This is to say
I have not eaten
Williams' plums
in the icebox

Nor have I seen
the stiff curl
of the wildcarrot leaf

Wordsworth's waters
on a starry night

Forgive me
for I do lack
what it means
to truly
write

I want you to put me on your tongue and let me dissolve into you like the tiny white squares that turn those glossy hazel marbles into black holes and intense stares. I want you to kiss me and see negative colored rulers in the corner of your vision and I want you to have trouble making a decision between kissing me and observing me while I'm sitting on your chest and I want you to laugh like you did with your cherry colored lip curled over your childish grin over and over and over again and I want you to forget the conversation topic every time you close your eyes because the world inside of your mind is filled with blinking images that you can't quite explain aloud so you settle for little talks about Rosa Parks and Indian style kisses and how the ocean is the Earth's thing or the complexity of butterfly brains and whether or not they remember their caterpillar memories (they do). Describe to me the first time you saw your favorite color and what developed the affinity for it: yours, a glacier blue toy that resembled the ocean and mine, a lavender Easter dress that twirled when I spun. Tell me about your school crushes when you were four and what you got your clothespin moved to the sad face for and I'll write it all in ink on my knee caps because "God, we're such writers" and you'll check the clock in the gaps and search for tunes or lighters and I'll want time to slow down because the nights spent with you usually seem as though minutes are just a few seconds shy of sixty, which turns the little hand pretty quickly.
I want hours, weeks, decades, to analyze the freckles on your face or the pace at which you move your tongue and precisely how it tastes.
I want you to tell me that your brother would like me and about the mountains in Tennessee and maybe next time I'll try to stay awake, unless you want to listen to the way I breathe so fully when I dream.

When I close my eyes, I want to be able to see what you see.
I want you to keep burying the numb parts of you into the warm parts of me.

we were poor
but not deluded

and when
van morrisson's
"brown eyed girl"
comes on the radio on
that worn
old
brown rug
my brother and I
started tapping our feet
shaking our heads
to the music and
our sisters are smiling
at us and
our mother is laughing
at us

and all we needed was
laughter and love
a prayer and a song

turn up the radio

i like to scribble unknown faces on my leg with pen and regret them as they're drying. they'll fade, i know, leaving blots of black ink in the tiny crevices of my skin, but the immediate wave of embarrassment in the possibility of showing such a human action to another makes my face tingle.

i wonder sometimes where the ink goes, the eyes, the lips, the cheeks. i'm sure it goes down with the water into the pipes and then into pools of murky water, the kind i imagine swallowing me whole, though i like to imagine it all floats up and becomes shards of the sky, watching over me. i hope the pen doodles, the unknown faces that i now know so well would wish good things for me.

She came back today
new hair swishing, talking, laughing
non-verbally different.

trendy, mismatched clothes
shapeless pants
a cheap embroidered windbreaker.
even with heels, she seems below me,
no longer restrained, outspoken, quiet, or fun.

I’m grasping for normality,
clinging onto her old expressions
that rolling of the eyes
flicking of the tongue
replaced by swishing
maneuvering, stoutly and gracefully
all at once.  

once we were little planets
now transformed into a shooting star
and me, firmly grounded in familiar earth.