I fell in love with a boy at a coffee shop
who always ordered vanilla chai.
I knew it was love because I could
never get up the courage to speak to him.

I fell in love with a bony fingered,
anorexic boy in my math class.
I think it was the way he did the problems in his head,
so he could use the paper for listing
everything he wanted to eat that day, but wouldn’t.

I fell in love with a girl who had dreadlocks
and burn marks on her neck.
I always fantasized about touching them,
asking if they still warmed up her skin.

I fell in love with the older man at the tutoring center.
I failed Spanish so that I could spend the next semester
eye ******* him from across the study table.
I've always had a thing for married men.

I fell in love with girl who pushed up her
*****, and pouted for football players.
It may have been unrequited,
but at least I didn’t catch anything.

I fell in love with the person
who left death threats in my locker.
I’d never known someone who felt
the same way about me as I did.

I've always dreamed
of standing atop tall buildings.
I guess the romance with height
stems from my small stature.
There is nothing more seductive
than peering over, toes on
the edge, and knowing the
one and only outcome of a
misstep.

You can run the risk
of saying the wrong thing
to the right person, but
when leaping from a skyscraper,
one will always find
you fall.

They told me to write about the family dynamic,
and even though they were careful to say

"The" family dynamic,

I was quite sure they wanted to say

"My" family dynamic.

The way I'm quite sure that when my mother asks if I'm gay,
and if that is the reason I'm sporting a gay pride belly ring,
that she is actually saying,

"I swear to God if you're a **** that's the last straw."

Catholic upbringings seem to only account for politely covering up
hidden agendas, not actually purging them in place of acceptance.

My family dynamic is the blank stare I gave my mother that day.
It is the uncertainty I feel on a daily basis. A constant debate on
whether or not I should send her fragile ideals about me spinning
off their axis, admit to being bisexual. In my mind I always look
her in the eyes and say something along the lines of,

"Don't worry mother, I could never be gay. I enjoy a good hetero ******* too much."

In reality I smile and shake my head.  Leaving her to go on living in a world
where daughters don't have premarital ***, or lose babies, or try to **** themselves.
In a world where her good catholic daughter could never be gay.

The summer air, I fear, brings a sort of mania.
Starting with the breath of mother nature's warm breeze
through my car window, and ending with my face pressed into the ground.
A sort of emotional and drug induced black out. In between is a madness.
Flowers bursting from their shy buds inside the bones of my arms.
Fireworks up the filaments and out the anthers.  
Sparking the tribal chants and patterns trying to live inside
my white blood cells. Forcing them to expand
and break, releasing a fever for sun and soil.
A sort of combustible stage production inside my veins.
Yes.  The summer air, I fear, brings an awful mania.