As you were sleeping
and possibly dead
I stripped the skin cell
and sweat soaked sheets
from my bed.
Scrawled two quotes
on the whiteboard that read
"Wait,
they don't love
you like I love you."and
"What you think
you become."
Poured milk into every bowl that we own.
Fed the fish and my pen
and the fire-bellied toads.
Kicked down the garbage pail,
rolled on the floor.
"They don't love you like I do. No,
they love you more."

I'd like to place a cigarette between your lips, cup my small hands around it
and proclaim that you are a writer living in a small apartment in the city.
You wear trench coats and I follow on your tails, doing my best to appear pretty.
But your words are soggy like the suede of your clearance shoes
that have stepped in the puddles between blocks striving
to get you through to the next privately owned book store
where you leave half-written poetry on notecards
and slip them into J.D. Salingar's fingertips
without having had read a single book he has written. (Neither have I.)

I have romanticized my sadness
like slapping away the hand of a boy who reaches up my skirt
and half-smiling afterwards,
wishing he'd do it again.

When a luke warm shower is more comforting
than memories of your hands pressed to my hips:
this is me loving myself.
Poking at bruises on my thighs, forearm, neck
(none of which were caused by you):
this is me loving myself.
Words aren't running off of my fingertips anymore
and the muscles in my hands don't twitch.
You were my muse
and I will carry you in my words.
Un purposefully reserving a place for you in myself:
This is me loving you,
this is me letting go.

You're first,
name shows up in letters spelled out in songs,
the name after that one resides in the people I call friends. Your last
name is written on the calendar in my room
that starts in January but I believe all life began last June.
I've researched the buses and trains and your eye color
and none of them can take me as far as I'd like to go fast enough.
But one day eventually I will show up at your doorstep ******
from the heart that's swollen so much that it's purple and pressed
against my rib cage, breaking straight out of my chest. And I will open
my swirling constellation of a naked mouth, uncensored and raw
while sun and planet will aim to thaw you out.
What happens next

I once read a book that ended in the main character remembering incidents she had repressed,
so all throughout Sophomore year of high school, I wondered if the abuse stopped at bruised arms.
I wanted so badly to have a valid reason behind the stains on my skin and keeping people up at night
to keep me company. The truth of the matter is, if I write what I'm afraid of I'd be writing this:
I didn't cry when my cat of twelve years was put down and buried in the backyard.
I didn't even attend her funeral. There are about three dead pet fish in my freezer
that I haven't gotten around to burying and about twenty-seven lies I've told since my feet hit the floor
this morning. I do not regret any of it. My heart is too big to fit in my chest so I wear it on my sleeve,
I'm told. But that isn't true- I crave for people to look up to me. I've met at least two boys
who have had a tourniquet around their upper arm and a needle in their veins. I love them both.
If I had to choose the one who got away, it would be the boy I could never love as a lover and still
I wish I could. My scars have no profound reasoning behind them and yet I still care that I cut off bits of my hair that you've touched before.
I confuse hardened hearts with strength.
I move too quickly and tell the other to wait.
I've kissed two girls and one kissed me.
The furthest we got was hand holding.
I should write you more poetry.

In the middle of the night I went to Wakelee and the wind whipped at my face
like the way your thrashing words would wash up on the shore of my mouth
and I'd spit them back out at you just the same if not a bit more eloquently.
At Granada Street I remarked on the place in the road that our bodies would meet;
this is where we collapsed because the way we hugged goodbye admitted defeat.
I didn't make it to behind the school where the tree we lounged underneath grew
as we sat as a lioness and a lion completely content to bask in the shade,
but I know after the fall and the winter, that tree still stands the same.
There wasn't time to drive by the house where you traced the tops of my fingers
after inhaling two lungs full of smoke. Where you noticed the way I wrapped my hands
around yours like a knot that couldn't be undone while you were in that state of mind.
But I saw the water we saw when we were ready to duck and cover and the way
the tides of a reservoir can be stronger than any other.
I sent each word out on a separate paper boat lit with a candle as the
"I" floated further than the rocks we threw
and the longest word was sent out second while
"love" drifted towards the beach and
"you" swam away from me.