Remember those city nights we spent
inhaling the marijuana and halal truck tinted air that fills the space
between the skyscrapers?

Glowing storefronts illuminated
both the skies with their stars glistening quietly under coats of dust
and the streets, dense under ***** and ***** spilled by boys
who yell obscenities to girls
who hang their heads low,
ashamed to be happy to have their push up bras appreciated.

It was the summer we read Catcher in the Rye religiously.
We were overflowing with privilege and hating privilege.
Oh god, how we thought we hated privilege back then.

In June we graduated from middle school,
and you found out your father was cheating on the woman
he cheated on your mother with.
In July you kissed a boy for the first time,
even let him feel you up a little.
I couldn't help getting uneasy,
even though you said it was nothing.

Most nights we couldn’t contain ourselves, shouting ideas
fast as the taxi cabs who'd nearly run our still-growing bodies to the ground,
always in a hurry to get home to their own sleeping children.
We raged rebellion against the red lights.
There was no time to wait around for things as unimportant
as people who weren't us.

In August, I took a klonopin pill from my mom’s drawer
because I couldn’t stop the dread beneath my skull.
It made me sleepy.

We were so filled with poems and wine copped at art galleries
where we’d feigned intellectuality,
that we'd see a *** on a subway train
and call him a vagabond.

Back then we thought we knew how life worked
like the palms of each others hands.
By September, albeit, our fingers were calloused
from the time we climbed a playground's wire fence,
twisted the caps off beer bottles,
and swung from the Monkey Bars.

she said i only love the
enticing parts of people,
the same way i highlight
my favorite lines in books
so i’ll have something to
focus on when i decide
to blow the dust off their
spines.
you’re missing everything
and you know it and
you don’t care,
she said.
you’re missing the real
parts. you’re cheating people
out of themselves.

even then, i wanted to
quote her.

i met a man in a church
outside of manila
who asked how i could stand
living in a country so cold.
amerika, he said,
felt wrong to me.
he asked if it was
cold still.
if it still felt like the land
wanted to stick *******
down its throat and throw me up
and up and away. and gone.

not the land. i wanted to say
not the land but this dress, ginoo,
this body and this name
and what you’ve gotta understand
is that there is no flight to someplace
warmer when the cold is etched
into your chromosomes.

but the only words i could
speak in his tongue
were yes, it’s cold,
yes.

Because you are wonder-bread-woman--
bearer of two and a half children,
five feet and four point six inches
of dapper domestication.
soaring, you are at the peak of the bell curve, and when you slip
it's on spilled milk, never cried for.
wistful, you stand on the edge of the bed and reach,
manicure  outstretched towards plastic glow in the dark stars
upwards of your eight-foot-walls,
because after all,
ceiling's the limit.

Gonzo used to say
before they blasted him off with fireworks
only ashes
he used to say that
the American Dream was dead

I disagree
The American dream is alive
though I haven't found it just yet

Focus.
  It's how perception alters when the
          overlooked explodes with
                                         prominence.

Stretching this vast expanse of past all along.
Smoking tendrils climbing from my mouth.
I only have one face,
                    Plato was wrong.

And kisses linger, but with time, fade away.
I feel my lungs fill with the entirety of it.
Was I only one,
                     *when sculpted from clay?