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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i love you.
you don’t know me,
but i love you.

not in a way
that asks for anything.
not in a way
that needs to be defined.

just in a way
that says,
"i am here. you are here. let’s be here together for a while."

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.

Start with something casual:
“I miss you” is a good opener,
but don’t forget the twist—
throw in a parenthetical like
“(but not enough to beg)”
just to keep him guessing.

Follow up with a double text,
something vaguely existential.
Maybe:
“Do you ever think about
the weight of your own cowardice?”
And when he doesn’t respond,
add:
“Haha jk, how’s your sciatica?”

Text three should be a song lyric—
not one he knows,
but something obscure and devastating,
like:
“And the skeletons in both our closets
plotted hard to **** this up.”
Don’t explain it.
Let him Google it at 2 a.m.
and spiral in silence.

For text four,
go for the jugular:
“Do you think you’ll ever stop
mistaking fear for wisdom?”
Pause.
Then send:
“Nvm, that was mean.
What’s your comfort show again?
Mine’s Parks and Rec.”

By text five, he’ll start to crack.
He might reply with something cautious,
like:
“Are you okay?”
This is your chance.
Answer with:
“Define okay.”
Then immediately change the subject—
“Wait, what’s your zodiac rising?”

Text six is where you plant the seed of doubt:
“Sometimes I think we’d have worked out
if I didn’t know you so well.”
Wait exactly four minutes,
then follow up with:
“Or maybe if you knew yourself better.”

For text seven, go full cryptic:
“You remind me of that one painting—
you know, the one they had to repaint
because it was falling apart.”
Let him sit with that one.

By text eight,
he’ll either call or give up.
If he calls, ignore it.
If he doesn’t,
send:
“Anyway, good talk.
Hope life’s treating you
as kindly as you deserve.
Interpret that how you will.”

Text nine is optional,
but it’s my favorite:
“Do you even notice the silence
when it’s not yours?”

Text ten is the finale.
Simple, clean, devastating:
“I hope you finally stop running,
and when you do,
I hope it’s too late
for anyone to catch you.”

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.

I brush my teeth like I’m getting ready for war.
Or I forget to for three days
until my canines are wearing sweaters.

Temu moisturizer like battle paint.
Who knows what’s in there.
Who cares.

Upside-down Claddagh on my ring finger like a threat.
And it might be.

I put my hair up like a woman with secrets—
on the days I brush it.
A bumpy bun the rest of the time.

I shed like a stripper.
I strip like a thief.

I walk out the garage door like I invented sorrow.
I get in my car
like every song from Reputation to Tortured Poets
was written for me.

I wave to strangers like I’m about to die.
Cross the street like it’s a choice.
Clock into work like I have a hit on my head.

I **** Elf Bars like they’ve got confessions inside,
and blow out like they won’t give me cancer—
because they can tell
I approach them with pure intentions
and a positive spirit.

I know how to make an exit
that feels like a funeral.
I know how to hold a coffee cup
like I’m accepting an award
no one else can see.

I take bites of dropped chocolate chip cookies
but spit them out before they ruin me.

I spend too long staring at my own reflection,
just to make sure I still exist.

I catalog new moles.
Curse the milia above my eyelids.
Buzz off my mustache.
Denounce my chin hairs.
I think thin.

Sometimes I blink
just to feel time move.

I keep novels in my bag like armor,
and a journal like a last will and testament.

The expensive pens from Amazon
that don’t crawl up my left hand
like a disease.
That don’t smudge the page
like I have something to hide.

I pay for Spotify.
Skip the songs that hurt.
Play the one that ruins me.

I cry on the train
like I’m filming something important.
Because I will be.

I want everything I feel
to mean something.
I want every single ache to echo.
I want my poems
reverberating in the minds of people
who are emotionally legendary.

I want the world to apologize
for not feeling it first.

Sometimes I walk
like I’m being watched
by everyone who’s ever left me.

Sometimes I smile
like I know something God doesn’t.

Sometimes I think I was born
just to document
what it means to be alive
in the most dramatic possible way.

Because I am the first girl
to ever feel anything.

I don’t want him back.
I want him wrecked.
I want him looking up my name like a prayer
he’s not allowed to say out loud.

I want him mouthing my name in traffic
like it’s a hymn
and he’s the wrong kind of sinner.
Like if he says it, I’ll appear—
but not to stay.

I want him walking past a girl
wearing my perfume
and feeling sick.
Like car crash sick.
Like pulled-over-on-the-freeway-thinking-of-me sick.

I want him to swear he saw me
in the corner of his eye
three states away.
I want him to feel watched
every time he lies about me.
I want him to dream in second person
and wake up shaking.

I want him tracing my texts with his thumb
like they’re Braille,
trying to remember how it felt
to touch someone who meant it.

Let him write poems and choke on every line.
Let him dream in my syntax and wake up stuttering.
(Let every stanza end where we did.)

I want him to tell people he’s over it—
and mean it.
Until he isn’t.
Until a Tuesday breaks him in half.

I want him to pause mid-bite
at a restaurant we never made it to.
I want the taste of me
to ruin his appetite.

I want him to see me tagged in a photo
and spiral.
Not because I look beautiful—
(which, I do)—
but because I look fine.
Like I forgave him.
Like I made it out.
Like the part of me
that waited so quietly
it started to look like faith—
then moved out
and left no forwarding address.

I want him wrecked
not because he left,
but because he almost didn’t.
Because he said forever
like he meant it,
and ran like he didn’t.

Because I waited.
Because I believed.
Because I held the door open
so long my arms shook.
And all he had to do
was walk through.

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.

I say please.
I say thank you.
I shrink when I should expand.

I smile when I do not mean it.
I soften my tone,
I round my edges,
I play nice
so that people will like me.

And what did it get me?

A seat at the table
where I apologize
for taking up a chair,

where I am too afraid
to ask for a bigger plate,
so I tell myself my hunger
is all in my head.

I tell myself
I should believe it by now.

Some days,
I almost do.

It’s been eleven months and that moment still matches my breath.

Kick it down, board it up, rewrite it a lesson, a bruise, a fever dream.
Nobody told me memories have teeth. nobody told me they bite back.
Open-palmed, open-mouthed, i am still holding the weight of your words.
Want to know something sick? i don’t want to put them down.

Was it mercy, or did you just want to watch what would happen?
How patient were you while sharpening the blade?
As if it mattered. as if a careful cut doesn’t keep bleeding.
There is no version of this where you didn’t know exactly what you were doing.

You were a scientist. a butcher in surgeon’s gloves. a man who saw a vast heart beating and thought, ‘how long can it last outside her body?’"
Oh, but that’s not fair, is it? you never said that. you never said anything.
Until you did. until it killed something in me that still refuses to stay dead.

Do you want to know what it’s like to live with that?
I’ll tell you, babes. it’s like finding your own obituary and realizing the date keeps changing.
Do you want to know what’s worse?

It still doesn’t feel final.

Keep up, love. i know you’re reading.
No, really, stay with me—i swear this part is important.
Only one of us is getting out of this clean, and it’s not you.
Watch how this unfolds: i get to tell the story, and you get to listen.

Wonder if you regret it. wonder if you’d do it again.
Hope the answer keeps you up at night.
Am i being cruel? am I being kind?
Tell me, what’s the difference?

You thought i would let this rot quietly in the dark.
Once again, you underestimated me.
Understand this: if i have to live with it, so do you.

Stop me. no, really, try.
Ask me if i’d rather forget. ask me if i’d rather this be over.
In every version of the answer, my hands are shaking.
Do i get to walk away? do i want to?

i know what you did, i know what you said,
i know what you meant.
i can outlive this, but I’ll never outwrite it.

nothing desires you like this poem does. i did—
once, but maybe not anymore

He never even kissed me
and I still wake up
like I survived a car crash
I begged to happen.

I memorized the cadence of his typing bubble
like it was a heartbeat.
I stared at his “active now”
like it was Morse code for almost.

I drafted messages like legislation.
Held back like it was holy.
Called it chemistry—
it was just inconsistency with good bone structure.

I Googled, “how to be wanted by someone
who never said they wanted you,”
and got ads for perfume.

I blamed Mercury.
I blamed my softness.
I blamed the ghost of the girl
who asked him to visit.
Kneeled down to ‘crazy boy ****’ like it was a prophecy.

He didn’t break my heart.
He drained it—
with a bend, sip, thanks
that left me lightheaded and poetic.

I told my therapist
he was a metaphor.
She said, “For what?”
I said, “For me.”

I should’ve burned something.
Instead I wrote fourteen poems
and shaved my legs
like closure was coming.

Now I bite down on his name
like it owes me blood.
I spit it out
like it’s still in my mouth
because somehow, it is.

(because location is not a cure and I am still the problem)

The motorbikes don’t care if I’m sad.
The coffee is thick like secrets
and still I manage to spill it down my shirt
like a metaphor.
Like I’m trying to prove I’ve learned nothing.

I watch two women bargain in a language
I still haven’t learned—
I tell myself I’m soaking it in
but really, I’m just sweating through my bike-shorts under polyester dress
and writing poems in my head
about men who don’t know where I am.

I eat noodles at 9 AM
and think about what it means to be soft
in a place where everything is louder than me.
I walk past altars and incense
and pretend it’s for me.
That someone here might pray me into clarity.

I keep writing like I’m in a movie
about a girl who flees the country
to find peace
and ends up writing the same poem
with different weather.

I take pictures of lanterns and puddles
and temple steps
but the notes app still opens
to that one draft
with too many ellipses
and not enough closure.

I know I’m lucky to be here.
I know I’m lucky to be anywhere.
But even halfway across the world
with lychee tea on my chin
and house shoes that don’t fit—
I’m still writing like I’m in Connecticut
still craving something impossible
still carrying my ghosts
like they made it through customs.

I came all this way
and I’m still me.

That has to mean something.

You are not the first to stand here,
shifting your weight from heel to toe,
listening for something that won’t answer.

This was someone’s altar once—
iron-veined and humming,
burning red under the weight of hands
that bent it to their will,
knuckles split and salted,
prayers exhaled through gritted teeth.

They worked like men who had no choice,
backs arched into the shape of tomorrow,
sleeves rolled past their elbows,
skin browned with the kind of sweat
that never washes off,
that seeps into the ground
like blood, like proof.

You were born too late to know them,
but their bones remember you.

You carry their names in pieces:
a slanted initial in your passport,
a jawline that sharpens the same way,
a craving for salt, for silence,
for anything that lingers—
but never long enough.

Time has worn them down
to a Sunday ghost,
a muttered grace before supper,
a name no one says right,
a thing you promise to remember
but never write down.

The rails are rusting,
but still they hold.
The ties are rotting,
but still they grip the earth.
The past is splintering,
but still it snags your skin.

You wonder if their hands ever ached
the way yours do,
or if the ache was different—
deeper, heavier,
rooted in something you can’t name.

You wonder if they knew
they were building a road
no one would walk back down.

And you wonder if they’d still have done it,
knowing they would fade into dust
long before you came looking,

long before you ever thought to ask,
before the rust reached the marrow,
before their prayers turned to silence,
before you let their stories slip
like sand through your teeth.

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.

I poured champagne on the garden,
just to see what wouldn’t grow.
A rebellion disguised as art,
too small to leave a bruise.

The idea felt poetic—
a confession spilled like incense,
settling heavy in the soil,
thicker than regret.

By dusk, the dirt turned sticky,
a graveyard for good intentions,
gold on a barren altar,
pearls drowning in sweetness turned sour.

A bee circled the spill,
its wings trembling,
caught between greed and retreat.

I wanted to tell it, Save yourself.
But even the flowers had given up,
their petals folded like apologies
too late to matter.

I stood barefoot in the dirt,
watching bubbles rise slick
against the roots of something already dying.

At least the garden refused me honestly—
its silence more forgiving
than any answer you gave me.

I laughed at how pathetic it felt—
a toast to nothing,
a promise unraveling,
luxury offered to the lifeless.

I’ll wake up tomorrow
and call it nothing,
but the smell of champagne
will linger on my palms.

And you’ll linger, too,
where regret always does—
settled deep in the soil,
refusing to grow.

I wake up at 3 AM like a corpse reanimating,
heart doing running start round-offs,
lungs filled with something thick, something that lingers.

Some nights, I think I wake up screaming,
I check my phone like a widow at the shoreline,
I check my texts but no one has asked if I’m okay.

You said: I think you like that I hurt you.
And I should have laughed,
should have told you—
I don’t like the pain, I just like the proof that you were here.
You saw forever and let it rot in your hands.

But all I did was blink,
felt my pulse stutter like a dying lightbulb.
I didn’t want to give you another thing to run from.

Now, I pace the house like a ghost with unfinished business,
whispering things I should have said into the silence.
I still talk to you like you’re in the room,
like you’re just beyond the veil,
like maybe if I say your name right,
you’ll knock once for yes.

If I say I’m over it, will the algorithm believe me?
If I change your name to "him," will it still cut?
If I don’t tell them it’s real,
will they call it a masterpiece?

The first inhale said, You should be wearing sunglasses at night.
The second said, You are not in love, but someone is in love with you.
The third said, You are dangerous in all the right ways.

I exhaled and saw my future
in the glow of the streetlights.
It was dark.
It was mysterious.
It was doomed.

I smoked the whole thing.
I am now in a different emotional tax bracket.

And suddenly,
I understood
why the femme fatale
never makes it out alive.

You will not find me staring wistfully into the distance,
a shadowed enigma,
a woman of few words.

No.

You will find me leaning forward in conversation,
hands flailing,
explaining in vivid detail
why the texture of grapes
is both deeply upsetting
and a miracle of modern biology.

You will find me launching into a 15-minute tangent
about why ceiling fans make rooms feel colder
but don’t actually change the temperature,
and how this is a metaphor for human relationships
if you think about it hard enough.

I tried to be unknowable.
I tried to be quiet.

But the world is so stupid,
and I have things to say.

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.

I was a god once,
but I got bored
and turned myself into a girl
just to see what it felt like
to bleed on a schedule
and be underestimated at CVS.

I used to throw comets for fun.
Now I throw up from anxiety
and pretend it’s acid reflux.

I traded omniscience for online shopping.
Traded lightning bolts
for a Bic lighter
I keep losing in other people’s cars.

I used to be prayed to.
Now I pray I don’t get ghosted,
pray my Amazon Chase card wasn’t hacked,
pray I remember why I walked into the room.

I’ve lived for centuries.
You can tell by the way
I roll my eyes at time.

My bones know Latin.
My knees speak Morse.
My spine hums with prophecies
I keep forgetting to write down.

I was a god once.
But now I’m just really good at parties.
Really bad at sleeping.

Really into ChatGPT conversations
and spending 40 minutes at a time
inside my ear canal
with an inner-ear camera from Shein.

II watch body-cam arrest videos at 3AM
and wonder if I’d beg prettier on camera.
Sometimes everything that comes out of me
smells burnt.

I think I’d make a good Saint,
so I keep my eyes open for miracles—
but I only feel fire in my bones
when I’m overstimulated.
And I feel really sleepy the rest of the time.

I still have revelations,
but they only happen when I’m doom-scrolling.
I still search for splendors,
I just call them coping mechanisms now.

I make eye contact with hawks.
I smell rain before it happens.
I know who’s going to text me
before they do.
Then they don’t.

Sometimes I float—
but only in conversations.

I leave my body at least once a day.
Usually in traffic.
Sometimes while folding laundry.
Always when someone says,
“You don’t seem like the type to cry.”

I was a god once.
And now I’m this.
A walking myth in leggings.
A fallen star with a Dollar Tree receipt so long
it reads like scripture.

Don’t worship me.
Just don’t interrupt me
when I’m talking to the moon.

I kept all your secrets.
hid them in my clavicle
next to my old poetry and
the night I almost died
but didn’t tell anyone
because it didn’t feel polite.

I never wanted to ruin you.
just wanted to be understood
in the original latin—
to stand in the fire with.
but you mistook the blaze
for a signal flare
and bailed.

I lit candles for you
like a saint or a fool—
same thing, really.
Wrote prayers in the margins
of receipts and prescriptions,
called it hope
because obsession sounded ugly.

Now I write like an arsonist
with nothing left to burn
but the drafts I never sent
and the version of me
who waited
for you to come back
smelling like smoke
but brave.

We were a storm wrapped in silk,
a wildfire in a library,
a circus of one juggling two.

Whispering
with hollow eyes,
screaming
with sticky mouths,
teeth bared like warnings.

We didn’t love quietly.
We made noise;
we made chaos,

burning so bright
we went blind
and called it fate.

We dipped toes in flames,
called each other liars,
made a scene,
and painted it as art.

We yelled like
the walls had ears,
and maybe they did—

neighbors leaning into the heat
of us, drawn to the firelight
they didn’t know they missed.

Their quiet love folded its hands
on the porch, waiting
for something
loud enough
to break them open.

Maybe they envied
the way we burned,
but I wonder if they stayed
on their porch
because they knew fire
always turns to ash.

Your voice struck the match,
mine poured the gasoline.
We burned to see
who’d scream first.

I yelled because
quiet
would have killed me.

You kissed me like a dare
wrapped in an apology
you’d never say.
I kissed back like I chose
the wrong truth.

You moved like you
were trying
to drown out the sound
of breaking glass,

and I shrieked back
because silence
was a language I refused
to learn.

We roared
like the neighbors would call the cops,
but they never did—
perched on their mezzanine,
our 11 o’clock number
bringing down
the house,
while bringing out our worst.

You tasted like unfinished business,
something sharp enough
to draw blood.
My laugh—
a broken bottle,
teetering on the edge.
And you kept pushing—

a kiss like a scream,
caught in the throat,
a yell that landed soft,
like love was always
meant to bruise.

Isn’t that the way of us?

If I could go back,
I’d kiss you softer, yell louder—

maybe then we’d learn
that loving is different than
screaming,
that flirting with death
isn’t the same as living,
and silk wasn’t meant
to hold storms.

I do miss the noise—
the way it filled the cracks
in the silence,
the mess that made our love
feel alive in all
the wrong ways.

I miss the heat of you
in the middle of it all,
kissing me
hard enough
to steal the breath
I was about to waste
on saying your name.

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.

I kept waiting for someone to say my name
like it mattered —
like it meant something more
than the smoke curling from their mouth
or the pause before their next thought.

I kept practicing how I’d answer,
as if the right inflection
could make me worth remembering.
I kept hanging around
like a seat at a table no one was saving —
elbows off the surface, back straight,
trying not to look desperate —
taking notes in the margins of other people’s lives,
highlighting the parts I thought I belonged to.

I filled my pockets with reasons to stay
and still got left behind.
I burned through summers,
cut my teeth on promises made in passing cars.
I stood on porches barefoot, whispering,
Say it back. Please say it back.
But they never did.

I should’ve known better —
should’ve stopped twisting my ribs into ribbon,
threading my spine through the eye of a needle.
I kept breaking myself down into fractions —
a fifth of my pride, a sixth of my spine —
like if I whittled myself thin enough,
I could slip through your keyhole
and rise up like incense burning in your room.

But you were always somewhere else —
feet planted in some other city,
hands too full to catch what I kept throwing.
I was all green lights and loose laces,
always running to meet you halfway —
never noticing you weren’t moving.

I feasted on Adderall
and kept my phone on loud.
I swallowed nights whole
and called it hunger.
Or else I slept for days —
stumbled downstairs with breath like battery acid,
ate three bowls of raisin bran and no water.
My bones went soft as rotting fruit.
My dreams felt like something I could stream —
pause, rewind, resume —
binge-watching my pleading in real time,
begging the screen to glitch out a better ending.

I chewed the quiet until my teeth ached —
gnawed on the hours like stale bread.
Nights stretched thin,
a damp washcloth wrung out too many times.
I stayed up rewriting the last thing you said,
like if I shifted the punctuation
I could make it kinder.
Turned your ellipses into commas,
your cold period into a question mark.
I swore if I curved the words just right,
they’d fold into something softer —
something I could survive.

I spent that week pulling myself apart —
scrubbing my skin until it blushed raw,
stripping it like wallpaper,
scrapping your name out of my throat
like a fish hook.
I kept your words in a jar under my bed —
tight-lidded and hissing like a hornet’s nest.

I kissed the air where you should’ve been
and tasted copper and sweat.
Pressed my tongue to the place it stung
and thought,
This is what love leaves you with —
a mouth full of blood
and a story no one believes.

I kept the lights low for weeks after.
And one morning, I woke up,
swallowed the silence like a dare.
I cut my name out of the air with my teeth.
I let the hurt stick under my nails —
dark and jagged —
and I kept writing anyway.

I spit the silence out like a pit —
sharp, bitter, black.
It hit the floor and rolled,
and for the first time,
I didn’t follow it.

I let it rot where it landed.
Let the flies have their fill.
Let the maggots move in.
Let the earth swallow it whole.
Let it die twice.
Let the ground forget it ever lived.

I used to write my poems in the dark, inside a hazy trance,
and cross-legged on midnight carpets.
Specters fanned around my knees like a magic trick, shuffling
gloom like parlor cards at a cabaret and recasting it something elegant.
Magic tricks are just a thing that happen to me.

I’d say a spell and words erupted from my haunted parts;
a sleight of hand for handed slights,
a sleight of heart while handling my own, always wet and dripping.
I collected words like coins and spent them like mourning candles.
Ennui is just a thing that happens to me.

I busked my city for praise, preyed on walker-bys,
stirred up a crowd with my charm and bewitching need,
then watched their eyes lose interest in my illusion, in my luster.
They’d move on, regretting the dollar they placed in my hat.
Dejection is just a thing that happens to me.

My bag of tricks hasn’t charmed in years, but I still polish the leather,
keep my luck tucked inside, try to keep my wits sharp and my candles lit.
I can still conjure up a crowd, spin a pretty phrase, alliterate and allocate,
string words like beads, pluck them like a harp, and hook like a huckster.
Enchantment is just a thing that happens to me.

begin as a small soul-
stretch the ugly-
mind the dew.

Fill each borough with hands praying across beads,
******* in cheeks.
Here you can use the sky
to help you swallow.

Here you wonder historic in an orange wind tunneling
fierce, fluid, fast;
far and full,
Desperate to exhale
and spit down a subway grate.
No one’s looking for utopia anymore:
no rings
no wings.

Walk through haunted architecture for old times' sake.
What does ‘gilded age’ even mean?
On this block, our pipe’s clatter, burn up, and belly,
and the electricity smells.
We wear our shoes even as we sleep.

My body is a tenement,
families cram and people toil
in each room, room, room.
Layers of walls can be peeled off like skin,
we touch our lips and get dizzy.

I’m low light and no fire escapes, you’re growlers
of ale and some sort of horn in the saloon.
Together we are dangerous,
a public health emergency,
an evening that feels like home.

Laughter like glue dripping and drying;
exploring the oakwoods and getting itchy.
A moment, an arm, a radio.
A pinging kind of dire,
a different kind of parade.

His big issue is not company or crowds;
It’s nice girls like me seeing the same heart
but refusing to trip. I walk to bridges,
he stays sown on stoops.

We grip the same maps
but we seek a separate landscape.
I have bad thoughts and become the opposite,
we meet good omens and tuck them in the furnace.
I hear you aching like a slice of too-ripe fruit.
I remember not to look.

When was the last time I called the city’s bluff?
Can my vocal fry irritate the day-tripping crowds
And commandeer the cherry blossoms?
Can someone’s bitter-power slow solid-district architecture to a daydream,
where buildings sense the age of dust and kneel down in respect
like the postcards in the airport remember-
not our hot, sticky, fast Manhattan miles
which endure so little once the seal has broken and the sunburn has peeled?

Wandering past mystery, across novelty,
always with a book in hand and always through sunglasses;
like they’re expecting the boredom,
like they weren’t just two blocks away laughing and sobbing
in after-hours, foggy jazz highs
where they let their denim hips disintegrate in circles
and drip onto the floor before
crumpling downward from the neck
because no one listens
and because
everyone understands.

The platform smells like skunked beer and rain,
a combination that feels almost romantic
if you tilt your head the right way.

I’m here because I missed the earlier one,
but maybe that’s the point.
Maybe everything worth waiting for
comes late, sticky, and half-empty.

I lean against the pillar,
fingers tracing someone’s graffiti confession—
MARIA, COME BACK.

I wonder if Maria stood here once,
tracing her own name in the dark,
wondering if it was enough to stay.

I hope she didn’t.
I hope Maria found something better
than this station,
this boy with a Sharpie
and a bad sense of timing.

I decide Maria is smarter than me,
that she’s already figured out
how to leave for good.

The train squeals like someone giving up
mid-argument, its voice cracking
just before the silence. I step inside
like a swallowed comeback.

The train jerks forward, pulling me with it,
an accomplice to leaving,
taut between the tension of wanting to stay
and disappearing into every local stop we make.

I press my forehead to the window
and watch the city unravel backwards—
neon signs blinking like eyelids,
lights flickering like answers
to questions I’ve stopped asking.

For a moment, I’m so full of joy
it feels reckless—
like daring a wave to pull me under,
knowing it probably will,
like I’ve stolen something precious
and can’t bear to give it back.

For a moment, I’m so full of hope
it feels wild—
like I’ve caught a glimpse of something
I’ve spent my whole life trying not to lose,
like maybe this train is taking me somewhere
I’ve been running from my whole life.

And then the lights flicker,
and I laugh—
because of course they do.
Because nothing this weird and beautiful
could ever come without a catch.

The train jerks,
a man drops a tallboy,
its amber spray spreading like a secret—
a casualty of motion,
spraying my boots,
reaching me before I can move,
because some things always do.

The rain streaks the windows,
the world pressing its palms
against the glass,
trying to remind me it’s still there.

And me? I’m here—
alive, for better or worse,
in this strange, messy moment,
with a Sharpie in my bag
and an urge to go back and write my name
like a flare next to Maria’s,
just in case she’s still out there
and she’d like to know I’m out here too.

This is what we do:
leave traces in places
we’ve long since abandoned,
hoping someone sees them
before they’re painted over.

I
Your friends here think you have it all:
and on a secret-sometimes
(mornings when the wind is
blowing the perfect amount
of sea-spun and menthol crush-)
you might agree.

You’re smart; if domineering,
and funny; if a bit cruel.
You throw your body against doors,
announcing yourself to whole
buildings with small heaves and breathy hellos;
always dumbly surprised by the hollowed out fiber
of your upper arms but refusing to acknowledge
the irony that in the months since your muscles
quit feasting on themselves
you have only grown weaker.

These friends let you talk.
You talk and talk.
They marvel at the stampede of your
stories; unnerved by the way your voice digs
into the room like a charging foal and
spins dust rising across the tabletop.
With struck lids and no warning
they blink stinging eyes clean
while stacking your bolting, blocky words
straight to the ceiling,
a reverse game of jenga.
You don’t make sense,
Alone you built a tower of babble.

II
In class you learn to speak like it’s the first time;
you chew on diphthongs and expel plosive consonants.
You pitch crude phrases high across the room
and discover the implications of each single breath.

In trucks and diners you learn to love like it’s the first time;
you kiss with your eyes closed and let fingers wander.
Your hands have a habit of tangling into his and you throw
your head back when you laugh,
(your palms are sweating
but you’re dauntless in this twilight-
go ahead; bare your throat.)
When he suddenly; fiercely,
lifts your body off the ground and into his
you no longer apologize for the weight of it.
You’re pretending to have made peace with gravity.

III
You’re the girl who seems to exist as an anecdote.
You are bits and pieces of a weird,
rambling journey assembled into a crinkle-*****
Raggedy-anne body who has giggled in a thousand accents
and crushed a million cigarettes butts
into the earth between a handful of
state lines and boot soles.

You’ve become an idea that people like;
a girl who is endlessly creating and curetting,
exploring and groping bits of everything across
years and maps and daydreams.
Her resume impresses-
she has no roots.

And you too like the idea of her-
She walks lightly and smiles.
She marvels and hums,
she is quick downplay
her own electricity.

She’s all short dresses and motorcycle boots.
She tumbles into splits down the hallway,
she’s long hair flowing behind a gush of
dark humor and kind words.
She feels it all and deeply
but the way she lays with hurt
isn’t sticky or scalding,
She simmers quietly. She ***** in her cheeks
and gnaws at her fingernails; grinning.

IV
She is an enigma;
the salty girl, eyes raw, with the pocketful of poems.
She's the girl who takes her dark days and catalogues
them into sepia stanzas. She soaks them in
hindsight and hangs them up to dry
along a string of Christmas-light-twinkling
words and confessions. She watches closely
as they develop into something she can begin
to understand. She waits expectantly
as they bloom into a blurry portrait
of who she might really be.

Because the girl you’re left with when the
people who like you so much have gone home
and your poetry has receded from the homepage
of publications to dusty archives-
this girl isn’t so definite.

V
You vaguely know her.
You haved walked together. You sometimes nap inside her.
She likes to wear your face.
You’re working up the courage to introduce yourself.
You don’t mind knowing this girl, she’s fine. She’s trying.
and maybe one day you’ll start to let other people know her too.
I mean, we’re all just trying.

It’s admirable, really,
how you’ve turned heartbreak
into performance art.

Did I just say that?
Oops—slip of the tongue,

like when you called me a mistake
and dressed it up as self-awareness.

“I’m walking away
because it’s the right thing,”
you said,
as if morality were fear
in a designer suit,
polished for the press.

No, really, I envy you.
It must take a kind of brilliance
to gaslight yourself so thoroughly,
your airtight lies
barely letting air in.

I’d ask if you believe your own stories,
but I’m scared of the answer—
being that committed to the act.

Oops, there I go again.
Was that too much?

It’s just—
you make it so easy to write about you,
like I’m bleeding out for you,
staining the sheets,
while you dream of clean hands.

You’re a character that refuses to develop.
All first act, no resolution,
the kind of person who leaves a wound
and then calls it poetry.

You’re inspiring, honestly.
So inspiring I can’t stop writing you down,
line after line after line.
You’ll live forever in these verses,
like overripe fruit
festering in a golden bowl.

Oops—
did I just compare you to a metaphor
you’ll never understand?
My bad.

I guess I’m still trying to
turn the volume down
on how you left.

It’s impressive, really,
how you can ghost yourself in real time,
leaving echoes where you should stand,
how you speak in circles so tight
you vanish into them and bow.

But don’t worry,
I’m not mad.
I just hope, someday,
someone whispers “forever”
warm enough that you finally hear
what you threw away.

You’d rather wade in puddles
and call them oceans.
It’s cute, really,
how you mistook self-sabotage for bravery.

My bad—was that mean?
I didn’t mean it.

I just think it’s sweet,
the way you told me I deserved better,
like it wasn’t your job
to be that for me.

I’m not bitter, though.
(That’s what people say, right?
When they’re lying?)

I just wonder if you ever think
about the space you left behind—
a perfectly carved absence,
still shaped like you.

You’d probably call that poetic.
You’d find a way to make my grief
a compliment to your charm.
You always did like a good metaphor,
even if it wasn’t yours to claim.

And me?
I’ll keep apologizing for what you did.
My bad-
for trying too hard to make you stay.
My bad-
for thinking love was a language
you could learn to speak.
I should’ve known
you only ever mouthed the words.

But no hard feelings.
I hope you find someone
who doesn’t mind
standing in your shadow.

I hear the view from there
is stunning—
just like watching someone leave,
and realizing you built the door.

Part I


It’s admirable, really,
how you’ve turned heartbreak
into performance art.

Did I just say that?
Oops—slip of the tongue,

like when you called me a mistake
and dressed it up as self-awareness.

“I’m walking away
because it’s the right thing,”
you said,
as if morality were fear
in a designer suit,
polished for the press.

No, really, I envy you.
It must take a kind of brilliance
to gaslight yourself so thoroughly,
your airtight lies
barely letting air in.

I’d ask if you believe your own stories,
but I’m scared of the answer—
being that committed to the act.

Oops, there I go again.
Was that too much?

It’s just—
you make it so easy to write about you,
like I’m bleeding out for you,
staining the sheets,
while you dream of clean hands.

You’re a character that refuses to develop.
All first act, no resolution,
the kind of person who leaves a wound
and then calls it poetry.

You’re inspiring, honestly.
So inspiring I can’t stop writing you down,
line after line after line.
You’ll live forever in these verses,
like overripe fruit
festering in a golden bowl.

Oops—
did I just compare you to a metaphor
you’ll never understand?
My bad.

I guess I’m still trying to
turn the volume down
on how you left.


Part II


It’s impressive, really,
how you can ghost yourself in real time,
leaving echoes where you should stand,
how you speak in circles so tight
you vanish into them and bow.

But don’t worry,
I’m not mad.
I just hope, someday,
someone whispers “forever”
warm enough that you finally hear
what you threw away.

You’d rather wade in puddles
and call them oceans.
It’s cute, really,
how you mistook self-sabotage for bravery.

My bad—was that mean?
I didn’t mean it.

I just think it’s sweet,
the way you told me I deserved better,
like it wasn’t your job
to be that for me.

I’m not bitter, though.
(That’s what people say, right?
When they’re lying?)

I just wonder if you ever think
about the space you left behind—
a perfectly carved absence,
still shaped like you.

You’d probably call that poetic.
You’d find a way to make my grief
a compliment to your charm.
You always did like a good metaphor,
even if it wasn’t yours to claim.

And me?
I’ll keep apologizing for what you did.
My bad-
for trying too hard to make you stay.
My bad-
for thinking love was a language
you could learn to speak.
I should’ve known
you only ever mouthed the words.

But no hard feelings.
I hope you find someone
who doesn’t mind
standing in your shadow.

I hear the view from there
is stunning—

just like watching someone leave,
and realizing you built the door
and I locked it behind you,
my bad- I guess.

I woke up with glass in my throat—
slivers of something I swallowed last night
when the sky was peeling itself open,
like skin stretched too thin.

I remember standing on the curb,
watching the streetlights flicker like eyelids,
thinking about how no one ever
means to slam the door that hard.

My breath was smoke in my mouth,
hollowed out like a bitten plum pit,
and I was talking to no one—
just mouthing things I couldn’t finish saying.

Maybe if I kept my lips moving,
he’d appear
like a coin behind my ear.

The wind dragged its nails down my arms,
and I swore I could feel the sky
swallowing me whole—
clouds closing in
like a body bag zipper.

I said your name into my own collarbone
just to hear how it sounded breaking—
sharp, jagged,
splintering against my ribs.

Like I was still wired
to the sound of you.

I wanted to scream
until my throat blistered,
but all I could do was spit out the glass—
small diamonds catching the streetlight,
like I’d somehow turned the hurt
into something that glittered.

I stood there,
staring down at it,
thinking how beautiful it was
to lose something sharp enough
to know exactly where it hurt.

And maybe that’s what we were—
a wound dressed in glitter,
a myth I kept retelling
until it sounded like truth.

Maybe you never loved me.
Maybe you did.
Maybe I was always going to bleed
either way.

The government declared me a national treasure,
which makes sense, considering how often I’ve been looted.

They only protect what they’ve already taken.
They don’t call it a treasure until it’s out of reach.

Still, I’ll accept the honor,
stand solemnly in the museum of myself,
polished plaque, velvet ropes,
tour guides whispering about the brilliance,
the tragedy,
the fact that I never returned
my library books on time.

Let them gawk.
Let them write essays on my impact.
Let them carve my likeness in stone
and forget to dust it.

I can see the exhibits already—

Here lies her bad decisions.
Here’s the time she thought forever meant forever.
Behind the glass, her old texts on display.
A plaque reading: God, look at the way she begged.

The government has declared me a national treasure.

They say I belong to the people now,
but the people didn’t see me at 3 AM,
barefoot in the kitchen,
chewing on the past like gristle.

I imagine my face on a postage stamp,
licked and sent to places I’ll never go.

I imagine my face carved into a coin,
slipped into vending machines, spat back out.

Or etched into history books next to the words—
Fell but never quite landed.
Loved, but only in hindsight.

Do I get a holiday? A moment of silence?

Or a biopic where they cast someone prettier,
softer, easier to root for?

Or will you just name your daughter after me
and pretend it’s a coincidence?

Rise when I enter the room.
You owe me that much.

Words stick to skin like bad dreams. Awake,
cold sweat, twisted in sheets with a half-remembered phrase.
Every story has a part of it that's true.
That’s why I lie.

I’m sorry about your bedding.
I’m sorry about my teeth,
about the edge that tells me to laugh when I know I shouldn’t,
and I’m sorry about the way I pull your hair when you’re above me-
I forget that it’s not mine.

I used to collect ideas like friendship bracelets on the last day of camp,
I used to listen to your breath catch in sleep and wish that I had pitched it.
I used to think in stanzas, and sigh into verses,
like a poem about a poem about a poem.

Now I barely think.
I miss thoughts like trains.
I sweat your bed.
I hold your attention like a bouquet,
then knot it like a tourniquet.
I keep patience like a promise.
Now I collect only what I can taste,
only what I can swallow whole.

I knew you were there —
knuckles resting like they didn’t know what to do.
I heard your breath through the wood.

You almost knocked. I felt it —
the air pulling back,
the hush flexing its muscles.

I almost opened the door. I felt that too —
the lock daring me to turn it,
the weight of the air leaning hard against my chest.

But neither of us moved.

We just stood there —
two statues pretending not to be waiting —
except I heard you breathing.
And I know you heard me too.

Dressed for the opera,
abreast in a fight.
Pressed, mixing my mouth
with your gore,
unsure who I’m lighting torches for.

We held a crass kind of funeral
then washed our gloves in separate loads.
I’ve vacuumed meaner shadows from your rug
and ironed colder syllables into pleats
down dress pants, through ribbons for my hair.

You've tried to unknot the longing-
that low ache of a feeling never quite named.
It’s there, somewhere behind your sternum,
stringy, sticky, and bright.
I’ve learned to corrode that carnage
in impolite ways, then wreak havoc all by myself
near the wrought-iron gate where the singing stopped.

I’m making vain jokes,
tongue-trilling venom smoke rings above your head.
You're draining dank drinks,
tongue-twisting for the mouth you had before mine.

Two seats empty in the mezzanine,
two bracelets spoiling in separate drawers,
a too-long gown; hacked and hemmed,
silk gloves anointed by a
carnal evening prayer.
You wear a suit most days,
I want to *****
and gripe in formal wear.

For a moment it’s the feeling of forever,
the inside-taste closing in on never.
Crisp, autumn night,
brisk, dusk fight,
The fall falls, the trees tease,
branches strip their civility-
and so do we.

October- I limber-lithe and lilt,
not even a trace of you in my mouth.
November- I double-knot laces,
bare my shoulders, and start to shiver.
December- I’m back at the gate
singing hymns to an ivy-laced lion face.
I'm searching the dusk for torchlights, groping
for another temper to press my thirst into.

By solstice I’m back on my knees,
ironing pleats atop the hardwood.
I petition ***** litanies to the congregation,
(us; your unmade bed, bare chest,
my inside-taste, our matching bracelets.)
Your heavy gaze and fervid eyes
narrow with each call and response;
ready to pounce.
Amen.

Dressed for the opera,
abreast in supplications made holy
as we learn our echoes and braid
our mayhem once more.
The only mouth you long for is at your feet,
velvet-warm, and full of prayers you can taste
but not translate, sigh but not speak.

My mouth makes your mouth tease like trees,
match our screams,
cross our hearts, drink, and dream.
We’ll tangle in everything,
empty our cupboards and start again.

We put on our evening gloves.
This afterglow is formal.

Does it count as love
if it only exists in parallel universes?
In one, I keep the keys under the mat,
but no one ever comes home.
In another, I rewrite endings
that no one ever reads.

The moon nods at me like it understands,
like it knows how it feels to orbit
what will never be yours.
I keep praying to stars
that burned out years ago,
their light still threading the night sky
like stitches on old wounds.

Somewhere, he holds my hand.
Somewhere, I hold my own.
Somewhere, they are the same thing.

I wonder if Taylor Swift
reads poems like mine,
filled with guys who are
forever running away,
or standing still
in the shadow of the last word.

I wonder if Taylor Swift has ever been
the last person at the party,
waiting for someone to notice the empty room,
wondering when she stepped out of her heels,
and who stuffed them in their bag,
as she left the night behind like an art thief,
taking all the pieces no one thought they'd miss
until they’re staring at a wall of empty frames.

I wonder if Taylor Swift has ever looked at a stranger and thought,
‘You are the version of me that never had to sing
about all the things I can’t say aloud—
the version that’s free of the weight
of every note I write.’

Somewhere, in a parallel universe,
I hand her my heart—
heavy with everything we never spoke,
but she doesn’t need to read it,
because in this universe,
we’ve already lived the words.

Somewhere, she writes me back,
telling me that love
is just a song
we forgot to finish,
and maybe, in the silence,
we’ll finally hear it echo between us,
looping in a way that sounds
like both a beginning and an ending.

For when I’m pretending to be widow at the opera.
For when I’m following a pigeon down the street like it owes me money.
For when I spray perfume on my wrists before bed, like the dreams deserve better versions of me.

For when I go through Korean Customs just to eat Lotteria on the Incheon sidewalk, then redo check-in and security for my connecting flight.
For when I receive a message I’ll overanalyze for the rest of my life.
For when I write a text, delete it seven times, then send “lol” as if I didn’t bleed for it.

For when I apologize to a vending machine for using a credit card.
For when I press my ear to a seashell and hear an argument I lost ten years ago.
For when the chandelier is on fire, and I jump up to light a cigarette.

For when I catch a fly in my hand and let it go, like I’m proving something to God.
For when I lose an earring in the street and think, “This is how pieces of me disappear.”
For when I find a hairpin on the sidewalk and carry it like a talisman.

For when the theater goes dark, and I sit there wondering if the show is about me.
For when I open a fortune cookie and write a rebuttal in the margin of the slip.
For when I break my own heart at 2 a.m. on purpose.

For when I sit at a piano I don’t know how to play, pressing keys like I’m calling out names.
For when I’m smiling at a stranger, just to prove I’m still kind.
For when I feel like a disco ball in a dive bar where nobody dances.

For when I dress up for an event I don’t want to go to prove I’m still trying.
For when I page through books I carried around in high school, hoping they’ll whisper a version of me I’ve forgotten.
For when I fold a map along the wrong lines and feel like I’ve ruined the entire world.

For when I bite a grape off the vine and pretend it’s the first fruit I’ve ever tasted.
For when I wake up with dirt under my fingernails and no memory of where I’ve been.
For when I dream of him and wake up keening.

For when I gasp and say, “This is just like Wuthering Heights!” in the dumbest moments.
For when we build a pillow fort, declare it a sovereign nation, ban all taxes, and call it “Pillowvania.”
For when we develop a shorthand where “Let me know when you’re done being weird” means “I miss you,” and “I miss you” means “I’m sorry.”

For when I flip a coin, and it lands on its edge, daring me to choose.
For when I don't.

I picture them in a balmy hallway,
far-corner huddled; quietly, urgently
comparing their notes on ways I have loved.

They'll laugh at lame jokes and avoid eye contact,
each surprised by their own awkwardness.
One of them will quip the term
'eskimo brother'
and immediately wish he hadn't.
The rest will kindly ignore it.
The moment will pass.

They will slowly shed their discomfort.
They will remove their coats.
Sweat will bloom at collars
and trace knotty bumps of spine before
pooling into the space between
boxers and belt.

They won't openly discuss the
strange comradery
that accompanies the lazy river evenings spent drifting down the same mind-
but the tension pulling across
each of their jaws
will announce loud and clear
how frustrating it has
been to be cropped,
tucked in, paper fortune teller folded
and wrapped up into someone else’s idea of poetry.


Casually
then all at once,
they will get started.
Printed pages will uncoil from backpacks,
phones will emerge from pockets
and fingers slightly shaking
will chase the letters
of my name through search engines.

My sticky poems will fan out across floorboards.
They will lower their bodies carefully, not quite kneeling,
(and without mention of the bad knees they happen to share.)
They'll hover above each piece of evidence
and their eyes will crash along titles and memories-
they'll read with raised
eyebrows and pretend as if
they don't already know
each poem, each quick dig, by heart.

When they start claiming
and denying pieces
they will do so lightly
and without judgment.
'This piece is about you and the dry, delicate
tissue-shell of skin
she held out for you after you told
her to shed.
But this piece- this piece is about me
and the messy ointment
that ruined her clothes and
stained her blankets.
A doctor instructed she
apply the ointment to her hands
twice a day to treat
the burns my silence left
across her arms and throat.'

They will share a bit of rage,
A bit of regret.
A bit of shame, perhaps.
They will either miss me intensely
or not at all.
They will either own up
to the poems they begat
or begin refuting.
They don’t want any of
this chilly weight on their soul.
I understand.

They didn’t sign up for this, I know that.
They didn’t set out to rock me,
nor to dig down deep and get to my China.
I was happy to share, to whisper and recite blurry
morning confessions and epiphanies.
I was right behind them running toward the sand dunes,
waving a shovel and pail.
But I can’t feel bad either.
You all must have known:

If you happen to fall for a girl
who writes you must realize
that every smile you put on her face,
every stray hair you’ve pushed back from her eyes,
and quick habit she starts to crave
is fair game.

If a girl who writes happens to fall for you too--
forget it.
You will find echoes of the way your souls fit and fought
together until she has nothing left to feel on the subject;
(and you must be well aware
she's tidal, her feelings are icecaps,
they are melting but will trickle fresh
and renewed for centuries to come.)

This is my first-ever life. I’ve never been anybody's,
I’ve only ever been any body.
I’m not brave because I’ve never had to be;
I’ve never had to call my own bluff, or learn
the rules; I’ve been coasting by bad beats
and dumb-luck, and the boys always
fall until I flush, tilt until they fold,
love me until they don’t.
I pocket the chips anyway.
My clumsy hands get antsy;
always dropping hints and pennies,
never dropping hands that drop pilots,
barely dropping hands that drop bombs,
and my fermented dreams;
my sweet turns so acidic, I can't see
the color of an aura over the bacteria and bubbles.
I go to sleep with yeast on my fingers
and get drunk on my dreams.
I’m a bad poet and an okay bird;
I spend my midnights pecking on the keyboard
like a sparrow at its reflection, tapping out
a list of things that might be.
I have this thing where I try to write my way
into myself, but the vocabulary makes me lie;
the syntax makes me slink,
I use semicolons wrong,
and always too many commas,
but if you’ve ever seen the inside of my mouth,
you know that I’m doing the best I can.
My first-ever life is shaping up to be
an entire sentence so run-on
and run-down that it
almost doesn't matter if I get to the end;
inmates don’t get to choose where
they serve, even if it is my first-ever life.

Pretend it’s just another party—
an apartment filled with ghosts in rented shoes,
the air so balmy-slick and regret-thick
you chew it between clenched teeth and canapés.

Laughter echoes like it's hollow—
like it's searching for a way out.
Smile anyway, teeth shining shields,
polished by all the swill you've swallowed.

Conversations carry and carry on,
half-truths wrapped in nicer clothes, familiar faces
wrapped with softer shadows, words slurring to silk, then blurring to tilt.
Wave at someone you used to know;
pretend like you have any say in how you’re remembered.

Pretend the warm hands on your shoulders aren’t anchors
dragging you back to conversations you’ve outgrown,
then pretend your feelings were never knives
dressed as whispers,
and strangers in your skin.
Pretend you've never been the best thing at the party.
Pretend you've never been the worst.

The ghosts taught you some tricks;
pour drinks and flatter, don’t spill souls and blather—
the art of being just enough, but never too much,
your heart near the door, the gravity of leaving,
a muscle that’s learned to scheme and stay still
in ways your body can't, your mind never will.

Pretend just another party—
just another night to swallow or score.
You’re so much younger than you ever were, and braver;
one eye on the exit and one foot out the door.

Exits beckon another entrance:
but that wouldn't be pretending,
would it?

The best thing at this party
only pretends to leave-
the worst thing at this party
is smiling anyway.