Is is trust
or disrespect
that swerves
avoiding cats
but carelessly
bulldozes pigeons—
who make it out
just in time?

There’s a certain romance
in he who doesn’t kiss
his lover, despite yearning

for her eager lips,
and tongue like a dolphin—
hesitant, yet inviting.

But she’s bottlenosed,
and he has the heart of an orca.
He just wants her

to test the water
before he drags her
down by her feet.

But what is so appealing
about someone
who makes you want
to give up your dreams?

Every failed relationship has left me
with a scar. I run my fingers down
the rigid skin each day
at school, and remember.

A boyfriend I had in high school
called me selfish
when I told him I never
wanted to have children.

I’ve never left
the states. Never seen fresh
snow, never even been
to a wedding.

Marriage, as I understand,
marks the start of
the end. And it terrifies me
that so many people

start the end
before they’ve fully lived.
I’ve never been to
the grand canyon,

but I’ll probably be
married in New Mexico,
burning my dreams in
our backyard fire pit

before I get to go.

You like
to play this game.
A vortex of *******,
change the face of who you’re kissing,
pretend.

Under
the lemon tree
we used to see ghosts. They
would just sit there and glare at us,
waiting.

I’m sorry. It’s such a frightening
thing. While I’m covered in airborne dust
and dirt, somewhere out of the desert
you dream of losing a girl you never had.

Under a straw sunhat, I argue with a chubby bartender
who insists my “over twenty-one” wristband
is not enough to justify selling an overpriced beer
to my baby face. I run through crowds, back

to my campsite, cursing her under my breath
for delaying my drunken dance. But somewhere else—
out of the heat and the food trucks and the live music
and the showers in the backs of trucks—you know.

And you prepare yourself for the path I am down,
where I miss Frank Turner for the sake of stumbling,
and later my legs will tremble under a tent
that may or may not be my own.

I used to make my choices carefully,
keeping a menu of where I’d been.
Now they all taste the same to me.

My first boyfriend called me a tease.
It was over a year before I let him in.
I used to make my choices carefully.

Always tasted citrus gum on his teeth.
Orange-lime breath through a goofy grin.
Now they all taste the same to me.

Another guy smelled of tobacco and ****,
scratching his habits into my skin.
I used to make my choices carefully.

His kisses were like rice crispy treats,
sugary desserts while staying thin.
Now they all taste the same to me.

I go back in time whenever I’m lonely.
We’re eternally teenagers, acting on whims.
I used to make my choices carefully.
Now they all taste the same to me.

It’s cold for a California night
near the start of May. The sky
was gloomy all day so some of you left
your suits at home. It’s alright,
wear what you’ve got. Music plays
through tiny speakers from a beer
soaked table as we line up, half
****, along the water’s cement edge.

The song is muffled, so I pretend
it’s The Shins. I can’t see anyone
through the rising steam, so I trip
headfirst to the bottom of the pool.

We get out every thirty minutes or so
to take shots, leaping back in without
a second thought. We don’t notice it’s pouring
until the lighters that live with our
glass pipes (within reach without leaving
the water) give out, and forget how
to make flames. Red cups have been
blowing off the table for an hour now
but we were too busy floating on our backs
and thinking this feels like home.

Sometimes pain is so strong
it transcends conscious thought.
So powerful it cannot be described,
imitated, or understood at all--
It simply is. It exists,
and welcome or not,
It is present.

My heart fills with you
then is rung out, and
left to dry.

You scribble yourself
on scraps of me.

You scatter them around
your room, wallet, shoes.

And this is love,
we are certain.

Does she wonder what I’ll think
when I find that freshly burned
evidence of a habit—I thought—
she dropped long ago? What upsets
me the most is that she couldn’t
confront her weakness enough
to buy a cheaper brand.

You deserve more
than this oddly-
shaped heart.

Something about the comfort of autumn—
in California our leaves go straight from green
to gone, if they choose to change at all.
The sun stays bright but the air starts to bite,
and the Santa Anas blow through to dry up
our last drops of livelihood. Most seem to like it—
the streets littered with death and ready to restart—
but the rough winds always hollow me out,
echo a haunting song off the tunnelled walls
of my bones. It’s about this time I empty out,
and fill instead with cotton mouth. My lips chap
and crack, but I smile silently, and I wait.

It’s not like anyone understands
what it is that draws me to you—
like anxious mosquitos to a caged
blue light, where they die united,
leaving a burnt stench in the air
as the light lives on. Or whales
who throw themselves ashore,
leaving their lives so they might
finally taste the half-baked sun.

Or maybe I am more ordinary
than I credit myself for. Maybe
I am like ants swarming a Snickers bar,
vultures following the dying doe,
Hollywood zombies tracking
the tender brain. But I wonder:
is this hunger, or craving?

Is there a chance that your years
of self-abuse could change you chemically?
That my lips picked up *******
in your saliva, or perhaps ******
laced the perspiration of a nervous palm
over mine? Is this attraction
or addiction? Does it matter?

We make the choices that decide our fate,
or so they say. But who’s to say
we’re really choosing?

It's nearly our bedtime and you're asleep now,
you have been for hours--actually--just as I knew
you would be when you first lay down tangled
in a net of blankets, promising, "I won't, I won't"
with drowsy confidence after asked if you were going
to sleep. "I just want to lie down," your gentle hand
shooed me away. And so I went, leaving a light trail
of kisses so I could find my way back.

You and I separated long ago. The only writer
I ever loved. I try to find myself in
between your words, lingering somewhere deep
in your inspiration, but I don’t think
I’m there. You always made them up,

but I knew you better than that. Recycling
moments from the past to make a fake
love feel real. I don’t love you.
I only wish I could see your memories of me
living on through your fingertips,

the way you do through mine. We live separate
lives in the same vicinity, touching the same
people. If you had told me this years ago,
I wouldn’t have believed that even a single
degree could separate you and I.

We were each necessary for the other
to mature. My biggest fear is that I didn’t
help you grow as a writer. So what
if we matured? If being loved by me
didn’t improve your writing, then it was all

for nothing.

Sixteen year old girls hold
the answers to life.

They have ***
(with boys who have girlfriends,
across the front seat of an El Camino,
parked two houses down from her own,
where her parents await her return
no later than ten, unaware
that while they watch Jeopardy, their daughter's
hair rubs and frizzes against upholstery
that is older than her, and her head
occasionally bangs against the dark sidewalk
facing window, with a deep,
but gentle, thud)
and call it love.

I have trouble keeping up
with myself these days.
I waited a year just to starve out
the taste you left in my mouth
for possibility.

Maybe you still live there.
Maybe you're still seeing that girl,
the pretty one from San Pedro
who made jewelry for a living.

It's a sweet and cradling thought,
the unknowing. What's sweeter still
is feeling such confidence that I
will never know.

you
and i are more

alike than we think.
but

you experienced so much
excitement
at my age, so

perhaps i'm destined
to have
mine

at yours.

Sweetheart,
if you saw my blood pour out
onto paper, you wouldn't want it

anymore.

Why must I feel more passion
for missed opportunities than
for the continuous love

flowing at my feet?

Root beer has a particular taste, I only
liked it with ice cream. You were the first
person I’d met over the age of eleven
that loved it. We’d always share drinks,
and you didn’t care what I liked.
I had a date recently who laughed
when I ordered such a childish soda.

At twenty years old, I needed total darkness
and silence to fall asleep. But you.
You needed the television on, or maybe
you had no preference, and just liked
to bicker. I’ve been sleeping with it on
for over a year now. My lullabies
rerun the theme songs of nineties sitcoms.

My back hasn’t cracked since February
of last year. It’s not your fault.
I’m not sure if I don’t ask someone
else to do it because I’m shy, or
because I want that pleasure to
exclusively come from you. I’ll admit
I miss you whenever my back aches.

So, here we are
again. ******* smoke
through glass straws
and frequenting the local
food trucks. Here we are,
pressing our chins
into our chests to see
who has more, only
so we can laugh about
it and somehow end up
losing our clothes.

I am both overflowing
and desperately dry.

You
are poisonous,
and I
am an idiot. I deserve
to be hurt.
Your venom spreads
quickly
and soon
you will unknowingly
avenge him.
I would rather bleed
out
on my bathroom floor
with a sharp
fist,
than allow
you
to slowly,
surely,
drain me.

If you're going to hate me for what I write,
you're going to hate me sooner or later anyway.

I still hate you but I want you to taste me.
Though I wouldn't dare ask, because
if I'm being honest I want to do nothing for you
in return. I want to punish you, deprive you.
To take from you--like a sacrifice to a goddess--
what I deserve. And to give you nothing
but the satisfaction of knowing that even after everything
you can still reach between my legs
and hold me like your doll.

When you aren't home, the walls speak to me.
The floor heaves with exhausted breath,
and the furniture creaks unprompted,

asking me to leave.
We call this home so often,
but only together. Alone,
we feel unwelcome here.

We both know. It's because
we painted the walls with our loathing.
We didn't mean to. And now I want nothing

more than to start new with you,
in a moderately clean home
with plain white walls.

We set the Standard, you and I.
Smoking **** in secret, out on the balcony,
you were that sophisticated sort of ******
that makes me want you to meet my mom.

Like the seed I swallowed when I was small,
from my depths a tree now grows. As first
I didn't feel it all, and then it felt like
n o t h i n g at all, and now as its branches
tickle up my throat I wonder if I'll die
before they're reaching out like arms
from my (normally) empty mouth, poking
wooden fingers through my broken teeth, or
if instead it will finally give me something to say.

...and what could I say?

Something about
the way you hold a cigarette
makes me twirl beneath my skirt.
Sinister swirls release and retract
as they slip up out of your lips
like snakes. You should quit,
I tell you you should quit
as I curl into your lap like a kitten
and thank you for smoking.

You and I sometimes speak in energies,
our auras reach out, connect, and entwine.
Like when you call out from another room
to me in the shower, just to tell me
that I am loved, when--unknown
to you--just moments before, I was trapped
in my head, apologizing still
for something I did a year ago.

You are the most attractive to me
when that's the way you feel.
You pull me into you with big brown eyes
and lashes long enough to do it alone.
Your hands, up behind your head,
effortless, and you smile to one side
while your hair just perfectly
swoops to the other, and there
was never another option; I am yours.

I’m pulling out grass,
wishing to feel closer to you.
I convince myself that it’s okay,
that I’m better, because I’ve learned
the beautiful craft of distraction.

I make sure there is always sound
vibrating off my walls, never a dull moment
in this skull. Numb it with herbs and every
time a voice goes low, drown it out
with stronger voices, any voices,
just never music. Or I’ll end up
right back where I began.

I’m pulling out grass
wishing to feel closer to you.
But instead I inhale, blink back
tears, pull myself off the ground.
It’s easier to carry on feeling nothing at all.

It has nothing to do with what inspires you
or what makes you makes you happy.

Art is about whatever it is that makes your
heart scratch at the inside of its own walls.

Sweetheart, don't be fooled
by my thick veils of lovely
language, this curtain behind which
I can easily disappear. I sing
a song which invites both
fact and fiction to the dance floor
to perform a number they didn't
know they knew. My tongue
wraps their love with a cherry stem--
still tied in a bow--though
they both long for more
than the other
will allow.

At what point
does writers' block
become retirement?

I've been drawing
blanks for six
years straight.

What am I now, if
not a writer? Nothing echos
along the walls of my skull.

But to be nothing is more
poetic an existence than any.
I am not worthy enough

to be nothing.

What happens when every image
becomes a cliche? No one
has had an original thought in years,
what makes you think you are any different?
Sculpting language so meticulously,
like you're the first to compare to seasons.
I bet you write about writing, too. Pathetic.
Love is not a feeling, it's a force. The words
write themselves and purely use you
as a vessel. Somewhere back in time
we did a seance of sorts and now sometimes
poetry drops in like a demon, possessing
the mind which tells the hand to pick up a pen.
Demons, whatever that means to you,
do not answer demands. They play their own game,
which we are indeed a part of, though
we were never invited to play.

My soft skin opens,
draws you in, earns your trust, and
then swallows you up.

Oh darling, you make me grateful
for gloomy summer days. The only way
I can feel close when you're so far away,
or gone entirely, or everywhere at once, I don't know
how it works. All I know is you're not here,
and wolves parade in friendly forged masks,
wishing their energy could be even
a fraction of yours. Pretending
they spend theirs the same ways as you.

Only you and I know the truth.
The darkness you hid from most
that I was so honored to share with you.
We'd remind each other to come up for air,
each stuck in our downward,
spiraling undersea dreams.

There was no one else like us.
I'll never be quite whole again. True love
that was never in love--the thing about us
is we are made of it. We were the packing peanuts
around all those we love, but when
there was no longer enough the box emptied out,
and I stay here still wishing it might fill.

Fearing my own mind for the sake of your heart.
Being less than an artist just doesn't feel right.
If you can't love my art, well, then you can't love me.
The words have to pour out, then they are both
never and forever mine. You can take them,

or leave me.

Remember when the pier burned down?
That familiar boardwalk we’ve known
since we were kids. We used to get milkshakes
at that Ruby’s, watching waves through
the window before they crashed down
and demolished beneath us.

From the inside out,
we waste away.

I remember the first time I coughed
up a bit of dust, perfectly dry, and said to myself,
"this must be normal."

However, I have always been
much more than normal.
More hesitant than normal.
More fearful than normal.
More of an empty vessel
floating through life than normal.

Nowadays, if you knock
gently on my chest
like a door it will respond
a low hollow sound, void of life, free of emotion.
The dust comes and goes. I feel
the marrow of my bones
drying more each day. Eventually,
I figure, they will crack and snap,
pouring out more dust
until I am weightless.

And maybe then
I can be freed. Set off to sea
like an aged piece of driftwood. Floating out
with eyes for adventure and a fate
full of rot.

Darling, darling--
I still creep beneath you
I yearn for your reach.
Lit between the floorboards,
I watch you dance in panels--
watch you undress under strobe light--
watch you sleep in shades of dark.
Sometimes, I crawl out
through the vents, to come sit
on your nightstand.
And we breath in synchronicity.
The air grows hot between us
and sometimes, I can't help myself
but reach out for the covers
to uncover, but instead
I crawl back down
and sprawl my legs
and disappear again
back into the walls.

Strawberry moon on
the darkest of nights, guide me
back home with your light.

Remember the long drives we used to take
down Pacific Coast Highway? The only road
worth traveling in the thick summer heat.
Pick your poison and wrap it in a palm leaf,
tell ourselves it's natural while we light it with a wick.

calloused toes
can’t feel the cold
of the linoleum floor.

we get hobbit feet
in the summers–a result
of running shoeless and living

dangerously.

layers of dead skin
but i don't feel
like i’m missing anything.

i’m not missing anything.

The door only slams
on windy days, and
in a similar fashion,
these days I just snap.
I am a manifestation
of all that I fear--
it is what made me
and thus it is all that
I am. How does
a heavy door transcend
the force of the wind?
How does it transcend
the forces that be,
who decided
it was a door?

Falling apart isn't easy to do,
on the bathroom floor in a puddle
of tears and sweat. Remembering
a time when things seemed simple, a
time before someone smashed
through the car window of the minimum
wage worker, living in her car, at six a.m.
and took the tokens of her life
away, to be under loved.

The unraveling was gradual:
Graduating from school and watching
her own brain start to melt away,
dripping out here and there,
on the couch, the bed, the floor,
all over the apartment but rarely
outside. Splattered on the walls
rather than scratching a way out. It's fine,
the mind just makes a mess of things.

We travel the same paths every day,
usually the same paths, the same way.
The same paths between our homes and
wherever we regularly might have to go.
We know them, or rather, maybe, it is
our feet that do, because if you asked me the way
I’d tell you a series of here’s and there’s. I’d tell you
I remember to turn left at that light, because
if you don’t you’ll have to pass the house
that fooled me for a month, feeding me
steak for dinner and inviting me back
to fall asleep on red satin sheets. I’d mention
how I’ve thrown up at that gas stop, and
how it was my soulmate who first took me
to the dive bar we just passed, which means
you should left again when you see a tall, lonely tree.
I’d tell you then that when I’m sad, I take
the roads closest to the sea, so I can finish my coffee
or hear the end of a song on the radio.
I might not get you there, in fact I might leave you
more lost than you began. But you’ll find your way.
Wherever we go we have been before,
We can trust in our feet and not lose our way.