the poem i resist digs deeper into my chest like a buried soulmate. it grows blurry and distant until i can’t find the sharpness of it, but i can still taste how it made me feel. the feeling becomes a dull hunger. the distorted memory of a bite. still gnawing, lost, hopeful that i will give in to my undoing and gruesomely reveal the bloodied shadow of a bluff that has been called home. neither of us can sleep. my teeth ache. when the sky turns purple with torment, i end up in the woods, collecting feathers, consumed in the uncaging of a fire that will never catch

When I’m older, I’ll give more of myself to the yellow morning. By then, I’ll have a front porch where the honeybees join me for breakfast, and I won’t worry about the sting any longer than I should, and the day will be enough. But for now, I am still waiting for a flood, still waist-deep in the rain. I am taking communion with the things that hurt, letting them melt on my tongue like hot wax. The broken clock, and the hollow haunting, and the songs that say what I can’t. I think the winter knows me better than I’d like to admit. But sometimes, the heaviness feels a lot like being held, and so I let it crush me.

I want you to know me by my handwriting
Let’s start licking envelopes again just to say hello
I’ll sit at my desk drinking coffee in the morning
A stack of letters in the drawer ******* with a string
You know I would keep every one of yours
Even if you lived next door or wrote me every day
I don’t know how to throw anything away

funny how the good feels like a stranger. i went to office depot with my little brother, we were buying markers and glitter glue, and i was someone whose hands didn’t tremble. someone who didn’t want to go home, so we took the long way. when i am driving with the radio on, i am an actor in a bad movie. when i am picking up scallions at the grocery store, i am the girl you believe in. but when i’m hurting, when i’m breaking, when i’m scared—i look down and my shadow is there. i don’t know who i am without it.

where were you when the tree branches
were scraping against my window
when i was staring at the cul-de-sac
clutching the landline to my chest
one time i thought i saw a bear
in the woods across from the bus stop
but it turned out to be a pile of brush
you know i still see things in the dark
the other night i woke up from a bad dream
and saw teeth that weren’t there
i managed to blink them away but
there are some things that i can’t
like the shadow in the doorway that visits
every night and the open hand i am doing
everything not to grab
it pretends that it needs me but really
all i needed was yours

The first days of fall are always warmer than I remember. It just takes one cold morning to make me want the glare back. Now I'm looking for any reason to go outside before dusk begins to swallow afternoons. I'm checking the mail on a Sunday. I'm carrying a broken lamp to the shed. I don't miss July and its quite seethe. I miss the beginning. I miss not knowing when it would end. It's a slice of sponge cake, a half-erased underline left behind in a book that I can't put down. I'll go inside and read it until the pages begin to curl. My nails were made for digging into palms. I only ever want to stay when I know it's time to go.

it's a race with the blade
of who can sink faster
but my heart doesn't
know what's good for it
so i take the stairs
and search for
my grave at the top

tell me that i don't
have to carve my name
into the granite
that i could leave
the bottom of
this page blank and
you would
fill in the rest