June took root in the same way you learned to scream
but now it's fall and you're trying
to sing.

It slipped away from muddy lids like lifting a veil,
like stepping into a bath,
(toes, sole, calf. toes, sole, calf.)
and crawled unseen behind apartment-light echoes;
crooning sultry half-truths,
weighing down vascular walls.

My heartstrings aren't laundry lines but the conversations
we never finished (last night, last week, last year)
hang from them; pinned to sheets, unbothered.

It's pulling on my sleeves;  heavy and damp.
The wind isn't howling but
I don't want to hear about the dream you had
where I was a Priest,
where I was hitchhiking,
where I cut off my hair in a taxi's front seat,
and gave it to you in ziplock bags.

A hazy sky; slow and sweet,
coats my traipsing moods like honey
and sticks to the bottom of your favorite mug
(yes, that one, with the chipped rim and your rival
high school's logo.)

We're still here, springing forward and listening.
It's growing, humming cold verses in a new language
while we watch his name take shape in the mist accidentally.
You don't mention how fiercely I'm blushing and I'm grateful I don't have to laugh it off. Some days laughing feels worse than puking.

We are still here.
We are still.
We are.

I'm looking for something important and I won't know it until I see it.
It's morning, it's warmer and we lift our chins to coastline.
I blow smoke upwind;
today physics is purely speculation.
Today I feel like secrets are extinct and I'm certain the day is so much clearer through my Atlantic eyes than their protesting embrace.

You can keep June, I'll take the sky.

I need more souls around.
Look-
the knife I chewed up sharp
sways and dangles a glaring charm,
(and a charming glare)
double knotted on a piece of rope and
tucked under my shirt.
It bruises my breastbone when I jump.
I’m always jumping.

I don’t cut paradise into pieces anymore.
I take it all in with one quick bite.
I’m hardly chewing;
I never learned to savor
and it hasn’t rotted me out yet.

Late last week I had an idea.
I told the room:
(thirty eyes squinting,
a dozen minds listening,)
‘Let's get together and refuse
to acquire a taste for civility.’
So what do you think?
I was only speaking to you.

I've been playing a private game
all summer and I keep scoring.
I wear long skirts and eyeliner
and keep my mouth shut.
I trapeze across centuries and well traveled
roads with my long hair
and track the pontential and power
assigned to my quiet smile
and gentle pout.

The world can be mine with a
flick of my wrist, a lick of my lips-
But I don't want it:
i'm here to expel, not to endure,
the point is to leave as light
as possible.
I won’t win until I have nothing left to carry.

Tonight I'll just seer sailors;
soldiers call to me
like I’m their sole daughter, their soul daughter,
dripping green jewels and deep, brown
curls onto tan toes and
dancing in the road-
(eyes decidedly closed,
rush hour.)

I gulp in smoke from their pipes
while spinning circles in the dirt.
My voice trails over tree branches,
my lungs smolder and ashe.
I smile sweetly-slow.

When I do meet their gaze-
(measuredly striking; a tender,
lingered look which veers me from gypsy to divinity,)
they tense.
They call out
You are my Odyssey.
You are my Wild Waves.
you are my Purple Heart.

Skipping stones over oceans and puddles,
I keep nodding and careening.
I keep coursing and coiling,
keep slurring my words,
refusing my name
and pocketing your promises.
I gave up on air-drying my skirt,
(You are not what I’m thinking of.)

I’m only a little bit of what’s left--
everything we tried to know,
everything we only read once-
everything we left in footnotes of
essays, under passenger seats
and tangled in the bed sheets
of that swollen-heart name
no longer spoken.
I'm only the woven wires
and reins braiding bold
acrylic cities across knuckles
and palms, flashlight
illuminated and glowing.
It's new skin shimmering in the
daylight, pearling over
and throbbing awake
in places only I can see.

Standing like a steeple in his shower,
just as revered and rickety,
mouth open,
pooling warm tap further than you'd think.

I spit cities, shining terror.
I swallow rust, I gulp fluoride.

I'm not nocturnal,
I’ve never liked wine.
(We’re still right here
still in a foggy half-love and still shouting
over where it went.)

Your performance on the bench,
baiting me but not reeling me in.
There were no nights swept dancing like water lilies over the quiet morning creek,
spinning slimy pirouettes on algae glazed boulders
animated over arguments
or kissing in truck beds until Mexican blankets
stopped feeling scratchy.


I'm just a distraction
a pretty one
to touch and slip toward
but nothing worth bragging about.
Nothing worth exaggerating or keeping
folded like a wallet in your back pocket
Levis for for beer nights in dive bars to come.

a backlit ode to rooftops
in skeleton suburbs
(like nostalgic,
like naked,
like full of stars and sinking-)

His flannel soul is gripping bruises,
is running madly toward dawns' finished dreams;
endless and grotesque in matching cardigans.

a sloppy ode to lips shaping words
and absurd emotional oversights,
to any uttering reflection that grinds too close to incoherent urgency,
(or to potential delight,)
pressed dizzy into a girl who looks like me;
all soapy panic and sometimes light.
visually brutal,
belovedly torched.

An ode to night like nonsense picks at our shins
reminding us how we don’t add up.
that being here now is already fading,
intertwined,
hardly sacrificed, a small canopied disaster
quietly running out of time.

I don’t want to write poems about breaking anymore.
I’m so sick of my words weaving knots into the fiber
of a noose and polishing the clip of
the anchor it’s tied to
in a dull sleep,
a heavy, hibernation light-years deep
in a cold, black lake,
tangled in seaweed.

Reeling it in,
(sweating, grunting, bellowing)
it doesn’t budge.
I’m figuring out how to
stand my ground too.
I’m done putting my books down
for people who don’t need me,
(people who like me but not enough.)
I’m done with rope burn.

I’ve been wearing my stringy hurt
as a badge all winter and it grosses me out.
I keep mistaking eyes for hands,
smiles and laughs for a net to land in;
this free-fall for an optical illusion.

Awake, my mind is vigilant.
It’s quick and fierce to bat away
any thought that might land,
wheels down onto bits of you,
but I can’t guard my sleeping brain.

In dreams my mind circles back to
quiet-night, November coasting.
Back to my fingers carving out shapes
in the steam fog of your windshield,
back to each dizzy morning where
I searched my phone for a ‘Good Morning’ text
that I never found-
(you never sent one, I never asked.
We were both without precedent.)

How do I exist if not in varying forms of unravel?
What’s the point of collecting the words pumping through
and out of me if not to cover, shield,
and serve as armor when I have no skin?
There’s so much more than you and your fingerprints
or me and my kaleidoscope mind.
Sometimes the best part is no part at all:

I want to write a poem about the silence:
the thick, metal tangle of wires that coil in my head-
they swear they’re waterproof but I’m still terrified to sweat.

I want to write a poem about the before:
before the envelopes were opened,
before the kisses felt cautionary,
before I threw myself in the kiln-
when I was shaped but not permanent,
when I could still make corrections.

Summer has been rolling in and
getting closer to my tanning shoulders
with each sunset and each curtain call.
By the time its here for good
I’ll be writing poems you can’t find yourself in at all.
I’ll be writing poems that
don’t begin broken.
They’ll be poems that are whole
from the very first line and stream words
growing stronger
instead of
growing apart.

I’ve never stopped a heart-
The poem should end here.
It doesn’t.

The sound of the levees breaking was quiet,
I thought it would be bigger-
The poem should end here.
It doesn’t.

I was expecting shrieking sirens, stirring dogs,
and motion sensor porch lights chasing rabbits
from driveway to driveway,
I was expecting to shatter mirrors
and lower temperatures
with my very existence-
The poem should be over.
We should all be in our beds by now,
(but we've got six more miles until our exit.)

I've been keeping up;
brushing my hair and
vacuuming the stairs like it matters.

I've walked through this damp, hail-heavy winter
with wet socks, a back-pack,
and a sterling silver pendent of jaded righteousness
swinging from my neck.
I’ve kept my head down and
blinked smoke out of my eyes.

Something inside of me was rusting and rattling
and I wanted everyone to listen carefully
to my clicking bones.

A doctor diagnosed my sacroiliac joints as dysfunctional
and suggested physical therapy.
My mother diagnosed my humor as alienating,
my spirit as disillusioned,
and suggested to lighten the **** up.

I’ve never stopped a heart-
I don’t think I have it in me.
I’ve never stopped a heart,
but I’ve just about figured out
how to end this poem
without the heart stopping me.

I

Feel close or run
(our echoing is escape
not candlelight magic)

a renegade lulled them so deep
(touching sleek song,
foever in fear)

a blooming kiss, an endless beach
(imagine, suddenly)
the imperfect:
the feathering hope that sways and beats
in nervous possibility
(that illuminates everything that might)

II

You may resonate summer
strumming, wondering, yearning,
with gentle guilt beating open toward
uncertain, where strayed smoke appears engulfing
only them.

Her sleek, royal mine,
her sleek, raven mile

deny them your secret-
stay a hot, shut vine,
be a rolling wind;
uncharted,
without a dagger to breath through.

III

Rocking blue light
bared our language
raw
if screaming is showing
then these sweating seas
are rocking and pulsing
with nerves.

Your body is a flooding summer,
cold creek, navy blue kind of Royal.
Your journals are meaningless,
the alphabet has spoiled.
Confessions melt to wax in the heat
and you’re starting to confuse hope with home.

IV

Unwind,
entwined,
gladly waiting.

A dry, gilded sorrow sings to pierce again.
They hesitate; warm,
unfilled,
as silent-radiant boy lips
(who give us whiplash,
who deny our gaze)
empty, quickly collapse
into a slight withering, glow
and contemplate the fragments of us left.

V

Imagine a small, gold
moon lost within
the raging, rising winter

calling through the dark
for our touch

together our form trembles
in beat with the too-spun silver chain
swinging between your kiss
or me.


My catching heart
your rolling eyes
a false enemy with a veil
to rouse the rising world.

I wonder how desperate and passionate
spread through my newfound blaze
so hidden by certain eternity.

What I feel-
it’s
entirely breathtaking.