When the rose is gone and the garden faded
you will no longer hear the nightingale's song.
The Beloved is all; the lover just a veil.
The Beloved is living; the lover a dead thing.
If love withholds its strengthening care,
the lover is left like a bird without care,
the lover is left like a bird without wings.
How will I be awake and aware
if the light of the Beloved is absent?
Love wills that this Word be brought forth

I could've loved you
a thousand times over
and a million sleeps under
my soft, pleading sheets.

In a field far away from here
I'd lay you down gently
and pick the thorns from your memory

wipe the leaves from your face
and the tears from your cheek
until the only thing left to feel
is me.

I'd read you poetry
and maybe even tell you a story
of this girl who showed me

that love is a mystery
bought out by long histories
I spoke to you delicacies
even my tongue didn't believe.
But now that you're not next to me
showering me with broken dreams
I think it's time to change my sheets.

stars spilled out from the night sky
into morning, mourning,
and
so did your skin.

please know, your
voice is
louder than any gunshot now
even as new bullets echo against
your gravestone.

She enters my bed,
Cloud of pillows under sheet,
New sun unwelcomed.

Early morning before
anyone has ordered coffee
and I feel delicate in the dewy
sun with the heater on low
at my ankles, I reorganize
the drawer below the register
gingerly feeling at staples and
rubberbands, Caleb watches from
the corner on tea with raspberry
in doc martens and ***** trousers
I wonder if I seem as pretty as I
feel or if he feels the staples too and
the dust from gift cards, if my hair
flares out in the light, if I am a brilliant
solar eclipse.

She was cold iron—
I smelled in her blood, elixir,
What made stars explode.