This is how you set a circle with the switchblade someone shoved in your purse at a party; remember how even in your sticky-haired, belly-foaming, hot-breathed drunkenness you knew its potential,
Finally an amulet.
Finally a flashlight.

How you would coo a greeting to it and let a centered, solid voice, (frying a bit at the end of most words, softening them like frayed denim)plunge down cold metal like a rickety ice luge that’s long been disqualified.
How you came to learn the weight of it in your hand,
all the ways to open and close it-
how to threaten,
how to strike.

These were the dewy-dank months of frozen toes shrieking in boots because you never got it together enough to dress in proper socks.
These were the mornings when your alarm blared alive from across the room because you could not be trusted with the snooze button.

Remember how you would wake up terrified, day after day,
with a stinging heart and metallic mouth?
How; dreading even the smallest bit of duty, you’d take a panicky inventory of the day’s looming obligations and graph the ways you might avoid them.

These were the stretches when even a full night’s sleep left you sunken eyed and exhausted-
when the idea of being anything,
even just being,
was too much to take.
These were the days you realized; with little alarm, that you might prefer sinking into death
over lifting up your head and getting dressed.

There were a few weeks that winter when you wondered if the snow would ever stop falling and the calendar was clean. You set your hair into two braids and cut them off with fabric scissors, fully intact.
You tweeted a picture of them with no caption then threw them away.

You were sad and putrefying, slowly collecting candlesticks and diligently keeping track of the moon.
You were color-coding post-its for each lunar phase, plotting; with a thawing-thick body and knotty spine, where your mishandled energy and menacing hyper-focus should be applied next.
These months were so heavy- dragging your feet through them made your skin crawl with static. Your shocks cracked rooms. Your clothes never felt completely dry.

This was the season you halfheartedly turned to nature, searching for a pulse in the barks and rubble of the surrounding land which you might mirror into something almost alive.
The days were bright and white and the nights were swaying and L.L. Bean navy blue and you didn’t smoke but your hair always smelled like Marlboro reds.

When the moon was highest you called out to it, asking for favors.
These were the hours where you could swear you were the only living soul taught to bite down.
These were the hours where you knew for certain what it is like to be dead.
Drinks up to the year you read poems aloud to storms and set fire to handwritten letters with your best friend in the middle of your white collar condominium unit at 1pm.
And smile because at the time it was exactly what had to be done.

Now comb out your tangles and bury the switchblade deep in powdery dirt below your bedroom window.
Do it unceremoniously and fast- it belongs knotted tight in orbit to the year you are now galaxies removed.
Though you may unpack your telescope and salute that tiny hell from time to time- you will never call it home.


That year; however heavy, is the year you must carry with you.
It will be trekking along, a step behind, across every mountain you climb and it will race you to catch dreams in every room to decide to sleep. That year; tinsely-light and braided tightly into veins, sings softly to you from below the defaced skin of your wrist in a language you're just beginning to understand.

Lesson number 1: a web of scars arranged by and for oneself can be a compass. In fact, it may be the ideal tool for orientating oneself to a clear-eyed world where presence is not shameful and the terrifying decision to exist should not require apology.
Lesson number 2: A road map etched over your body, charged electric by the intensity crawling through your marrow and planted by bits of you now reconciling-
This map can guide you well.

And your compass pulses with the life within you. Instead of pointing north, the needle will spin wild and fast until your bloodstream rocks a calm tide up and down the coast of your chest, bathing your lungs and conducting  your breath into a rhythm swaying low.
You’ll think you hear the vague sound of something almost hopeful; something that reminds you,
giggling and bluntly, that there's a mystery of years ahead of you
and to wholly exist in them.
I finally see that whether I’m on a giddy spill south by southwest, housing a heavy sorrow in my kneecaps or walking in rain boots Due North while wiping away tears with my ponytail-
the very fact that I’m still trusted with years to travel through and a world to inhabit will be more than heaven on earth.

I bought mascara and cantered through it-
stopping every so often to straighten up,
to relevé,
to turn exactly 1.8 pirouettes then stumble out
of amateur balance and click my tongue like a yiayia.

I dragged my fermenting body;
all wild eyes and heavy hair,
across four seasons while trying not to sigh too loud.

I dubbed 2014 the year of grit;
the year every day was a new texture of
gritty and I swelled my punches to match.

It was the year I cast my scars
out to sea on lines of poetry
I kept sequestered in my pockets
and reeled them back in published and
legitimate.

2014 gurgled into the year of stage lights,
highlighted scripts and talent lanyards
that stuck with sweat and raw, giddy nerves
from my neck across tripping tries.

It was the year I learned to dread the
third person. The year of one hundred word
bios I wrote over and over,
always baffled and unable to compose a few lines
describing myself.

It was a year of small stabs and big failures,
of getting recognized while buying yogurt.
It was thousands of miles in the Hundai Santa Fe
without ever really leaving.
It was the year of chasing without ever really catching.

2014 was a big collection of small moments that left
me with less certainties than months in the year.
They are simple. They are so very difficult to commit:
1.      Your emotions are valid. Please don’t defend them.
2.      The less you speak the more you say.
3.      Lipstain is never a good idea.
4.      Remember to check your email, dude. But actually.
5.      Your bones aren’t baby teeth. You don’t want them loose.
6.      The conversations you don’t have will haunt you.
7.      The places where you shed your skin then return to will haunt you more.
8.      A kiss is rarely just a kiss. Impossible with the threads of thought
you keep in your brain.
9.      Sweating means you’re trying.
10.  Feeling wanted is intoxicating, but be prepared for a hangover once the wanting stops.


It’s only a little. But it’s so much.
Walk tall with these bullets into 2015.
Be okay knowing you’ll laugh and squeal and feel beautiful and feel dead.
Know there will be moments you feel ethereal and there will be moments you will sit doubled over, pressing your arms into your stomach because it feels like that’s the only way to keep your guts from spilling out onto the floor for all to see.
There is not point but to make a point.
It’s just a year and the goal is the same: stay whole and grow.

I try to live Here. Here is humid-sticky-underground-dance-hall hot. I’m caught tight in a mess of limbs- bodies stretch and sway from this to Eden. I have never been more lonely. Together we inhale metallic Old Spice. Together we exhale stale tap water hymns. I am breathing all alone.

My tired tongue kicks awake to cheap nail poison as I tap each fingernail against bottom teeth and lightly push three times.
(Four times or eight times. Ten times in one quick, heart-drop minute but who’s counting?
Me. Of course I’m counting. There’s not a beat, rhyme or giggle that hasn’t busy-bee buzzed around my foggy brain. Each thought its own color, each touching down on a different set of crumb-glazed quilts or a different tower of gutted magazines. Each bee is long and thin, pointy in a terrifying way. Each bloated and dripping with a grand idea- which they leave like droppings and are so specifically intense they will never make any sense a breath apart from this moment and this context which crumpled and blew away while I dully, dutifully checked my pulse. I'm alive but my thoughts took off. I can see their exhaust but they fled fast, like they knew I could only begin to gnaw on them. They were born to quickly, maniacally live and die- in and out and there then off and gone.)

Here. Here the walls are chipping off one hundred years, one hundred lives of lead-based paint and are dripping onto the frayed denim of my ****** cut-offs. Impossibly long hair, absurd to call it mine, hangs heavy and wet. The strands shed drops of atmosphere on my (and their and your and-) bare feet. I’m my own sumi brush- my calligraphy is not words, but a footprint-marked path to treasure. Braided bits cling heavy and soaked to the curve of my neck and then billow like sheets hung out in the wind. My sharp, slick scapula must be the laundry line. It’s one of the good bones. Good bones only exist while jutting. The scapula is the beautiful ******* of my skeleton and we finally have made nice.

Here the music is so loud. The bass ignites my dental cavities. They sting and pierce as a reminder of how terribly I’m taking care. Lights blink, the room quakes and I need water.  I’m throbbing and flickering and faces attached to bones slither between each other and grind up into my own perfect focus. They’re smirking.

One at a time they appear with a warm, grainy hand on the small of my cold-sweat back. Each face of bones lean in close, dry and cracked lips that graze my own fever-hot ears. Goose bumps sling up and down limbs and the lips, all smudgy red lipstick and cigarette breath, whisper something to me that is absolutely crucial. It’s something beautiful or something hilarious or something crude but I can’t hear it. I’ll never hear it. They throw their bones back and cackle-laughing so hard it must be painful. All I can hear is my eardrums cracking and breaking, laying the bass for a high pitched dial tone.

One by one they do this and then, with a huge play-dough smile and eyes as deep as I feel, they slowly back away from my flimsy, electric body. I know they’re relieved they didn’t get stung. This goes on for forty straight hours. I feel like the Queen bored and still as they file through to kiss my ring. I feel like I’m at my own wake. I am beginning to erupt. I am lightly vibrating with the burden of militant creativity. I think I'm melting from the inside out. The bones still laugh and the bees, diving like war missiles, are screaming that it’s time to flesh out that novel, string precise words together in a huge, monumental way down golden strings that will change the world for the better and forever hang on God's graceful neck. It's time to record that beloved lullaby and sculpt that masterpiece or put on black clothes, sneak out and vandalize monuments. It is all absolutely crucial and so very urgent. Everything is wailing and I’m nodding slowly because if I do not do it, ALL OF IT, now- right this instant and quickly- I will die having said nothing. I will have wasted my opportunity to matter.

Here. Here the bone-bodies continue to mock me. The room stays dim and damp and I don’t think I’ll ever get clean. After twenty minutes or seventy years the crowd thins out, lights switch on illuminating exit signs and the room slowly, sadly, empties. I am sticky and aching and have never felt dumber. The bone-bodies left their blurry sweat, their empty bottles and their void inspirations like blank fortunes trailing across the bar top. There’s a real, fur, calf-length coat and a fake Birkin bag in the corner. My feet are filthy.

Here. But I’m not really Here. Here is bougy and exclusive. There’s no list but you probably can’t get in because actually Here is utter *******. Here is the moldy bricks and pre-war ceilings inside my head.
Leaving Here is too easy. You blink and you’re gone. Then I try to remember what party I even went to but I’m sitting Indian style and cramped on rough carpet and my back is in knots and everything I’m thinking is slow, melting taffy lose and inconsistent.

The sun starts to rise up pink through broken bedroom blinds and I know that I went way down deep and danced and gripped tight to flurrying ideas and made a big mess and now I’m stuck ripping papier-mâché, three inches thick, off coat-check walls and trying to read the graffiti-ed bathroom stalls but the Sharpie is dripping and I might be illiterate.

The Somethings I came to flirt with are hiding and won’t answer ‘POLO’ no matter how loudly I scream ‘Marco! ******* Marco!’ I’m reeling and under-breath begging ‘and please come find me and let’s make stuff and we can’t waste this and I can’t be a waste.’ But below all the pacing and knuckle-cracking I know that there are no Somethings listening to my panicky prayers. They sneaked out while I was braiding my hair for the sixth time, humming something old and Johnny Cash-y that I remembered and liked and had to Google and perform eight times for a mirror. I sneeze and I want to cry. I don’t think I know how to read. Edges start to blur and the alphabets a mess.

In defeat I’ll wash my face and slide under one light blanket and quickly sweat through it. I’ll lower my heavy, thick-thought and dizzy head onto a stack of three pillows. My vision will fall away from me and stars will explode in a chatty whisper that has be immobile and straining and sore. I will treat them like a sky full of fireworks blazing just for me. I'll ooh and ahh and my heart will palpitate under the weight of them. (Really I do know they're just amphetamine snowflakes falling slowly and burying my wasted night.  I swear next time I won’t waste it.) But at that moment I'll watch the show and feel safe and small and inconsequential, at last.

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.

What happened while
the manuscripts choked?
Lighter shoulders,
stranger testaments.

Pardons reflect an ark
where shine means shout,
wind means worship,
and we stopped placing wonder
on anyone's elegy.

I used to be so young and severe,
trembling under any movement.
I played a ghost
until I became one.

I'd be crimped into vails,
rushed through verses,
roused from rest;
sighing
and hunting for your hand.

Echoes of ether-
loose-limbed and hearkening,
barely blinking;
saluting fences,
planting poems,
heeding baby-teeth.

Interred with you in
this chaos,
this grass-
fermenting fate
forevermore.
We tried to rise,
but failed to become the sky.

Since you cannot
take testimony seriously,
I had to rip it out-
our two wills colliding,
our pine coffins dissolving.

I was buried with jewels in
my open palms;
still offering,
still not atoned.

Your hands were buried empty
with nothing to answer for,
still tense,
still clenched in fists.

We harbor things-alive from our dead parts;
mice warm in your nest of ribs,
beetles declare squatters rights
in the tent of my pelvis and
raise flags from hip-bone heights.

Worms slink along fingers
and unite our pieces in peace.
In life we follied;
underfoot we fuel.
Tenable terrain,
we transform tomorrow tender.

The manuscripts soften to us,
the archives are kind.
We let ourselves sink into the rattle
and double into strange dust
so that new things
become.
blooming from us.

It’s nights like these;
when the sky feels raw-quiet
and the moon hangs so low-heavy
and pulpy, parchment yellow,
dripping and left to sun-stain and disintegrate
against dull ghost stories
and stinging to-do lists.
This is when I feel it- the fracturing.
You’re out of sight.
I’m out of mind.  

I crack the window,
blink loose stars out of focus
and send them shotgun galloping
across the flat-hum pulsing,
tin tinged and navy evening static.

The North Star needs new batteries.
He flickers and sways but won’t
extinguish. He is soft and solemn-
a lazing, dazing anchor whose fraying rope
weaves bowline knots
and hitching ties
into each inch of my drying hair.

Every strand of the night breathes itself into life.
The pieces are softening and shifting,
howling and crawling.
They become young men planning,
flexing at high tide and daring
each other further out with each set of waves.
They are posing, pretending to be
what they think the word ‘reckless’ means.

They are throwing their bodies into surf
and wailing.
They are crashing hard
and violent
against the shore.

They are shaking out golden limbs
and rubbing bloodshot eyes.
I watch bruises bloom and gashes erupt a flash
of crimson before salt water clean and stung.

They are flashing gleeful smiles
and throwing taunting screams across
whole seas while diving back,
quickly, elegantly,
into the same rough surf
that just spit them out.

Maybe they’re proactive,
maybe things hurts less when you
know where the hurt will come from.
Maybe the game isn’t to stay lovely
and bright and whole;
but to know pain’s possibilities so intimately
that when it comes time for you to break
you can do so without shattering
completely.

Nights like these;
sitting cross-legged with a blank
page open and an aching, reeling,
sickly-warm ribbon sprouting from my molars-
I get it.

Streamers wave proudly across
my body.
They grip and simmer,
they wind tightly around  
organs and bones who
gave up their hiding spots
and surrendered their secrets
the first time I let him come in.

The strings are bright and knot themselves tight.
They tether my windpipe,
weld each rib colorfully between sternum and spine.
They coil down and tie off;
thick, swaddled and bobbing, bowing
themselves regally around my coccyx.

Nights like these I have no armor.
Where is my skin?
I stir and rattle to even the slightest shift of Earth.
Exposed and quaking, I body-map bolts of light.
The light is tap dancing over lungs,
igniting blood and ricocheting through the summer camp,
arts and crafts hysteria fusing my anatomy.
It plunge pastels deep into the marrow of my bones.
The room is smoky, my gut splashes about, electrocuted.
I stop feeling tired.

The thing is- what I’m really trying to say,
is that I have no words right now.
There are no pretty lines caught in the twine of
my hip joints and no fiery prose laying
eggs in my spinal fluid.

There is no poem to write
about the fleshy, sour
smell of my own heart
roasting on a pyre or the hours it will take
to scrub off the charred bits of melting muscle
now staining the carpet.

This bitter heat creeping up my throat
and the sallow contraction of my
belly are not the prologue to a revolution-
my diagnosis is not a metaphor.

They are simply the tangy symptoms of the sadness
pinging around my insides and playing
peekaboo among the weeds of my broken body and sticky mind.
She will wait, biding time, for a properly rapt audience.
I whisper then whine that I’m too messy,
too slouchy, too emotionally ill-equipped to house a heart
maybe breaking,
definitely ripping, across-the-ballroom
slipping and wrecking-ball imploding.
Sadness smacks her lips and smirks.
No one rides for free.  

Nights like these I think
maybe I’ve wasted all my words;
my sentences and precious syntax and swooping rhetoric,
on lighter blows and mere heartaches.
I am a ragdoll limply stretching.
I am standing completely still, taking inventory.
I’m puzzled, though decidedly unthreatened,
by the glass-littered ground, my bleeding feet.
I mean look at the big picture:
I lit myself on fire.
I’m not worried about sunburn.

I know now that it has happened-
the hurt circulates my veins
and pumps me full of vehemence.
The act of breathing is ferocious,
I am a tangle of raw nerves.
This is the night I’m left with a heart shattered
in six hundred pieces on the floor and absolutely no poetry rising
from my pores to help glue it back together.

I said I get it.
I should have practiced.
I should have left my clothes on the sand and
ran toward the sea, naked and unembarrassed,
while diving head first into fierce undertows
and crashing with the boyish bodies of the night.

I should have experimented;
explored all the ways hurt could find me
while the beach was still mine to breathe out and yell for
without fear of being told 'no.'
But I didn’t. I kept my clothes on and my secrets to myself.

Tonight I’m a wreck and this isn’t a test.
I'm so far out, weighed down
by this boxy, heavy pain
ripening in my arms.
I'm panicky and paddling in any direction,
trying to keep my head above water
and praying the shore will appear and welcome me
once I get through this next set of waves,
through this next set of waves.

Shut off the sky if I ask you to.
Grab my world so brassy boring between
battles and courage.
I provide the cold hands and you provide the ghosts
We know constellations listen from melting harnessed skies
then share stories of their bigness.
June can wait a bit.
My verse spinning sad where you used your knees on the good nights.

Born alive, born with the thinnest layer of skin
Finding comedy in the ripped pages
Cutting phonetics apart
Witling words, truncate.

Shakespeare was an afterthought.
I’m bowing in the middle of the scene, I’m shaking off applause.
Punctuation becomes a commandment
I reverse and misuse.
Commas mean breath and in their place- used in succession,
mean run through corn fields like you’re being chased, like your fingers are full of cramps.

Injecting poetry like insulin.
Hoping it will seep into your bones
and strengthen the foundation
like the milk with you ice cubes you
had to drink with dinner.

Envy the women on nick at night who want new dresses and new babies and don’t scrape their insides out in front of readers and audiences because they’re bored and maybe not sure if they’re real.

You wrote yourself a note and taped it to the window,
now it’s sun-stained, ink-blurred,
typeface dripping, tapestry ripping,
another thing you let pass,
another ring slipped from your grasp.
Another night alone in your empty rooms;
waiting for a glimpse of golden.

Stutter into sleep, wring awake,
forage your phone for letters that haven't moved.
The world's still the same; bills seep your numbers,
alphabets plait your nerves.
The city won’t cower before you,
the summer won’t buoy you into anything
other than forward; tanner and older, unfound.

What do you dream of these days?
And in what shades of blue?
What’s dead in your head? What’s kicking?
What do you hope for in the vacant morning,
and who do you miss in the lingering night?
There are no wrong answers.

There are lights you forgot to turn off,
there are epiphanies you forgot to remember.
There are days you forgot to dance in the kitchen and touch your skin to grass,
but you haven’t forgotten me. You just don’t care.
Does that make me a ghost or a regret?
Both leave sand in my mouth, both ricochet an echo;
neither feels like an ending, and both make me shudder.

I’m looking for something to fill the space between my ribs
that isn’t a calamity and isn’t a marvel,
just some kind of ballast that won't see me at sea.
I need a tether for my tongue that doesn't look like you,
and a compass for my eyes that won’t point you-due.
I need a berth for my grace that won't let me drown
as you **** a cigar, and angle to watch the shore watch you.

My library-heart roars and aches with every story ever told,
my big feelings hold up the sky and call in the waves.
I’ve never been so close to something that wasn't mine,
I’ve never blinked more golden than when no one's looking.
I’ve never been lonelier than when I was
holding on to you,
so why can't I let go?
There are no wrong answers.

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.

There's a subtle violence to the way we interact
your eyes linger, half a dare, half a dismissal—
waiting for me to say something that will make it easier,
like my mouth will invite you to betray me before you even start.

You say my name like it's a sigh you can't quite swallow,
and I answer with a laugh that tastes like a talking doll,
plastic and metallic, sticking to the back of my throat.
We sit in the silence that pulses between us,
thick as the secrets we keep beneath our tongues.

A smarter girl would have seen the strings,
a dumber girl would have played along,
a bolder girl would have set fire to the toy shop,
and a braver girl would have never
let herself be a toy in the first place.

There's a subtle violence to the way we pretend;
clinging to skin with fingers made of willow and ash,
clinging to diving boards with the same desperate grip.
I wonder if this is love or just inertia—
a habit that clings like the scent of smoke,
***** and aching, lingering long after the flame is gone.

But you hold me at arm's length,
just vague enough to haunt,
just close enough to hurt,
and I know better
but I still reach, I still grasp—

I still fall like a dream dissolving at dawn,
a fall that feels like freedom,
weightless for a fleeting second:
no strings, no metal, no violent subtleties, no smoke at all.

And when the ground rises up to greet me,
a cruel embrace that whispers
what's been in my mouth all along,
what the doll tried to say before she burned:

that letting go is never the hardest part,
it's surviving the landing that shatters you,
and knowing you were the one that jumped.

The ache of August is more static
than buzzing bugs and cracking thunder,
more stubborn than stop-motion memories,
more constant than our stop-and-go days,
more shameful than our pay-to-play nights.

It’s the smell of sunshower-damp pavement;
the heavy breath and sweat of the city,
all the restless, anxious bodies filling up bars.
All the things that keep us up and keep us tired,
the sad swarm of souls on their way home
again.

This ache that slithers around ribs,
presses with cramped fingers, until it finds the bottom
of a spine and squeezes.
It claws and clutches,
grabs and grabs,
hooks and holds.

A grip, a fist, another white lie,
another calloused hand.
Another crook making a mess of my words, stealing
color from my eyes and hope from my voice.
I August-ache. I August-break.

The sky hasn’t been blue since April.
The A train hasn’t run express since the last time we talked.
The universe is an oil stain that will never wash out,
and it’s been a while since I believed in anything,
but I’m still trying. I’m still looking for light.

August sighs, hot and empty,
daring us to flinch or flee, remember to regret.
Springtime-thrills smoldered,
nights by the mouthful,
hands in hair, all burned down.

In August we ache. In August we break.
We hold our hurt like a secret and our fear like a crime-
then with whispered mornings and honeyed winds,
September comes and shakes the ashe out of our sheets.
In September, I’ll be in the light.
In September, the sky will be so, so blue.

I’m dreaming of boats again—
white dresses, cruel lines,
the way your laughter sounds
when I can’t see your face.

I surrender my subtext and sigh
in rooms small enough to swallow
everything unsaid.

And you—
half-light, half-shadow,
saying my name like it’s yours.

The air is salted and stifling.
A girl I don’t know laughs—
her hands in your pockets,
her voice a blade, stitched neat,
and when I see her face,
I’m afraid it’s mine.

“This is not an answer,” I say,
as if boats know how to be honest,
as if white dresses don’t drown.

Outside, the water churns.
Inside, I am heaving—
lungs full of salt,
mouth full
of you.

This is how you haunt me:
small, quiet,
always below deck.

And when I wake,
the dream asks me:
‘What did you bury there?’
I open my mouth to answer,
but only salt comes out.

We learn to smile with our lips peeled back,
half-feral, half-forgotten,
daughters of flesh and teeth,
tasting the world as it tears through us—

The earth calls us by name,
whispering whorls and wants like lullabies,
beckoning hearts that never knew mercy,
braiding hair with thorns and boughs.

We answer in hunger,
all iron and salt, thirst and thistle,
skin pulling tight over gnarled roots and longing,
nerves quivering like a candle burning at both ends.

We sharpen ourselves on what remains—
cracked knuckles, raw knees,
holding the ache like a birthright,
swallowing each bruise,
never begging, only bleeding.

You’re always going to be a bit of an open wound.
Are you running lines or running away?
I can’t tell if my labored breathing is a testament to
how fiercely I am trying,
or how loudly I am failing-
a strange mouth full of pointed teeth and honey.

Breath; bated and
muttering words I can’t get right.
Breath; rife and
barking to any ear that might hear.
Breath; soft and simmering,
begging to be set alight or
extinguished, or buried among stumps and limestone.

I was born soft and everyone knows it.
I was born soft and every time I put my palm to my chest,
something shudders. No one taught me how to be.
Soft and sad, like an old song you dreamed of,
soft and solemn, like the last time you tried to pray,
soft and sinking, like the flag of a country overtaken.

I was born soft and every time I’m wrangled
back to earth, it​​ rips me open.
I was born soft and every time I’m touched,
I bloom to bruise the same color as the wind.
Softness is the color of mercy, not the smell of dust.
I am always on the brink, my edges are sharp enough to cut,
my fingers always bleeding and my mind always jangling.

Magic and cruelty- another line I cannot hold.
I was born soft and I know how I look to the world,
but I will never understand how I look to you,
or why you keep coming back.
I’m shimmering, glimmering, rare and hard,
a spectral glow in the reeds,
a lake without shoreline to leave a drowning girl.

I’ve been lonelier, but I’ve never been so haunted
I’ve been rustier, but I’ve never been so stiff.
I fight myself to do things, I can’t write poems.
I’m up all night, throat raw from licking wounds.
My appetite for anguish is colossal,
and my calamitous softness abides.

I’m talking to myself about you, I never shut up.
Born soft and inarticulate, I wrote a whole script for us.
I’m not always sure what I am saying, but I know that it’s true.
A girl floated around a lake and never got wet, a girl with a boat in her heart meant for lovers and the lost, a soft, swaying girl with delusions bigger than the whole sky. I’m talking to myself again and your line is soon, do you know your cue?

Brilliant and breathless, bending
language like a gardenia wreath
hanging from the rafters
of a sun-drenched mouth
that could only be mine.

Bullish and breathless, tangling
ellipses, clinging to a simile’s hem until it
trips and rips the thread of thought.
I don’t mean this as a manner of speech–
I speak without manners.

Billowed and breathless, humming
out of its skin and into mine.
Meaning is a feathery, fallible thing,
twisting, writhing, vanishing;
tough to trust, prone to rust,
words swirling and spun,
sea-tossed and salt-stuck
on a foreign tongue.

Beaming and breathless, flirting
with the edge of a rockwall,
a siren call,
more lullaby than warning shot,
more hymn than howl, a voice
that could only be mine.

Belated and breathless, underlining
the good lines, never shaking the bad,
plucking at the precipice, never leaping,
clamoring to be heard but never speaking.
A lot of words, but no poem.
A lot of pinch, but no push.
Graceless and glitching,
mine alone.

December is still lucent,
winter is still scratching its legs in the grass.
Our bruises are yellowing, our swells are endless.
The scorn is still hot in my mouth,
the tense is still past.

I don’t want to lose the taste of red,
or the weight blue brings in its throat,
but I’m ready to peel your scent off my skin,
scrape the sanctified from my sinned-in-bones,
and burn the map to the hidden rooms I built for you.

I know the fire is slow and the years are not.
I know the burning is mine and you are not.
I know the stuttered-tongue is a cliff and the knife-edge is in my hands.
I know that silence is an answer and that you are not.

LOST:
A dream about a staircase with no top step.
Last seen circling my brain at 3:14 a.m.,
with no place to land.
Reward: One uninterrupted night of sleep.
Contact: riddlesnotlullabies@askytoclimb.com

FREE TO GOOD HOME:
A laugh that doesn’t fit anymore—
sharp, too loud,
like it belongs to someone braver.
Please take it before it cuts me deeper.
Contact: clankingtin@softsolace.com

MISSING CONNECTION:
You—on the other side of the street,
waving like it was still 2015.
Me—too slow to cross,
too afraid to shout.
If spotted, please circle back.
Contact: my number’s the same, but maybe you deleted it.

FOUND:
A treasure map to nowhere, folded into my coat lining.
No roads, just dotted lines,
and an X I’m scared to dig up.
No need to claim; it’s already mine.
Contact: (don’t.)

MISSING CONNECTION:
You—wearing a yellow raincoat,
laughing like the storm was yours to own.
Me—stuck in a doorway,
too afraid to step into puddles.
If you see this, let me borrow your courage.
Contact: meetme@bridgeofmysong.com

FOR SALE OR TRADE:
A reflection that doesn’t belong to me.
It moves slower, smiles at things
I haven’t thought of yet.
Will trade for a mug that doesn’t drip.
Contact: smokingmirrors@unstablefaces.org

LOST:
The way my name sounded when you said it,
soft and certain,
like it was the only taste there was.
Reward: The strength to stop listening for it.
Contact: sacredsyllables@windwhispered.com

FOR SALE:
One fractured moment in time.
It split clean down the middle—
half yours, half mine—
and hums like static when held.
Warning: Reassembly not guaranteed.
Contact: timesabitch@xrayfractures.com

LOST:
The ability to distinguish between a memory and a dream.
Last felt in a room full of books and musty yellow light.
Reward: A map with all dead ends marked in gold.
Contact: dreamfugue@unreliable.org

MISSING CONNECTION:
You—crossing the street as if it didn’t exist,
leaving footprints in the air.
Me—watching from behind a pane of glass that wasn’t real,
wishing I could step through.
If you see this, tell me if the other side is softer.
Contact: glasswalker@phantoms.com

FREE TO GOOD HOME:
A mirror that only reflects your mistakes.
It’s cracked but still works.
Perfect for someone braver than me.
Contact: onthewall@mercilessmirror.com

FREE TO GOOD HOME:
A scream swallowed too quickly,
leaving the weight of what it couldn’t say.
It hums at night, sharp enough to cut silence,
soft enough to still feel human.
Contact: wailingweight@humsandhaunts.com

FOUND:
A version of me I didn’t know still existed.
She’s smaller, softer,
but hums with the ache of wanting something bigger.
No one’s claimed her,
but she feels too familiar to let go.
Contact: echolalia@layersdeep.com

FOR SALE:
A jar of lightning,
trapped mid-flash, flickering faintly.
Warning: It won’t light your way, but it might set you on fire.
Contact: sparksfly@volatilenight.org

MISSING CONNECTION:
You—standing in a crowd of people who looked like you.
Me—shouting a name I wasn’t sure was yours.
If you see this, tell me which one of us got it wrong.
Contact: facelessblameless@nowronganswers.com

FREE TO GOOD HOME:
A shadow that moves faster than I do.
It drags me to places I swore I wouldn’t revisit.
It’s loyal,
but it doesn’t listen.
Contact: runawaytwin@goingnowhere.org

MISSING CONNECTION:
You—just out of reach,
your voice fading like a star going nova.
Me—chasing echoes through rooms I don’t recognize.
If you see this, tell me how it ends.
Contact: graspinglight@foreverandnever.com

WANTED:
A gas station map that folds wrong.
Not one that shows the way,
but one that erases it completely,
leaving only the thrill of getting lost.
Payment: Breadcrumbs I don’t plan to follow.
Contact: wanderorlust@uncharted.com

MISSING CONNECTION:
You—at a bus stop,
Me—watching you disappear before I could prove myself.
If you’re still waiting,
I swear I’ll catch the next bus.
Reward: a Metrocard, but refilling it costs more than it’s worth.
Contact: NYMTAhopeful@thatlakeinQueens.org

FOUND:
A photograph that doesn’t make sense—
faces blurred, the room stitched from dreams:
a log cabin leaning into splinters,
a Vietnamese superstore where shampoo and morning glory
share aisles with áo dài and gnocchi,
my first-grade classroom—pine-needle air,
metal chairs sparking against old carpet.
The photo shifts,
but the context stays the same.
Contact: dreamsindanangand1996@framegames.org

FREE TO GOOD HOME:
A moment of clarity that burns too bright to keep.
It sees everything,
even what you wish it wouldn’t.
Take it before it blinds me.
Contact: keepithidden@callouscandor.com

FOR SALE OR TRADE:
A clock with teeth.
It eats seconds like they’re starving it,
but spits them out just wrong enough to notice.
Will trade for a moment that doesn’t bite back.
Contact: devouredtime@bitingsands.com

WANTED:
Someone to tell me if it’s too late.
If the road I’ve walked is the only one I get,
or if there’s still time to take a left,
a right,
or turn around entirely.
No qualifications necessary—just say something.
Reward: My charge to pay attention; ***** coins and all.
Find Me: I'll be wearing a yellow rain coat.
Contact: universeswap@prophecy.org

I’m considering breaking;
something big and essential and shared,
like a four-way traffic light, or a water tower,
or smashing every lightbulb I’ve ever used,
and letting the glass shards spread across
The grocery store aisles,
And I’ll shop for spinach, and caramel, and greek yogurt barefoot,
To show everyone how tough I am.

I’m considering disappearing into the November winds,
I’m untying my apron as a walk across the yard.
I’m already forgetting what the dishes look like
and when the utilities are due-
I’m already exaggerating what I’ve got, and
intonating superstitions toward where I’m going.

A gaggle of humans fleeing the tolerable
should push, should glow and guess,
should smile while they walk away,
shaking off their receipts and sunken science, gratefully.

Ahh, it feels good to decompose -
so good,
so, so good.
Have you tried it? Really tried it?
Anything anxious, or stiff, or sad
sprouting inside of you is severed-
pried out of the baseboards with the hammer’s claw,
and flushed down the toilet leaving a rusty stain on the porcelain.

But then,
then,
you become radiant.

You become a mystery; searing and traveling,
wrapped loosely in oils and gauze.
You become an emblem;
the blackest sun, the proudest eyelids, vaguest plans.
You become a fable,
picking scabs off your fingers, roaming sweaty markets,
utterly dissolved.

Cruel summer in viscous reds and pinks; wine stains,
sweating cans, margaritas in plastic cups,
everything pulsing on a sticky dance floor and sad.
Screaming and flirting with the easy and the lost as the sun drags bodies
to a place where hearts are haggard and hungry,
where the hunted steer to survive.

Cruel summer in tangerine-dream and traffic-light-greens,
the slant of bruising metals, the hollow of a hollow,
hot-hopes of the blue of blue and more blue.
A polite laugh, a memory’s memory, a wish on a still-burning candle.
I’m nothing if not a witness to superstition and the way faith tastes like fear.
I’m everything if I play my cards right.

I’m roving about;
a derelict architect, a soul with someone else's name carved across it.
I’m in and out of the city,
in and out of the conversation.
I’m in and out of his vision like suspicion-
he walks past our claw marks on corners and song-scratched streets,
he looks at the city and the city looks back, and he thinks of me.
Planted and planned and made to be.

Cruel summer in jaundiced yellows and mauves,
the pain of​​ the sun on shoulder and bottle,
the ache of a smile and a lie on lips.
His hands on my waist, my mind in a hot room,
my glint swimming in his eyes,
his voice snared between my sharp, sharp teeth.

Cruel summer in grimy greens and stained-glass jewels dripping
another bartop, another night where just friends melt and merge,
another morning spent tangled and giggling,
like all of this exists to see each other smile.
Like this wasn’t a dutiful ritual and a route to ruin.
Like it wasn’t the most marvelous game to play.

Cruel summer in royal purples and gold beading, holding his hand and my tongue,
meeting the train with a sinking chest and a straightened spine.
Another kiss before I hop the turnstile.
Another three months wracking and whirling;
cursing his hands, howling the night, willing him to pitch me the ball.
Just waiting for cruel summer to bloom in shades of blue,
beaming because cruel summer doesn’t lose.

After miles of coasting,
trailing a stretch of steel remembered
more as an artery than a scar,

(back when the sun-stained arms
and scratchy palms that laid each track,
across an endless America felt
ageless and exhausted;
gripping great-grandbabies and bibles and whittled pipes,
fingers coiled and knotted with stories, ready to spring forth
and croon out if only they were ever asked.

They didn’t talk much during the inbetween:
that window of time when their bodies were no longer
cracking and howling, rooting rungs into dry grass
from ocean to ocean; fitting the landscape
with a skeleton of its own-
but before the true rest
when they let their bones shake out the tight
grip of untold tales
and sink into the dirt they helped carve.

You think of them now as dust and a rosary planted
under pine, a Sunday grace, a shared plot.
You do, don’t you?
You’re not really looking.

Sit down and begin to
unravel the secrets you tried
to bury inches deep
within your thigh.

Remember the giddy hollow of
after. How ringing out sheets
and watching Polaroid skin
as bruises, slowly, did sprout and spring
was almost enough to quiet it some nights.
How if only for a breath
you could relish in the rapture
instead of only diving through ash.


Discuss the way it felt to throw
yourself away from the inside out-
reaching and retching and clawing
with chapped twig fingers at all
those vile bits that bloomed inside of you.

You were just uprooting weeds.

You were just casting out veins.

Tell them how it was just like
tossing a coin into a city fountain-
but in reverse.
(and how it's okay to admit
that you still miss the wishes.)

Wading through humidity,
adding to humanity-
the Lower East Side,
too hot to be still.
Too old to be kissing on sidewalks,
(doing it anyway.)

Let me show you my leprechaun leap:
run, jump, crash:
eight mimosas deep,
then I’m four limbs down
on a subway grate and laughing.

Twirling in the green dress I wore last time,
like a ******* cartoon character,
and you smile, but just a little.
And I grip, but just a little.

You hold my hand, lean me into walls,
where bricks radiate heat,
and I can’t tell you how lonely
Alphabet City feels
even now.

A heavy, dog-day eloquence,
the sticky camaraderie
of a heatwave, late August:
smirking with strangers,
running through sprinklers
like little kids.

Saluting a little light,
something curling the edges
like damnation,
lifting like prayer,
and I still haven't learned my lesson.
(I can’t rewrite my lonely.
Trying to write your name over it
will only stain more.)

Let’s just keep wading,
keep laughing,
and let the heat do the talking.
I will not say the next thing.
I will not say anything at all.
(I will not say anything at all.)

October wears the wrong shoes, wears out her knee,
wears days passing like ****** rings on each bony finger.
I’m getting quiet again;
tucking my hands in my jacket,
tucking my scraps and starlight in sidewalk cracks.

There are days you can convince yourself of anything,
but they don't come as often as they used to.
I feel like I should be the one singing,
I should be the one watching the moon rise twice in one night;
skimping on sleep and feasting on frisson.
I’m not that old, but I feel like I could be.
I’m not that jaded; I prefer reverie.

September was made of sighs and swords,
August was slow-marching shadows and tiger-tight dreams.
July was nothing but waiting-
nothing but stringing beads on an endless thread,
nothing but erasing the map and starting over.

Months have a way of slipping to the street
as you loosen your grip;
like coins storm drain-clinking,
like jewels gutter-glinting,
like time spilling, time seeping;
time swallowing you whole.

There are days you can still get away with anything,
but it’s getting harder to curtsy to the mirror and feed it a lie.
There are days when it’s fine to forget the name of your city,
But you can’t forget the names of your teeth,
or where you buried them, or when you’ll need them again.
Dirt is always shifting, names are always changing;
I’m still singing, still counting, still naming.

There are nights when I know I’m dreaming, but I also know I’m awake.
How many moonrises can I count in a day before I run out of fingers?
How many streets can I name before I run out of breath?
I’m a little anxious, but I mostly get out of bed.
I’m a little sad, but I still meet each month with hard hands and rings.
I’m a little anxious, but I keep my scraps and starlight.
I’m a little sleepy, but I still sing while counting my moons.

You can’t outsmart yourself.
You wouldn't be land-locked and writing this
if you could.

      Let’s try something different. Let's find a boat. We’ll meet at the bow, and try to forget what we know. We can start over. We can put our memories on ice and our hearts on hold. We can grow new lungs, and new eyes and our bones won’t ache in the salt water. Let's read the stars, captained by someone born without a lily in their teeth or a map in their pocket. They’ll have an anchor to choke and a rattle to keep us awake.
      Let's sip the coffee of a woman with roots that run deeper than the earth, and speak the steady language of not-wanting. We can learn sea songs, cover our dreams with thick, acrylic paint, and bring our ghosts to life at preapproved parties. We’d all get along so well. I’ll undo the sound of my voice. You'll sweat out the nicotine. We'll eat strange fruit at balmy ports, acquire a taste for the rind, and our scars won't open; we'll be positively flush with Vitamin C and the pipes we've learned to whittle.
    You’ll start to crave the way I smell like rain, taste like salt. I’ll show you what to do when your compass points left and you find yourself on the wrong side of the decade. I'll create a perfect starfish staccato, which is a dive I'll invent and perfect two days in. We’ll build a dream house out of sea glass, learn ***** jokes in morse code, and share a bunk with a man who claims he was born a crow and misses it every day. He might take our bones home to his blind wife after this voyage. He might make flutes from our thighbones, hock them around shipyards, or he might ask us to write his eulogy. He might be the guardian angel for someone who drowned centuries ago, or he might be God. We're fine not yet knowing.
      We're on a boat, after all. We can do shimmery things, like tangle our limbs and kiss in nooks where the light doesn't touch. We can dive for pearls in the shadows of our own thoughts, and keep the sun on our faces. We can all learn to swim like angels and walk like saints. I’ll show you how to make a secret place inside yourself where you can wrestle unspeakable things and then send them into the storm.
      Let's drink cider in the hull, lose our sealegs,  and trace bumpy roots to an older, kinder world. Then let's sit very still and believe in it. Let's tie that kindness around our wrists. Practice our knots or not. Let's pass the bottle back and forth while we trade secrets with winter finches telepathically.
      If we feel like it let's fall in love. Maybe with each other. Maybe with something else entirely.    
      Let’s talk about things we've never said aloud, let's try to put some of our sticky longing and heavy heartbeats into some kind of language. Or let’s pretend the city is only as large as our pockets and as static as the space between our chests. Let’s go back in time and see what would happen if I didn't kiss you on the West Side Highway six months ago. Maybe there’d be nothing to pout over, nothing to pine about. (Heavy heartbeats always find something to pine about.)
      Let’s walk to the sea, let's forget what we know. Let’s start over. I’ll take the train in and we’ll meet for brunch. I won’t get red and loose-lipped from too much sun and *****, and I won’t look for black cats in highrise windows. We'll talk about things that don't sting and the city won't mind the bleak things I say.
      After playing on the pier and not kissing, we won’t walk East, swaying. We won’t stumble into a church and genuflect, then slide into a pew, softly join the Rosary recitation. We won’t bow our heads, or stumble through the Apostles Creed (where was that one during ten years of catechism?) We won’t say Amen with our chest, study the stained-glass, and  our legs won’t leave sweat on the kneeler after we stand.
      We won’t barrel back into daylight where we’re old friends who don’t kiss and I’m still a prize- My cheeks can flush but I won’t let the mimosas get on top of me, or you get on top of me. like it was only a little bit inevitable. I won't babble; completely unhinged and hopeful, or drop my grace somewhere on an elevated train as dusk cradled us both in blue. I'll polish that part of Brooklyn with my poise, not my plea. I won't pray again on the train home, (not on my knees and slipping, but still on my knees and slipping.) I won’t have to meet rueful eyes in the window reflection with only one poem on my lips, ‘Have Mercy on me, Oh God-‘
      I won’t have to sit sad and scalloped alone on a midnight Metronorth, bewildered and blanched, because we’re not here, we’re far away and out to sea. I’m still a prize, and we never have to say ‘Amen’ at all.

My color is whatever makes you ravenous-
I always wear my color.
Snatching some wind along the FDR,
folding it in my jacket for later.

I’m checking my cardinal marks,
hair down, skin salty,
I’m always navigating blooming
creatures like you
away from devoted danger.
I do my work,
then slip away on a buoy tender.
You won’t follow me,
you’re not that tender.

I’m not the first ingénue to show you
that the cross you carry is short,
or how your shadows are companions-
But I am the first swift sprite;
dripping with kindness and just enough allure,
to make you feel fresh ardor,
a new kind of ecstasy.

I say my lines, hit my cues,
and watch your eyes narrow as the ache
sets in. I revel and romp.
You covet and crave.
We dip and I spin you through a fast moment fever.
Now you’re feral on a stalling subway.

I’m not planting language,
I won’t hold your hand,
I’m humming a slow, electric kindle and you’re starting to spark.

I’m glinting, you're drowning like you understand.
I’m glinting, you’re yearning like a boy.
I’m glinting, you're conceiving our future,
because there’s no way you can let this feeling go.

It’s true I want to please,
but your fancy was a little off-
I won’t be looking up to gage your reaction,
I won't be looking at you at all.
Picture me closing my eyes,
grabbing my jacket, driving the tender.
By the time you’re on fire
I’m halfway down the river,
and I’m still glinting.

I started puking birds-
I watched them fly south for the winter,
toward warmer pavement and fuller trees.

I started stuttering butterflies-
I watched them take giant sips from birdbaths,
We both know my mouth is so, so dry.

The thing about wings
the thing about things
the thing about trying to focus
and listen and nod while
My mouth is sticky and
my brain feels clogged, like a real
mess worth of paper towels
bunched and flushed in a panic
all the way down my throat

The electricity in this room is so loud
You keep talking, I look for outlets
You get annoyed, I turn off the lamp
You say stand still, I say I’m still listening
You say this is what I mean
I say I’m listening
I repeat what you said before you got annoyed
You say that’s not the point
I switch off the surge protector
I say it’s still there
you say that’s not the point
I say I hate this sound
You say it doesn’t bother me
You say if it ever does I put on the lofi-hip-hop-headphone-girl channel
You say think about it
I think about birds in trees instead
and if power lines are so so loud
or if it’s okay because they can drink from birdbaths
and fly south when they want to,
not just in winter. not just when the pavement is warm.


I say sometimes listening to you is like
watching a show with subtitles;
sometimes you are the audio and the electricity
is the subtitles, sometimes the
electricity is the audio and you are the subtitles,
and other times you are the electricity as well as
the subtitles and maybe there’s no audio at all,
and maybe the video is a few frames behind the audio
and maybe the subtitles are projected in reverse
like when you take a picture of a mirror
and maybe another electric note harmonizes with the first
and also maybe you’re having a stroke or at least
you’re really thirsty and you can’t unclench your knuckles.

You say now what, I say nothing
I’m on my knees, crawling the carpet,
feeling for outlets, scratching my rug burn,
unplugging sockets.

You say nothing for a moment
I listen for any quiet electricity still playing
you sit down next to me, I lift my legs up and over yours
I look at you, you look at my knees
you say I’m not annoyed, I say that’s not the point
you say listen
you say have you thought about microdosing
I should hear a punchline cymbal

I hear nothing, I don’t feel warm
I start to laugh then stop
I start to stutter then stop
I puke.

May of last year, I became a girl again—
not one I’d been before,
but one I met for the first time,
bejeweled in a New Jersey parking lot,
singing with lungs
too used to holding apologies.

When the stadium lights dimmed,
we stood at the blockade,
a constellation of strangers orbiting
the same star.

It was the closest we’d ever come
to being fully ourselves—
sparkling, loud, unabashed,
together.

We were women relearning how to be girls,
unfolding ourselves in a carpark,
peeling back layers of too-muchness
we’d been taught to hide.

The years had pressed us quiet,
shrinking us to fit spaces
meant for us to be seen,
but never felt.

But here, under the floodlights,
we found permission in the shimmer—
sharing shorthand glances
and whispered secrets that sparkled.

Someone spilled a White Claw;
someone else sipped their heartbreak.
We nodded solemnly at both,
because ravishment and sorrow
need no explanation here.

The music reached us on delay—
her voice traveling not from the stadium,
but from the sky,
echoing just far enough
to feel like it already belonged to the past.
We sang anyway,
daring it to catch us.

There was glitter on the asphalt,
scuffed into galaxies
by the soles of cowboy boots and Converse.
We spun and swayed like children unlearning shame,
our bodies moving freely,
finally forgetting how they’re supposed to look.

A security guard, middle-aged, glowing white bob
mouthed All Too Well like a prayer
she’d carried for years,
her female gaze—
not surveillance, but sanctuary—
the kind women save for each other
when the world isn’t watching.

She nodded as we screamed the bridge,
her eyes sparking,
as if unearthing something long-buried.
In that moment,
we were all the same age.

On the upper balcony,
a silhouette waved—
a shadow carved by backlit glow,
as if the universe greeted us by name.
We waved back,
because what else do you do
when kindness feels that big?

The glint and glimmer turned
strangers into sisters.
We clapped for the ones who ran to the gates,
even two hours in,
hands clutching miracle QR codes.

We whooped for them
like it was our own triumph,
because it was.
Together we're storming the barricades
of a revolution made of rhinestones.

Someone spun with their arms wide,
spilling bliss into the night.
Someone else stood still,
eyes closed,
holding the weight of a lyric
they didn’t know they needed.

It wasn’t just a concert.
It was a reclamation—
a bead-strewn riot of tenderness,
a reminder that we’re allowed to take up space,
to hold everything,
to feel it all at once—
even if it's messy,
even if it's ugly,
even if it spills like light too wild to gather back.

A woman with long braids
and Bluetooth speaker in her Hi-Vis vest
blasted Fearless at the station,
while directing us to our trains.

We sang it back to her,
off-key but perfectly in sync.
Joy spreads like stardust,
and what else can you do
when you’ve carried something
so vast,
so bright?

For once,
the world paused—
not as an audience,
but as something softer,
a witness to the sound we made.

We were there.
It was rare.
I'll remember it.

It was July and something inside of her began to thud. small and light as a pulse grew from a seed at the bottom of her belly, weaved and braided with veins, commandeered organs like ivy on headstones. washed up and sprouted from her chewed down fingernails, popped blood vessels in her eyes. she thought, 'if this isn't dying then it must be blooming.' this new presence was abashed by the absence of Arabic script and an African summer. it wept at dogs as they panted; they could let go so easily- a few deep heaves and they're back to pure. easy and breezy and not the sad, harsh tear of skin below shoulders, the bruises creeping over wrists and the shredded esophagus. the soiled heart and tar-heavy soul. it panicked more and more as the calender blew past. it sobbed as tomorrow became today and today became yesterday.
i lived a hazy summer. brown skin and hair that turned red at the crinkly ends as it baked. i walked through cornfields and slipped on husks. landed on my back and erupted in giggles at the snowglobe sky protecting me and caging me. incense and gin were as consistent as the advent sun. music blaring and bodies bumping and no release. no escape. my little book of plans was solid and secure. and then smashed. ripped. no poetry and braids. not dreamy just silly.

The past few weeks have been mounted in hot pink and mahogany.
Hot breath; sticky and drooling,
dogs up the glass and
I resist the urge to
outline my name in a one-finger, window-fade, Arabic script-
I can’t keep my giddy heat
and roasting hands to myself.

My thoughts pirouette a coconut,
slippery-sweet meld of dazed concentration while I leprechaun-leap over cool evening sidewalks
and tip-toe in stairwells for that
last fevered kiss
as the heavy door
crashes shut and we're still alone.

The hole in my boot sole
grows with each step;
I feel the full magnitude of
each drying leaf as I go forth and pulverize.
I don’t think I can help it-
The leaves fall and the fall
falls and I might be falling.

These days have been oil paint
thick and layered inches high
on expensive canvas, on the
cardboard I've plucked from the
dumpster at work.
The smell of thin trees
and bright fields;
combing out and
rinsing off
and tucking
themselves in for winter naps,
cradle the breeze and
bellow a
proud conquest with its sweet,
smoky hum.

My own long, dark,
hair is lured up and around by grinning wind.
Earth waltzes with the bits of me I've let grow.
Hair is dead, right?
(and the longer the deader.)
In my long, soft, dead parts I am waving free-
finally free and laughing.

I’m laughing because nothing is tangled;
nothing stings yet.
I’m laughing because if--
When,
this ride crashes
I can't imagine how I'll
survive the wreck.

Because I'm caught on the details;
the tiny everythings that get me.
The little choices made
(but so sweet-muted,
they're not printed in the script.)
They are dull-pencil-scribbled in later
by an actor who’s fading fast into
a calmy, balmy, dreamless sleep.

Still, they're the bloom-blushing afterthoughts that catch me
off guard and whip my guts up
warm and oozing.
They stick in my throat horizontally,  clawing and breached.

I acknowledge them softly
and play like this easy
kindness is not
completely foreign to me.
I’m carefully absorbing.
I'm mutely, blinking back
slow-welling eyes
because this feeling of unworthy
coiled deep in my bones
is too rooted, too tangled,
too stutter seep quaking
through my marrow
to just shake off.

But I am trying.
I’m quietly,
radically,
hiking a mountain to
meet him halfway-
desperately hoping he won’t *****.

I’m dizzied and melting to the throwaway habits I’m
beginning to crave.
How his fingers pray the rosary
on each bead of
my cracking knuckles.
How he kisses my head when I'm looking at my phone and thinks I don’t notice.
How lately, the sleepy way
I let my posture disintegrate into his body,
(a place that's sun-stained and velvet.
a place that's formed and transformed endlessly across decades and continents)
feels like graceful landing after so much turbulence.

I've met moments of calm locked in limbs and new security in the shapes my fingers find tangling with his.

Even glances can anchor me. A sip of his eyes-
eyes that have shown him so much of the world;
the bright corners and ***** streets,
the graveyards and parades,
the sidewalk saints and stumbling souls,
a world he knows can be beautiful and horrific
and both and neither all at once-
those glances manage to steady the sway
of my tangled body and droop-heavy soul.

and okay, I don't see poetry in
the way I swing myself up;
arm, leg, arm, leg,
into the front seat of his truck while
he closes the door behind me-
(my own faded muscles stopped atrophying
months before I could even remember his name,
but calves and obliques still recall the sensation
of ripping, pinching and splitting
like raw cotton in the presence
of heavy metals and four wheel drive.)

Still, there is something
almost too easy to weave
into words about the
smell of soap on his chest even
late at night and how there-
right there,
is a small island
to double over in laughter
or sigh your stress aloud.
With the tiny details
and subtle quirks I’m
shorthand jotting and jacket-pocket folding
it'd be too easy
to fill a notebook.

And though I'm still treading lightly,
I think if you asked me
to describe the word ‘worth’
right now,
I’d probably tell you about the way
I can pull away, look up and smile during a kiss
and find his eyes already in mine,
smiling back.

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.

The museums all end eventually.
If coral lipstick claimed
decades
the way regret seems to-
I'd never stop talking.

I've been forgetting little
pieces of each full moon
across the weeds
of the world.
I don't think anyone minds.

I dreamed your soul attached
to dumb little details
while my body stretched
out against the absence and
I wasn’t that sad anymore.

I don't  swallow feelings;
I feast on poems.
I play with fires howling
In my ribs and
extinguish names
like we rehearshed.

My days are cheap but I’m burning soft again-
like nothing stole my miracles,
like I didn’t lose eleven months with you
tangling my tongue.

it's something else now,
something less like summer brave
and  more like feathers
stitched together
just pretending to glow.

I tried mining nuance.
I tried burying my limerence in
parking lots and kicking
gravel over the glowing parts.
My tongue was never that flexible,
and my knees were never that strong.

If I still smoked black cloves
with pigeon-footprint-fingers,
cooing with beaded arms,
and dissected birds,
I would be all in;
I would win this game.

A rabbit crosses the field.
Something caws.
Our clock is dead.
This filthy week has been
wind spun in darkness,
I’m inching towards light.

You’re stitching boring words,
every point you knit cheapens
my morning. I’m just here to gleam.
Daylight rolls toward me,
tasting my cheeks-
all light.

And then I’m gleaming,
warm, illusive, bathed
in a poem sunbeams
wrote because they missed me.

Live knee-deep
in language but be certain
of magic.
Dignity whispers
that you’re sleeping.

Not much closed to my kiss,
not much cracked to my scream.
I want to be a phenomenon.
Phenomenal.
All light. All gleam.

A secret in my palm
and a secret in my mouth,
and the two are not the same.

God says He’s sorry,
and I say I’m sorry too.
The truth is not the same as the lie,
but they have the same taste,
the same weight,
so I swallow them both.

I ask God if He remembers
the day He knit me together,
with fear and wonder,
all thoughts and thorns.

He nods His head, and I nod mine,
and we both agree
that He should have been more careful.
I say I'm sorry again,
and this time I mean it more.

A plea in my fist and a plea in my throat,
and the two are not the same.
God says He knows my heart like
I know His mercy, and I feel bad,
I think He might be as lonely as I am.

God tells me a new song is coming,
and I tell Him hurry, I want to sing.
We both know that wilderness
is a state of mind, a state of grace,
and I let my mind wander.

A blinding fall
reflected off lakes in greens and browns
almost a year removed
from wide-eyed walks across
the Borden Avenue Bridge,
counting steps and calculating
just how many sweaters
you’d have to layer for it to seem accidental.

November was dragging
and you weren't trying to impress.
You drove to school
and didn't go to class.
You thought I’m flexing,
you thought I’m finding my feet,
you thought thinking was overrated.

You smoked cloves on benches,
let bracelets rot off your wrists,  followed every ‘person
you may know’
on Twitter.

Holed up in libraries across the Shoreline, you read Vice,
posed for pictures with strangers
and made friends with Cat Marnell but she never texted back.
You played with words in a way that started to smell nice.

December was still lucent,
your curvy cheeks and sloping
thighs receded into something new-giggling and compact.
When you skipped finals
and failed every class,
you shrugged, deleted the emails
and got really into makeup.

Winter was a dizzy dazzle of
new pills and old clothes and
a pallor that crept just on the line of
***, glitter and death.

It was the summer my
feet tanned like a gladiator,
my coliseum was more a
city piled on dirt, dust, trash
and under that; sand. It was
a desert summer though pollution
and global warming stole the
'dry heat' notion, burned it
up between layers of humidity and
buried it under the city-
down to sand that touched jewels
and biblical lust.
sometimes I ate pigeons and
sometimes I ate McDonald's.
sometimes I was in love and
sometimes I cried myself to sleep.
my eyes were brown, my skin was dark
and my accent was convincing.
I could have been anybody
tiptoeing between past-dead
hatchbacks and stray cats-
any lonely girl with sleep in her eyes
and fogged up sunglasses,
so why did I stay me?

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.

It’s a sticky summer and I do laundry every other night-
I can’t keep clean.

Wednesday morning, early August, while leaning (not cleaning)
across the gritty counter where I earn a paycheck, I
feel the last deep pull of my lungs before they surrender to rust.
A calm vision catches in the coursing current of my blood
and floats, untethered, through ****** channels of vein.
In the way some women sense pregnancy before their body gives
them any clues, I know I am in decay.

It’s been so easy to confuse the materialization
of hips; stretching and grazing after a long hibernation,
with the steel-toe heaviness of my heart.

Both have me tripping over myself,
shivering and admiring the hem of my skirt
as it dances in time with the circles
I keep turning in; giggling alone
and taking stuttering steps down the cereal aisle
for the third time this week.

Hip and heart are equally quick to bruise
and when a laugh too high, too loud,
too insincere rattles my lips;
a staggered, cold gale stings
both my gnarled pelvis
and the grimy bit of light
that sits behind my sternum.

Every piece of me blushes and
pinky promises it’s neighbor it
will do better. Will be quieter. Will keep
to a light simmer and not erupt boiling and steamy.

The bones cross their heart and hope to die.
The tendons nod with big eyes and try not to blink
as the message travels through my anatomy like a panicky
game of telephone. The head bone’s connected to
the back bone, (we’ve got this) the back bone’s connected to
the hip bone (we just need to focus) the hip bone’s
connected to the thigh bone (we’re done speaking today.)
Dem bones, dem bones gonna rise again.

It’s a sticky summer and studying my hands
has become a national past-time. No matter how much
sweat has pooled in the dip of my clavicles or dampened
the swatch of hair below my ponytail, my palms keep
cold. Fingers shake consistently. Rings fit well, then pinch
too tight then slide off too loose in the lifetime of one afternoon.
I’m wasting a lot of time willing myself to stabilize.

It’s a sticky summer and the hip and heart within me-
the ones I never asked to be responsible for,
are expanding to fill the dunes of ice I hid under all winter,
which have begun to melt. My brain pulses loud and hot,
untamed by my skull and I have to sit down for a minute.

Following the quick, thin stream of my thawing winter with tired eyes
I realize how clean it is. Clear but comfortingly foggy like sea glass. Like the warming dashboard of a below zero drive through the night.
It’s decay but it’s also ripening.

If leaves didn’t crumple and fall to the ground
how would we know when to put our sweaters on?
Eventually the stream will dry up and become something of
an entirely different definition.
And so will I.

I keep setting my mind on fire, but it’s still so dark.
I hold my breath, and hold burning torches for your ache.
I have taken a thousand flowers to bed and none have bloomed,
I have held a thousand sighs and none have made me cry,
I have broken a thousand hearts and all of them were mine.

I’m on the wrong side of the river,
laying in the weeds and getting itchy,
waiting for the buzz of a motor,
praying for the sound of a train,
thinking of you.
I’m looking up at the sky
to see if there are still stars,
half convinced they won’t be there,
fingers stuck in the dirt and holding on to the ground for dear life.

I’ve thought of your body in a thousand ways,
all of them have been wrong.
I’ve thought about the room you keep locked away,
how it smells of a mother, the air like a grave.
A cabin without windows, like a body without blood,
a grazing patch for all the blows you’ve taken to the chin,
for all the heartaches you can’t put into words.

A ripped map, a bed for dead feet,
a closet to stow forgotten things, a radio that isn’t plugged in.
It’s a tomb and I won’t disrupt the dead.
I can offer to blow a hole in the roof,
string Christmas lights on every wall,
and lay a gladiolus bouquet at the door,
but I can't turn a haunt into a home, and I won’t try.

There are so many ways to touch you, I’ve imagined every one of them,
but none are enough. I can taste you on the back of my tongue,
I can smell your gloom some mornings. I can find you in the empty wine.
I can feel you in my bones, and see you in the light
that filters through the cracks in the blinds.

I want to destroy everything that destroys you.
I want to make you a home you don’t want to burn down.
Has your mind been on fire lately? Has my love been a flame?
I’m drawing a new map for you to read, I’m reclaiming the wrong
side of the river. I’m building a bed where everything blooms,
Where we can lay on our backs and see only stars.

You can play
with the tension
and not get caught,
but you can never
break it;

not when nerves
are taut telephone lines
purring with electricity;
thick enough to chew.
The cracks are deep
enough to bury a secret,
swallow each perforated promise,
and each broken beacon.

I can feel your pulse
racing against mine.
I can't tell whose heart is beating
and whose is beat.
We are two sticks of dynamite
in the same trophy tin:
sparks of breath singeing skin,
we hold each other up
until we hold
each other down.

The rules of war change
with your mood,
the laws of physics
are putty in your hands,
and the tides of time
are your own
collapsing conspiracy-
a house of cards you reshuffle
and repossess as the candle burns
a circle of wax on the table.

I can’t decide if you want to devour me
or decimate me—
adore my halo
or annihilate my hope,
love me with your whole heart
or wreck mine with your whole weight.
And you can’t decide either,
can you?

The light is unkind,
the land unforgiving,
and you are all
my favorite lies;
the canvas of my
incomplete portrait,
the crossed out pages
of my abandoned poems.

You can play with your edge
or throw me off it.
Either way, I'll be yours to keep
or yours to conquer.
I won’t tell you how to ruin me,
or beg you to spare me
from your rabid reign—
I’m not that kind of country.
I’m an open border;
a shattered compass,
spinning wildly.

But I will say:
the ruins
are all that’s left when
the empire falls,
all that’s real when the
games are done,
all that’s preserved
when the tension eases
and the maps are redrawn,
again and again.

I'll send a postcard
to your grave.

What would happen if you let yourself be hungry?
Would you reach for the bread or the knife?
Under the table and dreaming;
feral for kindness,
ragged in revile.

Swallow olive pits to allay your stomach,
varnish your voice with vinegar and honey,
twirl your tongue like a teaspoon around
new wild-blue words, hijacked hands,
and a bellyful of burdens clawing up your throat.

The hunger will keep you honest,
the bread will keep you alive,
the knife will keep you from being too kind.
Kind is another word hungry;
and hunger is how you got the knife.

What would happen if you stopped pretending you
were the center of the universe?
You are; but not because you are special–
because you are the only one who’s learned to bite down,
the lonely one who’s learned to look up.

Now that you know this, how would you like to behave?
It’s not up to you, but you should still think about it.
Chew on the questions but don’t swallow any answers;
the center of the universe has a weak stomach, and puking
proverbs only drags out the meal and ruins your boots.

What would happen if you were a little less precious?
Would your fingers still write ******? Would your knife still cut?
Would your appetite ache while your heart howled, ulcerated and untamed?
Your wayward words only tell half of the story;
the other half belongs to the hunger who ate the bread.

A word isn’t a thing to behold, but a thing to be held.
A poem isn’t a thing to reckon, but a thing to wreck.
A heart howls when forsaken; the banished **** and bite down,
There is a kindness in the story, but only when it’s told.

We didn’t bloom together the way we should have. We never eyed each other across neat soil; both self-conscious and self-righteous as we sipped the sun and, in quiet bursts, raced to touch the sky.  

We weren't planted by gentle hands in soft plots with room to stretch our limbs and shield our eyes, nor to bud in peace and thrive and find identity in both our own bold blossoms and as a pulsing piece of the whole lavish garden.

We didn't bloom because we erupted.
We running-start-swan-dived into stale dirt and were too close from the very beginning.
We didn’t sprout up straight; we snaked and lurked and left no bit of earth untouched by our vibrant, stencil **** fingers declaring ourselves alive.

By harvest we were tangled beyond repair.
By harvest I didn't know me from you and I liked it.

To be so entwined is lovely but depends on a balance
we could only begin to grasp.
To expand but not uproot requires perfect synchronicity maybe not beyond our years but certainly beyond our maturity. We spread out our emotions like tarot cards on a towel in the grass and reflected in your sunglasses I met the silent pieces of me.
In colorful, grim drawings those quiet, ugly bits floated up veins and settled under ribs.
They stayed silent. Until they began to scream.

And you and I- we didn't have the words;
not our own words that we earned and burned while stumbling across months and plains,
tripping over potholes and finding our feet quicker each time.
We had place-holders words we sang back and forth and splashed around and bathed in.
The words we spoke were profound and cardboard.
We were just reading lines, sharing identical scripts and an ache to be seen
so deep and desperate it was sinful.

We maybe shared the humid cling of regret; which hung heavy in stuck-air auditoriums,
it beaded sweat echoed, rolling down spines and turning blood to sticky wax as we whispered in the corner about the things we could say aloud while our minds never left the things we wouldn't dare.

We were mostly ill-equipped.
We joked about hurricanes
We didn't survive the first storm.

I want you to know you really hurt my feelings.
I want you to know you're the first guy I've given my feelings to hurt.
I want you to know I was terrible towards the end.
And I know that. But you gave up on me

You gave up on me at the exact moment I was giving up on myself.
Even as my tongue stung metallic and veins pulsed so hot and loud
through my eardrum that I felt I would explode- it was clean.
It was all remarkably clean.
and sterile.
There were no explosions.
No shattered plates, ****** knuckles or blown out voices
that scratched and rose in time with the sun.

Just a quick slash of rope-
an anchor cut loose and left to sink;
our secrets were set free to
rust over and collect algae.
We were suddenly off the hook
for any vulnerability we might have spilled
on each other in our fits of laughter
and hours of sleep.
A deep sigh of relief.
A deeper sigh of desolation.

The moment exists in sad yellow lighting that must have been added in restrospect.
I tweaked the floor of my memory too:
at that moment I was not wearing flipflops on linoleum- but sinking, slowly and barefoot, into chilly riverbed mud as it turned to ice.

I opened the door and there you stood.
You knew I had been crying and I didn’t try to hide it
it was too exhausting- running on fumes.

And I did expect something from you,
anything from you, that might dull the singed-dagger plunging
stab to my chest with each breath I gulped and spat .
I wanted anything that might reel me in from the cliffs edge
where my thoughts had carried me on horseback.

But you had nothing.
I watched your eyes swallow my swollen lips and pinched, glassy eyes
like a quick, sharp shot of warm whiskey.
Careful to avoid eye contact you slipped ‘**** this,’
under your breath and started to reach for my hand.

You started to, but then after a second suspended
you let your arm fall back to your body.
Head lowered, jaw clenched and you turned and fled with a new heaviness pushing down on your posture.
It looked painful and adult.
It looked like you finally felt the weight of our season.
And watching you go I shrank in lighter and thicker because I felt it too.

We are not going to get a happy ending-
not with each other and not right now.
Maybe not ever.
And that will have to do.
(Though I will miss your hand in mine.
I hope one day you'll remember being tangled with me and it will make you laugh before you cringe because I didn't like to be alone.)

If I wanted to be alone I would just go home.

So what if-
What if we dive in?
What if it worked?

What if you let it fall-
What if I caught it and gave it back to you
without making a big deal of it?
I’m gathering dust- I stopped moving forward in the last few years,
but I have a weird feeling that I can try-
Like at least right now, while the city basks and blows around us,
I can walk again.

I’m talking about boats while getting a sunburn,
I’m growing blisters I’ll lance with a pin tomorrow,
but for now, I'm focusing more on exploring your hand.
I’m choking down Tabasco and talking fast,
you’re talking slow and listening.
I’m leaning back and laughing.

I’m the one who kissed you,
you’re the one pretending to be surprised.
I’m the one bringing up the hours we spent on the floor
all those years ago,
when you were young and I was mad,
and now, after half a decade of radio-silence-
I’m the one letting you **** me on a different floor,
across a brand new carpet that hasn’t settled flat, hasn’t softened at all.
I’m proud to have let myself soften.

I’m thinking about the way you don’t taste clean but I don’t really care.
I’m not as active as I’ve taught myself to be,
but for now, it seems like you don’t mind.
Keep not minding. Please.
For now, I’m okay with watching our bodies’ arc, thinking
‘goodness, this is just so funny’ and a little bit ‘will this make you like me less?’

Eight years ago I wrote a poem about you and people started to notice.
They told me how it netted in their own hurt and how it held them in a tightness they needed,
and that meant something to me. I never liked reading it-
there are too many flowers. It’s a green and pink feeling,
but now I know that I’m red and you’re blue.
I don’t think you saw it, or knew that it was about you;
I kind of hope not, It was dramatic, but so was I.
So am I.
I am still so soft.

While that poem was brewing, I was reeling,
I was everywhere and I was dripping.
I got a bottle of whiskey and gave it to you in a parking lot.
You didn’t kiss me then, and I let that hurt me for a while,
which wasn’t fair to you; you weren’t even old enough to buy whiskey.
But now you are. And now I’m not everywhere.
I’m only here. I’m still dripping.
What if it's less like leaking and more like watering?
What if it helps us grow?
I want you to be soft with me, I want the flowers
to start to make sense because if we try, maybe we can bloom.

A vile sort of silence drapes my summer
with white-silk cheeks and gauzy sighs,

it's been ages since I've killed my darlings;
drenching them in light, hoping to be surprised.

Each poem is steeped in saline,
each line laced with sparks and sour,

but the syllables still sing, sing, sing
for their own satellite-sake,

the stanzas still dance, dance, dance
like drunken angels in heels and tulle,

the metaphors still spin, spin, spin
with bits of gold through my mind and muck.

Each night I feed myself tales of my own glint,
each morning I warn myself to get a grip.

If you can keep a secret,
you can keep your distance.
If you can keep your word,
you can keep your head down.
If you can keep score,
you can keep your eyes on the road.

Night crawls toward hot-morning on its belly,
dawn breaks like a thousand tightrope hearts,

hot-pink pain seasons the sky with oozing, vivid blush,
blue-blood bats flutter from my hair like disgraced prayer they rushed.

The last larkspur dies,
the first swallow flies,

each hairpin I lose in my mouth is a line,
and each hairpin I find in the field is a sign.

Darlings,
we both know you should be dead by now;
all shiny and benign:

Darlings,
I’m all summer-soft and quiet-taut-
no ****** on my mind.

Let a little lonely thrill
careen from Ikea bolt
to Ikea ***** under the thin,
chipped legs of my folding chair.
Let it bolt across the
tabletop like a daddy long
legs when the kitchen light
flips on and hums into
a deflated, blinding brightness
at 3:26 am on a Wednesday in February.

Let a little lonely thrill
find its way past my loose
muscles and blooming skin-
let it melt down into my dankness
and start to sing so loud
that even my sweat radiates vibrato.

I want it to burrow from
ear canals to pastel brain
and flood my gums
after seeping through cheekbone
pores, hostile and sun-stained.

I need to feel it scream
its loud, grisly engine
to life from the parts of me that
might soon spoil.
I'm not moldy but you're
also not yet desperate. (Your checking
account can handle a few more
diner trips and coffee runs
and it's already Thursday.)
With any luck you can avoid
chewing on me entirely this week.

I am (silently, always silently)
begging
those manic hero spirits
that bounce
and rise across every pothole
of every road that my
tires didn't dodge.
(Whether by lack of skill
or lack of will is up for debate-)
I don't want the trails back.
What's the fun of tracing a failed
treasure hunt backwards?
It hurts more than it heals.
It illuminates exactly where each wrong turn
was made, ignored or aggressively denied.

I'll finish this road trip but
I know this whole playlist by heart.
I'm done with truck stop maps
that I can't fold correctly,
that I can't keep from tearing
along the creases.

I'm done with wine flavored Black
and Milds, wooden tip,
bought in boxes of five
or individually with dimes
and ripped dollar bills
stashed in the glove box,
kept there specifically
for the occasional urge to storm
any aspect of myself with concentrated
poison and my lungs volunteer.

I'm done with getting by on
metallic coffee four Splendas
and my white knuckles,
my raw nerves.

I've made it clear I can maintain this
grit that I've been dragging across
the Tri-State Area since last June,
but I can no longer ignore
the constant windburn
on my shoulders, chest
and forehead.
I need to spend some time with my back
to the express lane on the interstate.

I need a break.
I need to let someone else drive for a while.
I need to sit passenger side with
my hair down, bare feet hanging out
the window and lost in a daydream
that is so very far away.
I need to let the sun pour
wide and easy
into my open mouth,
janky limbs finally loose,
the words at the tip of my tongue
hitchhiking on the caress
of slicing traffic.

I'll keep my sunglasses on deep
into the night-
until each lightning bug has kissed me Hello,
Darling. Good Evening,
and it becomes hard to tell a yellow traffic light
from the moon.

I'll just coast. I'll know the salt in my mouth
is the day's hard work cooing at me;
that the sweat of my neck has been absorbed back
into me; stiffening my clothes and curling my hair,
until I'm back behind the too-tall steering wheel,
avoiding tolls and damp again.

Because lately I've been so tired.
I can't see straight to my neon-exhilarate.
I know a little time with my head lolling
again the seat, the window, you,
and a little sip of the landscape
taken for purely what it is
instead of what it's becoming-
will stretch my gut back where
it belongs instead of double knotted
to the tailpipe, waving along, air-drying.

Give me a few hours and I may
nearly forget the slow
burn of that ever-aching ghost light.
I think I'll close my eyes now-
If I focus  all of my energy toward
a mind and body learning
stillness, I can almost feel
a rhapsody at one thousand sun beams.
It's a new day in America,
it's a new day in my bones.

Cut to me: tempting his anger with my white-knuckled grip and words so honest they could make a saint scream.

Cut to him: choking on his own twisted tongue and front-door fear.

Cut to me: still holding the reins of the wreckage, still not letting go-

Cut to him: saying sort yourself out, saying he’s broken women far stronger, saying anything he can to turn me against him, saying he’d pay for my own heart to be sealed.

Cut to me: a daisy in my mouth, a blackbird in my hand, a shattered window in my chest. I have this feeling that I'm not supposed to be here, I have this feeling that I’m only half-way through this story.

Cut to him: six feet tall, and each one a cellblock of quiet anguish.

Cut to me: cutting my feet on breaking branches, scraping my fingers on the rough bark of a tree. The poems don’t say anything, the tears never come. The rain falls in the wrong places, the daffodils die for the wrong reasons.

Cut to him: new job, new state, new life. Starting from scratch but still scratching at the itch that looks like me, still licking wounds from the daggers aimed at my hope that ricocheted back to his own. What does he do with his hands when he thinks of me? How does he deal with his guilt when it claws up his throat and he’s afraid to spit it out?

Cut to me: dreaming him with long hair. I don’t know where to imagine him when I imagine him; a topographic map of unknowing in my mind- an uncured landscape and rough terrain. I see him as a question mark in the wilderness; forging his own labyrinth of twisted truths and hop-scotching the minefield he planted.

Cut to him: Not really in the wilderness, probably in a condo in a mid-sized city. I think if he meets a nice girl who tags him in her Facebook posts, I’d have to **** myself.

Cut to me: demolishing the both of us, casting his secrets like seeds in the dirt, watching scandal bloom, and his character rot in the high noon sun.

Cut to me: imagining annihilation, holding his hand while leading us to slaughter, destroying us both, and having a marvelous time doing it. I’d make sure they slit my throat first; he’d have to hold me while I bleed out, stroke my face as it loses color, and tell me it’s going to be okay as I fade away.

Cut to me: doing none of these things. I don’t have it in me; when I told him I’d never hate him, I meant it. Wading through summer defanging the snakes in my belly, hoping he’s declawing the tigers in his mind. I won’t admit that I’m waiting, but the story's just half-told. Our plot is paused, and I’m sitting alone, but what if it’s merely intermission, and he’s just at the bar, getting us drinks?

In the jungle,
on the islands.
In my bedroom,
on my dumb ****.

I get a text.
I need a tattoo.

A real tattoo;
a Lola's wrinkled hands slapping my thigh,
laying me over banana leaf,
then hammering long needles in my chest-
maneuvering a horn, a bone, a citrus thorn,
tap, tap, tap, tap,
sketching wounds to fill with soot.

A muted barb,
a slight prickling of skin,
then sinking, stamping, slipping-
through blood,
through muscle,
through bone.
Staining, stripping, splitting-
scraping at my inside-sun.

That’s what my grace has been feeling like.
That’s what my shame has been reeling like.

I deleted the poems.
I deleted the messages,
I tried to delete the flutter.
I want to cry but nothing comes out
my tongue is so big,
I have too many teeth.

My lungs feels the way mercury looks
pouring into a petri-dish.
Kind of trippy. I didn't even trip.
My surface is all salt and peppery,
numb, infinite,
and so, so stringy.

A man told me secrets and I didn’t flinch.
Then he got mad,
Maybe because I didn’t flinch.
Maybe because he can’t not wreck things.
I didn't flinch, so he threw ** at the wall;
a bowl of puttanesca, cute frosted cakes,
oily tabouli, slippery tteokkbokki.

We watch it drip, drip down,
until scraps and broken plates tye-dye the baseboard.
I didn’t move to clean it up,
he didn’t move to explain.
We didn’t groove to call it art.
This is, of course, a metaphor;
we don't share a wall,
I haven’t made tabouli in years.

okay. okay. okay. okay.
It’s almost funny but not there yet.
Should we laugh about this or catalog it in our dark days?
but to catalog, you'd have to stay.

You said you weren’t scared.
I said I was glad.
I said you’re big and I’m small and we might fit perfectly.
You agreed. That was before you got mad.

Something inside you is reigning rabid-
We knew this.
I am rascally and rare.
We knew this too.
My feelings are so, so big.
Can you see them in shop-windows while you walk your city?
Can you hear them while you shower, or
smell them in your coffee grounds?

That feeling again-
That Old-World ink.
That heavy-heart sink.
The static slander of my skin,
the catty condensation of my brain.
Everything inside is lava lamp-holographic,
and everything outside is pin pin pin pin.
Lola, please keep hammering.
I still feel tacky but your needles
gather up the strings.

It's not decorative:
I'm hoping it's erosive.
I'll bow down deep;
elbows up, eyes down;
an apology for not flinching
when you thought I should have.
Eros bowed out, you're not staying.
I'll bow again- it's twice for the dead.

On this island,
it's just me, that Lola,
her long needles, and my big feelings.
She can hammer them back into me
And I won't flinch.

This summer is the apocalypse.
July gnaws on her dress,
the hem a serrated knife,
the shoulders too hot to touch.

July has a way of sifting its scorching
into every kingdom crevice,
of shattering and scattering,
and flogging the fleeting.
July tries to maim memories, choke
daydreams, forget I’m waiting for you.

This summer is the apocalypse.
August twitches like a viper,
scales iridescent,
eyes empty as wind.

August has a way of biting back,
of wringing out bygones,
extracting grit from muscle and gut.
August turns thoughts into sirens,
words into whips, my pride into porcelain,
And I'm still waiting for you.

This is a river that runs uphill.
This is a lake that​​ swells with silence.
This is a field that keeps its secrets.
This is blistered lips and a clenched fist.
This is you howling my name.

This is the thirst I couldn’t drown.
This is the shadow that stretches.
This is the echo of an almost, the heat of a not-yet.
This is the other half of the premonition.
This is me, still waiting for you.

Shut off the sky if I ask you to-
grab my world so brassy boring
between its battles and its courage.
I’ll arrive with cold hands and you
can bring the ghosts.

I smell dirt in the day and undo
things as I roam.
I don’t listen when logic roars,
but let it loosen in the sun
and sing my prayers through its marrow
like I’m blowing glass,
like I’m hatching galaxies.
June can wait a bit,
verses still spin sad
where you used
your knees on the good nights.

I tried the dancing.
I tried bleaching the blackened veins
and rusting ribs that held me together
with a smile brighter and stiffer than ever before.
It took a mirror and a shiner to remind me that was pointless.

Before was fumes.
Before was whiplash.
Before was my chattering teeth learning to limber over the back fence then dive into the novels
of your hands.

Before knew my night skin was something to flee and
that all betrayal
starts with moonlight,
isn’t that right?
Before knew that travelers
and wanderers
were taught to survey treetops and look to their shins,
but now I just jump.

You said you’d return with a body that wasn’t mine.
It’s okay if you lied.
I’ve tried to swallow the world between sheets
with a thawing mouth and sinking hips.
I’ve tried to whittle the scenery down to bad habits
and foxes tucked into the hills,
Illuminated just when you thought they were gone.
I’ve found a geography where our jokes are meaningless,
where our hearts are no longer the same,
and it is too gorgeous for words.
Thank you for allowing it.
Thank you for avoiding it.

The first few lines of a poem always sound like they should be the last,
the last few sound unnecessary,
I'm not sure if the next line is a metaphor or just
a way to keep my hand in the fire;
I think it might be both.
I think this might be it.
We’re all just a few lines away from being forgotten,
but we have to keep writing like we’re not.
We have to be careful not to die before we die.
We have to say goodbye before we say hello.

You know what I mean, don't you?
Like the poem should be written in ashes, but
the lines are too long to fit in the hearth.
You try to keep a notebook and end up writing on the wall,
you try to fit the words into your mouth before they're swallowed,
you try to taste them before you choke.

Brevity’s a virtue, I’m a vice.
I have yet to see a chasm that I couldn't swan-dive into-
I have yet to wreck a heart that wasn’t mine.
I still can’t describe what I really mean.
I take up lines like a layer of locusts, like I’ve got a plague in my pen.
I’ve never finished a poem in my life, but I’m still careful not to die.

I know what I mean, but I don't mean it.
My sentences sometimes look like the death
of a small animal, blood and fur, feathers and bone,
twisted muscles all tangled together,
rotting in the sun with no one to bury it.

Decay in blunt, angular letters and a mottled pink sky,
a rusted machine, the worst of me.
The pulpy feeling of sentences clawing their way through my skin
just to get out and get away, to gnash their teeth,
chase a phrase, or find new mouths to fit into.

It’s the last line again, the one that belongs five stanzas up,
the one that wants to kiss your cheek and leave a stain,
that stokes the flame and knows what you mean.
A last line that clings to your skin,
drips into the next poem, because it wasn’t quite right,
but will be remembered. It will be buried.