lightning doesn't strike the same place twice,
but typhoons and hurricanes do,
and just like the rain, i keep falling for You.

lets speak like there are no periods
and keep our need for our tongues
to curve into commas and let our
lips visit the taste of hesitance only
when our breaths begin to hitch like
ragweed on the itch of a cough lets keep
talking like our lungs have no need for
replenishment lets keep speaking like
we have no need to stop

i.
There is a small bruise
spreading across your forehead
like wine across the body of a saint.
Your forehead is resting on my sheets,
cotton and white like sinners. Our bellies
are sweaty and naked. My belly has been bloated,
spread out and looking like a high peak, for over
a week, and I’ve never not wanted you here,
in my bed, on top of my bed, more than now:
our shirts are both blue, our shirts are both
lying on my floor. I am shivering, trembling
like moths in a burning house.

ii.
In a dream we are walking through
a train station that looks like an
alleyway and you are letting go of my hand
slowly and I am feeling like a church
made of grass and my limbs are feeling
like graves and across the train station
that looks like an alleyway there is a girl
in long clothes beckoning to you and you
come and I am sprung up drenched
in pools of my own sweat as though it were
July all over again.

Neighborhood boy dies this summer.
Now you are in love with a ghost.
At the funeral you hate your body. There
you realize that your thighs have been
growing rapidly, like an infant’s breath,
and your stomach looks mountain ranges.
The boy in the casket is thin as ember. You
swell with jealousy. You do not cry. The last
funeral you went to was for your grandfather
and you didn’t stop asking questions,
about where he was going and who he’d be
living with. Now you are all silent stuffed animal.
You have not gone to church in two years, have
only prayed when the boy has been listening.
You could not love Christ if you tried; you haven’t
tried. You only drink his blood to feel as though
you are being touched by hands that aren’t yours,
or your parents, or the boy’s. Your hands look
like pet birds, always. Your hands are trembling
underneath your dress, pinching at your stomach.

You wear gloves like they
are second hands or more

like a pair of ghosts either
way they are extra i.e.

not a part of you i.e. this
body (your body)
that you are in

should belong to a cow
but you have never stepped

onto a farm you imagine
a farm with soil black

and bitter with language (your
father worked on a farm

when you were younger you
did not know him but still

you grew a beard the way he did)
And now you wear gloves

they are secondhand

they are like graves
they span generations

~deleting this 4 now 4 reasons but if u buy a copy of the next issue of 'winter tangerine review' .....~