I’m in a Target parking lot
wearing his sweatshirt
and a sash that says
'Poet Laureate of American Mistakes'
because I won it in a landslide
against every girl
who’s ever texted
“you up?”
knowing **** well he is,
but not for her.

I didn’t cry today,
but I did stare at a peach
for ten minutes thinking
about death,
and foreplay,
and if any of this even counts as research.

I think about texting him
just to say
I’m sorry I made you a metaphor.
But the truth is
I’m not.
He was the only thing
that ever meant something
after I wrote it down.

I came here for toothpaste
and left with a bikini top
I’m too emotionally haunted to wear,
and a notebook I won’t open-
because if I do,
I’ll make art again,
and I’m trying to quit,
but I never really try that hard.
I don’t even know if I want to get better.
I just want someone to notice.

A man honks behind me
because I’m not moving.
Because I parked
but forgot to arrive.
Because I’m not really here,
I’m three texts back
and one year late.
You don’t know it’s the last time
until your hands feel stupid.

I wave like I’m sorry
but I’m not.
I’m just poetic.
Which is worse.

This parking lot’s a stage.
I’ve died here six different ways.
Once in June.
Twice in sweatpants.
The fourth time I thought it was over,
but the music kept playing.

I wear the sash like I’m in on the joke,
because it takes a hint of genius
to be this stupid,
because when I said
“I’m okay,”
no one fact-checked me,
and when I said
“I didn’t learn anything,”
they gave me
a crown.

I take the sash off
before starting the car.
Fold it like evidence.
Leave it in the front seat
like I’m done with the bit.
But I’m not.
I just need a break
from being clever.

I should’ve bought the peach.
Let it rot on the dashboard,
at least then
something would’ve gone soft
without making it my fault.

The sweatshirt still smells like
whatever I was hoping he’d stay for,
(mainly, me.)
And the notebook?
Still closed.
Which is hilarious, really.
Because you’re reading it.

(This poem is a lie.
I opened the notebook
before I even left the store.)

I touch things I’m not supposed to
and call it prayer.
mouth open,
spine bent,
tongue tasting the fence line.

They say longing is holy
if it stays quiet,
but mine doesn’t—
mine breaks the jar and drinks the oil.

They told me I was an open wound,
festering with verse and girlhood.
They weren’t wrong.
But wrong feels a lot like worship
when done slow enough.

They say impure
like it’s a curse,
but all my favorite girls
are made of swampwater and sin.

I’ve never confessed
without turning it into performance.
My mouth was built
for poetry
and plea deals.

I was thirteen
when I learned to ache
without making a sound.
Seventeen
when I turned it into scripture.
Twenty-five
when I realized no one was coming
to carry the body but me.

I keep trying to write
the right-sized truth
but it never fits in a single poem
or apology.

I want back the girl
who ran barefoot into fire
because she believed
it might be heaven.

I want someone to touch me like I’m soft—
even if I’m not.
Even if I bite back.

I want to grab
without apologizing
for how hot my hands are.
I want someone to look at me
like a threat they’d die for.

I want the kind of love
that makes funerals nervous.
I want to be written about
by someone who isn’t me.

And I want to want less.
But I don’t.

You want a softer girl?
Tell that to the altar
I keep burying her under.

You told me you were trying.
I told you about the time
I threw up so hard I started praying.
I saw stars in my hair
and thought they might be angels.
But it was just the acid.
Just the light.
Just me, alone again
in a bathroom that never loved me back.

You didn’t say anything,
and that said everything.
You texted “sorry”
like a magician pulling shame from his sleeve,
then disappeared
like a good lie.
I stopped asking you
to prove yourself after that.
I just started watching
to see if you ever would.

Maybe I made the whole thing up.
Maybe you did say something.
Maybe it was kind.
Maybe it was cruel.

Maybe the light flickered
because of bad wiring,
not heaven.
Maybe I was just sick.
Maybe you were just tired.
Maybe none of it meant anything.

But then why
do I still dream in that fluorescent color?
Why does the silence still have your shape?
I built a chapel from our last conversation.
Tried to make the ache holy.
But I was the only one kneeling.
And no one wants a martyr
who won’t shut up.

You said I was unwell.
I said, Amen.
You said I was always bleeding.
I said, Isn’t that what makes it a miracle?
Because if this isn’t a resurrection,
then I’ve been dying for nothing.

I gave you the ugliest parts-
even the bathroom prayers,
even the version of me
that asked God to make you gentler.
You said, “I didn’t ask for that.”
I said, “Exactly.”

You weren’t the end of the world.
You were just the earthquake
I canonized.
The tremor I learned to waltz with.
The reason my mouth still tastes like salt
and I call it grace.

So if God ever comes back,
I’ll know how to greet him:
on my knees,
already emptied.

I told the stars to shut up.
They weren’t witnesses. They were worse.
They kept spelling your name,
blinking slow, like pity,
glinting gallant-
like that ever saved anyone.

I walked past the summer we called ours
like I wasn’t still stalking it.
Like I didn’t prowl on purpose,
like I didn’t rehearse your alibi,
like I didn’t pray
(for prey.)

I was fine with the trees, the oil stains,
the way the sun pretended nothing happened.
I could go days without hearing an ice cream truck,
or seeing a sun-burnt stranger
and thinking: maybe the universe
rerouted you into someone
I could almost survive.

You once said I was dangerous.
And by once I mean
I wrote it down
and heard it forever.
It’s in my lymph nodes,
in the poems you pretend not to read.
It’s in the version of me
you kept almost loving
but never quite chose.

You called us perilous.
Or maybe I did.
It’s hard to tell, since
I’ve been writing you
with your mouth shut
for months.

I keep checking the margins
for your voice.
All I got were
the noises people make
when they’re trying not to drown,
but pretending to wave.

Why is your name still more siren
than sentence?
Still more blood than bruise?
I made your absence
a body I slept beside,
because I kept waking up
guilty.

I never served,
but I wrote the ending.
Put my hand on a Bible,
bit my tongue so hard
the truth still tastes like you.
Wore borrowed pearls,
and swore to God
I never loved you more
than the day you didn’t show up.

I would’ve done time for you.
I would’ve confessed to a crime
that didn’t exist
just to hold your hand once
on the courthouse steps.

You said I was dangerous.
You were right.
But not in the way you thought.
I told the whole truth-
just not out loud.

You didn’t get convicted.
But I still can’t go back
to that summer
without thinking the tan lines
were warning signs,
without getting subpoenaed
by the sky.

Some nights,
your name still tries to get in
like a burglar.
I play dead,
tell the stars to shut up.
But they unlock the window anyway.
They spell you out in light
like they want me to remember
how it felt
to be the crime scene.

The suburb’s still a skeleton
but now I wear its bones.
I was backlit,
bored,
all drywall and divine punishment,
first names shouted through screen doors,
ceiling fans spinning
someone else’s damage.

I kept saying I'd leave.
I kept writing it down,
spending my stories on soft drinks and scar tissue,
but
there’s a difference between
nostalgia and necromancy.
Between naked and naive.
Between full of stars
and just
falling.

We said forever
like it wasn’t
a curse.
Like it wasn’t
already dissolving in the pollen.

I wrote hymns for mouths,
sloppy as mascara in rainlight,
that made meaning feel like a dare:
the emotional oversights
we let ruin us twice.

Flannel soul,
face like unfinished business.
He touched me with all the guilt
of a borrowed god.
Begging,
but never burning clean.

A slippery little eulogy
sprinting toward a dawn already
in someone else’s rearview.
He didn’t kiss me,
but he almost did.
And I’ve been sick about it
ever since.

An ode to night
that chews at the hem
of what we thought we were.

Being here now is
already retroactive.
Already haunted.
Intertwined
like seatbelt bruises.

A small canopied disaster,
still posing.
still pretending.

I was a rooftop girl,
and I meant it.
Which is worse, I think,
than being believed.

The sky never answered,
but I kept
sending poems.

The suburb’s still a skeleton.
I’m just better at burying
what I mistook for light.

The kitchen smells like a secret I forgot to bury.
A peach gone soft, skin splitting like a bad promise.
The fruit flies know something I don’t;
they’re the last priests of a dying faith,
and they’re waiting for me to leak.

I tell myself I’m healing,
but last night I dreamt I had to eat your heart to survive.
It tasted like burnt sugar and nail polish remover.
I woke up gasping,
your name soldered to the roof of my mouth
like a curse I didn’t mean to cast.

I call it the trick of wanting:
how I keep looking for your fingerprints in places you never touched,
how I flinch when someone says my name in the dark,
how I let the mirror watch me shatter
and pretend I’m a stained glass window.

Here’s the part I shouldn’t post:
I liked it when you lied to me.
I liked it when you said this isn’t about love
and I let you mean it’s about power.

The fruit flies keep coming.
I pretend they’re a sign from God.
I pretend they’re angels. Or demons.
Never both.
I pretend they’re a reminder that sweetness
is just another word for rot.
I pretend the buzzing is the sound of my name-
fermenting in your guts,
putrefying in your chest,
decomposing in your memory like abandoned fruit.

I know I shouldn’t write this.
But I do.
Because I want you to see it.
Because I want you to flinch.

Because I want you to know:
I am the girl who would eat your heart if I could.
I would peel it open with my teeth,
lick the blood off my lips,
smile like a god in a red dress,
and call it love.

And you’d believe me.

I saw you in the rearview of my mom’s Santa Fe,
your shirt half-buttoned, a half-burnt cigarette,
the sun catching the gold in your teeth.
I was fifteen, which meant I was fluent in making it worse,
and you were the kind of boy who could skin a rabbit
but never learned to say sorry without spitting.

I told you a lie once-
said I didn’t care if we kissed in the parking lot,
in front of God, or the devil, or the Home Depot sign.
That was the first time you looked at me like
I was glass and you were bored.

I was sixteen, which meant I was fluent in leaving,
and you were the kind of boy who could gut a fish
but couldn’t spell the word bruise if it was on your own skin.

You played me songs you didn’t finish writing,
the kind where the girl always runs,
and the boy always watches her taillights
until the guitar string snaps.
You told me I’d ruin your life if I stayed,
so I stayed.
That was the first time you looked at me like
I was glass you could see through
but wouldn’t bother breaking.

The night you didn’t say goodbye,
I wore the amber oil so heavy it felt like drowning,
stood in the mirror until I blurred into a girl
you might have wanted
if you weren’t so scared of the wanting.

I was seventeen, which meant I was fluent in staying.
I’m the girl who learned that wanting
is just another way of setting yourself on fire
and hoping someone else smells the smoke.

I bought stamps for a letter I’d never mail you,
I saved your voicemails on a phone
I kept at the bottom of my drawer,
next to the earrings I stole from my neighbor’s sister,
the ones that looked like a promise you never made.

You’ll tell your friends it wasn’t that serious.
I’ll tell mine you never learned the chords.
But we’ll both think about it:
when the air smells like wet asphalt,
and the radio plays that one song
we never sang together.

We both know the words.
We just never sang them at the same time.