muscles of your feet.
Maybe it’s the soul
or more likely
it’s some forgotten vestigial *****
which only emerges through its own absence.

Now hollow in your middle
the muscles surrounding contract in confusion
thinking, knowing, that the empty space is wrong
but not quite able to recall
what had been there in the first place.
and so you think your heart is seized by grief,
when really, you are confused, you are feeling only
nothing.

as Grief lives beneath the ground
as Grief swings beneath your feet.

Some things in life are free, some things will take a banana from your chest drawers.
However many miles a road is that men walk down must,
at the end I hope there is a crew of construction workers
that all they really need is ice cream with chocolate syrup, all they’ve ever needed.  
They realize the waves of sound in the air are made out of ice cream
and the swinging of their arm splays out chocolate syrup like rainbows.  
This would happen in the latent way that apples happen, sprouting slowly from the root
and the secret’s on the inside blooming with a star
but meanwhile forming a hide that’s either crisp or chewy.

Biting down on air is a maddening sensation
and the upper and lower jaw blame each other;
contact every time is a betrayal.
They have no one else to blame but whom they meet on the other side of the empty room.
My jaw speaks and clicks in jerks. I do not understand but it is ok.
I like to be a woman of mystery.
I like to be a woman of mystery even when I can’t understand myself;
it is ok.

The day I found the inside of me
with the crust of eggshell still atop her head she emerged,
already speaking the truth as I had never known it.
Already husking away the lies of the self
which had held me into hopelessness
she emerged. She spoke
to my own glistening eyes before me, she said,

"This is the condition, my dear
(my one true love)
(my only source of god)
that envelops creation and stretches back into the yawning mouth of the first atom
it is
to be
alone.
To die and birth alone
to cry and rage alone
against the bind of all things that makes you
what you are and
what you are not.
When you feel it deep in your belly clawing at the make of matter,
know that we all claw, we all throw ourselves against
the high ceilings of our skulls and strive
to find another home.
But I am with you,
cradling the wound, healing it with slow, careful
kisses of the self.
I am with you, I am
the oval that surrounds your heart
the Eye within.
I am the last left
when you seek all source of comfort.
You can hide in me."

And with that, she returned home
settling into the crescent in my center.
Gone to the eyes, but still in every bone she speaks,
she whispers,
*You are not alone
as I am here.