I felt at home with you in your empty apartment,
where your mother called me “darling” and “honey” for vacuuming,
and I sat on the floor in the middle of your living room,
imagining I had just bought my own place.
I listen as you furnish the rest of your life out loud to me.
I say we should build safe houses around each other
and call it home.

Now this is where I tell you,
your kisses are like warm honey.
And I don’t even know what that tastes like,
but I swear that is the right simile.
You are made from poetry.
You are tightropes
Overhead, knotted together.
You are the netting beneath the act.
Somehow you balanced me when all I ever felt like I was doing
was crashing into you.
I say ‘be prepared to be tackled when I am happy’
because you are like throwing the front door of my house open,
before sprinting into my yard to peer at the first flowers of spring growing.
My heart slows down to a jog recovery when you’re around.

So I tell you,
your kisses are like foggy breath in the winter.
They’re the frost on my dad’s car in the morning.
Frost like the dusting on my bangs when I was little
and walked into elementary school with wet curly hair.

I tell you,
your kisses are like going on a plane for the first time,
but also like getting off at the airport in your hometown.
Sure, you enjoyed the flight.
But you’re happy to be home.

The last time I saw you, I was the splitting image of the Butterfly Project.
I thought pen could save me.
In middle school, they impress upon you so much about ink poisoning,
But not enough about what to use besides ink.
I need the butterflies on my wrist, I say.
I’ve been doing some research, and I found that
Butterflies can see the color red.

I tell you they tumbled down my arms.
The butterflies, they somersault
Over red crevices in my wrist and palm;  
Bat their wings like eyelashes holding back tears;
Rush air over wounds with their wings
Because oxygen heals.

I never said I didn’t like the taste of oxygen.
It just wasn’t my flavor yet.

Maybe the reason I like film photography so much
Is because an author named Janet Fitch once said she felt like
An underdeveloped photograph,
Her image rising to the surface.
Maybe my photograph is overexposed.
My photograph is of the whiteness in my mind when I hurt myself,
And I need chemicals like fixer
To bring an image to the front and center.
The rule of thirds divided me into two parts self-hatred
And one part hatred for hating myself:
Perhaps there’s one chemical I need to soak my brain in;
Perhaps I missed the perma-wash step
And I didn’t fully rinse away the negative solution on my film.

And if I am to talk about steps,
Then I am a spiral staircase that hasn’t had the steps built in yet
Because I don’t understand how to attach them.
I’ve forgotten how to hold onto railings.
My palms are splintered because I land on them when I fall.

Now I never said I wasn’t worth recovery.
I just couldn’t say that I was.

I am the embodiment of not wanting to get on the roller coaster because I’m scared,
but also being the roller coaster myself.
I just don’t know how to stop.

You’d be mistaken if you said the stones
didn’t feel hotter than the sand beneath your feet.
Casting circles along the ground, light
shimmers between the trees. Flowers
reach up to it, along the way shedding petals.
I walk on, gathering about me my dress.

I’ve found recently that I’m happiest in a dress.
Reminiscing memories of prom, I imagine a floor of stones
instead of tile and a corsage of intricate petals
And a sea of feet,
Swaying to a slow song, like flowers
sway into the light

in Sanibel. Imagine our venue as Sanibel where light
brightens every picture and blesses every dress;
where the appearance of flowers
isn’t just a corsage or pretty weeds poking through stones;
where sand adornes feet
and wind means a breeze of perfumed petals.

Twirling down from the trees, petals
blink with color in the light
and stick to ocean-water bathed feet
shaded by my dress.
Days are spent winding along stones
of Sanibel’s flowing garden of flowers

And it becomes captivating. I find elegance in flowers
like prom attendees. They bat their eyes like petals
alight softly on stones.
I see so much light,
I would twirl and twirl and twirl in my dress,
spinning on feet


And if my feet
never touch the ground, at least they’ve danced to lush flowers
and at least my dress
has spilled out around me, meeting petals
soaking light,
cloaking stones.

In Sanibel, I dress for bare feet.
I let myself not be heavy as a stone, I let myself flower.
And I collect petals, to remind me things wither without light.

You’d be mistaken if you said the stones
didn’t feel hotter than the sand beneath your feet.
Casting circles along the ground, light
shimmers between the trees. Flowers
reach up to it, along the way shedding petals.
I walk on, gathering about me my dress.

I am not
silk linens for you to drape
across the arm of the couch
like a waiter
adorns his arm with
a porcelain-colored napkin
that never bears a
crease.

I am not
glass;
the vase that shattered,
and leaked clear blood
that lapped across the floorboards
and decorated the
suffocating
flowers with invaluable beads
cannot possibly define me.

I feel sensitivity
when a frost
chills its way about my teeth,
but the state is not penned
into my sexuality.

Now if I were to shoot
a bayonet
that belongs within the leather jacket
of a man’s
costly callused and
blistered
hands with, instead, my own
that were spun
from the fabric of my dress,

I would aim
for the notion
that labels women—
like we are merely a crate of pomegranates—
as “gentle, domestic brutes”
and my gunshot would echo
with the shout of a
vindication

on the rights of women
that can be written down between the
sheer
of our tyrannical stockings.

I’ll cut my hair
to the length of controversy;
for if I must rebel,
my passion for women’s equality
   begins at the roots.

I need you to know
that I’m like a flower. I’ll wilt
and crinkle if you forget
about me, even for
just a sun-adorned
day. I need to be watered, constantly—
but not constantly enough that I am
drowned and submerged
under the shower.
There is a correct amount to
overwhelm me. If you caress
my petals too roughly, I’ll bruise…
And if you pull them off, they may never have
the audacity
to grow back.

Death
does not know of the phrase “I am breaking up with you,”

nor the feeling of hatred
you have for yourself;

death
only knows
the deterioration of your body
as a whole.

Death
does not know of
the darkness plaguing your mind,
or the crack you feel in your heart.

Death only knows of
a lack of nutrients,
or a lack of blood,
or a lack of breath.

Death does not apologize,
nor give you a second chance.

Most importantly,
death will not love you;
death will not give you the opportunity
to recover.