you are sitting next to the boy who drove you
to the fast food restaurant, who drove you to
prom, who drives you crazy,
the one tapping his fingers
down the swell of your forearm,
the one you love in pictures, in postcards,
in senior photographs with his tie askew.

you love him the only way you know how,
call him crying and ask for help
but desperation is not reciprocal,
and needing someone will not
make them need you.
it has taken you much of a lifetime to
learn this.

in the passenger seat,
in the plastic bucket chair,
in the doorway as you convince them to stay open.
you are sending dark globes flying down a polished lane,
all flashing lights and glossy surfaces,
stale breath and obscenities.
you bowl a gutter ball.
you bowl a strike.
this will be the night you realize
he fits you no better than the lurid shoes
cramping your toes.

at his house, at his kitchen table,
in the chair he eats breakfast in every morning,
you are staring down the fist-shaped
hole in his wall, jagged edges
and dark spaces,
it keeps showing up in your poems.

on the artificial green of the mini golf place
down the street,
on the metal bench with the arms
too cold to hold you,
on the luminescent dance floor as he says your name,
watching him heal from heart surgery
wondering what you’d have to do
to make him love you as much
as his body loves catastrophe.

in the backseat with the broken subwoofer.

under the fluorescent lights, your hands unintelligible,

you are crying but you don’t know it yet.

here I am leaving you warnings, here I am
singing you to sleep,
here I am bookmarking your memories
with the words you should have heard.

when he speaks, listen to his words but do not
picture him speaking, do not crinkle with the creases
beside his eyes. do not fall.

he will not catch you.
he will not care.

do not call him next week, on your birthday.
do not tell him about how your father made you cry
or how you feel alone at night.

he will not love you for it.

here you are reading the pages you’ve written about him. don’t cry.
wrap the ribbon from the bouquet he gave you
around the handle of your dresser.
do not think he’ll give you anything else.

on the sand glazed with seawater,
on the overstuffed couch with the cool kiss of a cell phone
against your ear,
in the arching concert hall with the chapped wooden seats,
you are saying his name.
he is there and there and there, laced through your life
like a child’s frayed ribbon, unraveled and imperfect and beloved.

he is beautiful and he is broken
and you love him for the scars he leaves
but you can’t will people back together.
you cannot fix this.

he is telling you he’s leaving and he means it.

he is not yours to miss.

his lips are on your pulse point and
his hand is spreading the ribs in your chest,  
you never realized that being this close to
someone meant opening a door.
welcoming them in. they make
their home beneath your skin and you’re
not sure if you want them,
their laughter and their touches.
their bare chests and their breath.

you are a building so many people
have tried to wound their way into.
there are fault lines in your breastbone
and a falter in your pulse and
these days your palms are more
scar tissue than skin.
every breath hurts and
the walls of your heart are covered
in graffiti you can’t stop yourself
from reading. this night is just another
room in a hallway that smells
of wet paint.

burn this house down.
leave the cushions on the carpet
and the dishes in the sink,
smash the mirror with its smudges
before you get the chance to think.

this has nothing to do with forgiveness.
this is how you wake up next to him
and tell him to leave.
make some new graffiti.
sign your name on every surface,
fall in love with the contours of your shadow
kissing the floors.
you are made of smoke and dust and ashes,
you are ready to face the day,
and there’s no room in you for anyone
who doesn’t want to stay.

This is what it is to fall
for a boy with blurry edges.
He will be unfinished but you will trust
him anyway. This is how you learn
how tenderness can be the texture
of a hand in the darkness, the chill
kiss of wind on your cheek, something
you never saw coming.

This is how not to write a sad
story. Say something a little
sweeter. Smile like that night he locked
his keys in his car and you spent
four hours learning how to break
into something
you had no right to be in.

Forgive him for being one more door
your hands shook too hard
to open.

This is how your song goes.
You bring the lyrics and he brings
the tempo, you choreograph the dance
and he forgets the steps but you
forgive him.

You had a dream once where you got
married, you never told him that,
the wedding was in your study
and he showed up half
an hour late. You cried. You hugged him.
You were in love.
Even your dreams
taste like disappointment.

This is how melancholy marks you,
hopeful and hurting,  
how you make stained glass
windows out of the shards inside your chest.
This is how you bleed and make
it something beautiful.

You went to his party and you swam
in the pool. You ate his ice cream and you
took his love. His refrigerator looks
like a love letter to your face but he won’t
speak to you in person, you wonder
when you stopped
being two people in the same picture
and started smelling like
wet paint.

Your life like a song you sing to yourself,
an old one, the kind where
the words come easy.
His name like a tattoo you shouldn’t
have gotten, a memory you can’t give back.
How did you end up here.

This is where the music stops,
the band packs up, your family kisses
you and walks out the door.
This is when the party’s over
and no one wants your sadness
anymore. Vibrating
and waiting. You have lived all
your life to hit this note.

Heart like a washing machine. Heart like
a peanut butter sandwich. Heart cracked open
on the surgery table, hopeful and broken.
Haggard and raw. They tell you when
you use a muscle too much
you can hurt it.

It is beautiful to be the architect of your
own injuries, to choose who will
do you harm. To understand that healing
is just another way of getting stronger.

This is how you look out the window
every night and forgive him.

His face like a mistake you could
have made and always did,
like there could still be something more
than this.

This is what it is to love
in a world where people can be broken.
To believe they can be fixed.

Tell me about the day our hip bones
said hello.

Your eyebrows curved
like cupped hands,
how that was more than I’d expected,
how the hope bleeding through your fingers
stained my temples when you touched them.

You believe and it makes me want
to build you a skylight,
sunk in the rafters like a baby tooth
peering shyly from dark gums,

my heart is a broken down *****
but you play it just right.

You’ve got the body of a musician and
there’s something beautiful about your
skeleton being on display,
your shoulders are blades
and they cut right through me.  

I was a safety deposit box,
holding things that were not mine.
I was springtime in New England,
all baited anticipation and lasting chill.

You are an Arizona rainstorm.
You are moisture in the desert, thunder in the silence,
utterly unprecedented warmth.

I have been many things, but never once
enough.

I may hide my face when I cry but please
do not ever understand that as an act of contrition.
when you weep, your hurt is something sacred.
do not ever be ashamed.
I will sing you to sleep with that song that says
when you weep the world cries with you, that the ocean is a sea of tears
shed for the pleasure of sharing your pain.

I have been springing leaks from other people
for as long as I have had fingers to plug the cracks,
spent many hours wrestling with the rusted faucet of my feelings.
I have never learned how to turn it off.
I know your sadness seems like a suit
custom-made to fit but I also know you as
a girl who is capable of growing. spread your shoulders. tear the seams.
there is a certain satisfaction that comes from the destruction
of everything you were supposed to love but never did.

I should know.
I spent last night with only the seam ripper to talk to,
shedding the last of my dovetail layers.
we both know sharp objects keep their secrets well but if you listened closely
you might hear it whisper about how it pricked my finger
and found poetry in my veins.
You will find that people write things that make you want to believe them
and that sometimes belief will hurt too,
but I promise you the things you place in the palms of hope
will be given back in the shape of other people’s hands.

And I know there are days when your sugar plum feet
are raw and melting from the puddles
but just remember that sometimes words are made of letters
that we can slide into each other from
and a crack between two people is just
a new seam waiting to be sewn.

I am sorry about the letters I wrote you
in red ink, the swells and valleys
of your body that I never
learned to love.
I am sorry for making you a war zone,
for the carnage and the crime,
the cruel topography of the boot prints I
left inside of your skull.

Especially those. You see, I was taught how to
choke the things I love
with fists stained blue and bleeding,
to shake till they are limp as a rag doll
and cry over their prone form,
but never how to touch the planes of your face
without leaving frost on your wings,
ice behind the shutters of your eyes.

I’m sorry for all the time you spent
tending the garden of your sorrow,
I’m sorry that your tears
didn’t help the flowers bloom. I’m sorry that
the bathroom mirror knows you best
wild-eyed at 2 am, asking it ragged and heartsore
who will love me now. who could
love me.

I’m sorry that when I say I’m trying to be better
it sounds like an apology for not being good enough.
I’m sorry that there are days when your poems
read like grocery lists of all the lies
I told you when you cried.  

Forgive me.
I’m sorry we never learned how to
fall into and not through,
sorry the slopes of the letters in the words
we speak aren’t the bridges we mean
them as.

I’m sorry I buried you under the couch
in that therapist’s office. your tears were
saltwater I couldn’t allow myself to drink.
I lived on a desert island
and could not permit myself the
pleasure of a mirage.

I’m sorry that I never believed you could be
someone I could understand.

I’m sorry that you’ve spent so much
time looking for someone to
love you.
I’m sorry it couldn’t be me.

A good way to feel lonely
is to drive the highways at night.
Fall in love like the headlights
that never touch,
only pass by,
feel like writing poetry
about the margins
that define missed connections.

Go home and make
as little noise as possible,
turn the lights off behind you.
You know how to make it look like
you were never here.
You think this
is a sad thing to be good at.

A good way to breathe
is to wake before the sun
and swim in the chlorinated pool,
partitioned and glassy,
think about brushing elbows
with the body in the lane next to
yours just to
see if you’re still solid.
You know you are less dense
than water. These days it feels
as if someone could pass a hand straight
through you.

Pull yourself out of the lane
and pad to the showers,
scour away the clamminess
with steam and liquid soap,
think about all the lives that intersect
in locker rooms and sit
in silence for a few minutes
just to listen.
You like the way the words echo,
just in case you missed them
the first time.
You always miss
them the first time.

A good way to escape
is to order packages from stores
you’ve never heard of,
diagrammed and backlit, fall in love
with the mystery of receiving.
Feel the calendar days
like empty spaces, hollow and aching,
missing parts of your body that can only
be filled by the miracles about to arrive
in the mail.

The postman crunches steadily
up the driveway, gravel
buried in the treads of his
boots. You think this is beautiful, to
carry pieces of where you’ve been
like last night’s spinach
in your teeth. Shameful and secret. Dark
and delightful. Something not everyone
is capable of loving. Lock
eyes like hands,
thank him as he turns away.

Think about
asking him to shake out his
boots, so all the roads
he’s seen can stay
even after he leaves.
You need
less things to leave.

A good way to mourn
is to write poetry at night,
chasing a tail that tastes like
mixed metaphors and
melancholia,
you have told your story
so many different ways
and none of them
have ever made him love you.  

Think about memorizing
his handwriting
and using it as your own.
Write grocery lists that could be his
and taper your signature to lines
so sharp they pierce and wound.
If you’re going to use his hand,  
make it hurt.

The curves of these letters
do not belong to you.
Your hands are so broken
they can do nothing but miss him,
and there are suddenly too many
teeth in the sickle of your smile.
This may be one fight you never seem
to stop losing and I know most nights
the lines of his shoulders cut like knives
but believe me,
this is the most exquisite
way to bleed.
If you’re going to hurt,
make it poetry.

the wooden sticks are in the fire
and never have I ever
seen your face in the flames.
the hair on your knuckles singing,
the hair on my head smelling like smoke,
I will still be breathing charcoal as I fall asleep.

I will still be tasting melted sugar on my chapped lips,
salt in the hollow at the base of my throat.
incandescence behind my closed eyes.

we flicker and we fall.

play that song. the one with the
sweeping rhythm, the one you could
lose a person in.

lose a person in it.

close your eyes.
swing a little. dance that dance that looks
like spontaneity, like you’re keeping me guessing,
like you’re waiting to take flight.

don’t go.

I put the pen to the paper and
I try to make the meaning,
you dance
near the fire and you try not to get burned.

I walk back home and close the door
and you sing me to sleep
silently
from across the street.

sing a little sweeter. I’m still here.

thank you for that bonfire smile.
thank you for the warmth.
we have seen this movie many times
but I must confess that I still gasp.
I still weep.
I still beg you not to leave me right before

you leave me.

I have written this poem many times
waiting for a different ending
but never have I ever been this close
to the flames.

set me alight.

you are a scar that only I can see
in the mirror.
I have already thrown too many pieces of paper
into the flames trying to write you as
a beauty mark or a burn.

come here.

touch me.

it has been many years since I have dreamed
of breathing fire.

You are my favorite room to cry in
and I see your face in every “If Found,
Please Return” sign I pass.
This one’s for you.
I draft up posters that say
I lost a boy, you know the type, the one
with the eyes like two-way mirrors
that you can see
into but not through,

the one with salsa music in
his bloodstream,
the one with the arms always wrapped around
someone who is not me.
Sometimes I close my eyes and I sing
you the song about how the world
never stops turning
while you dance four hundred miles
away pressed against
the meter of another heart.

A different beat.
I’d send you an invitation to my party
but I think your address has changed
and I’m too afraid to ask.
I ask our friends instead.

I have forgotten how to write you poems
that do not read like eulogies
to something long dead.

you will meet a boy and he won’t know how to love you
but he will want to touch you until you smell like his hands.
you are not required to let him.
you are not less of a person if you do.

some nights you will stay up drinking until the sun
greets you like butter on your toast,
and it will hurt in the most exquisite way you have ever known.
there is some pain that we are better for having felt.

some nights shame will come to you like a dog you kicked
in fear the night before,
bruised and aching, but letting yourself be something
you never thought you could be
is not something you need ever apologize for.

the friends you make without trying are the only ones
you’ll ever need.
the friends whose bed you can sleep in without fear
are the best ones you’ll ever find.

being afraid is the worst thing you’ll ever do to yourself.
fear is a neighbor who bring you sugar
without you even having to ask,
but I promise you that leaving your front door open
will let so many better things in.

and when you feel small, remind yourself
that at the very least
you are a productive member of the water cycle.
you drink, and you cry.

in the pulsing basement
with the blue lights people curve
their bodies to others like twin
quotation marks, the beginning
or the end of something, a place so
many words could go but

for the music swallowing them whole.
when will I stop being afraid of
you long enough to look you in the eye?
don’t tell me a single ****** thing.
it’s so hard to like people
when you know too much about them.

hands on hips press fingerprints
into bone, broad palms on slim silhouettes,
so many people falling for shadows
that we have to keep the lights turned low.  
stumbling on the swells of the bass,
just looking for arms to catch us.
we dance like we need another body
to support us, like there’s something here
left to save. if I don’t try to kiss you
will you stay?

please don’t give a **** about me.
please, just take me home so I can fit
the shards of my spine to yours
and break myself again in the morning.
everything is happening on the wrong side
of a wall I built myself
but when you throw me up against it
I think I can hear my heart a little better.

our friends are dancing next to us
and I watch them like they know what they’re
doing, like here’s a lesson I was born to learn,  
I have lived this life so many
different ways and none of them have
ever made him love me.

a girl tows a boy up the spiral staircase,
dark mascara tracing the shadows
beneath her eyes.

I wonder if they’ve broken
each other yet.
I wonder if they’ve found
what they’re looking for.

You haven’t touched me
in ninety-one days. I don’t
know how to tell you.

I haven’t seen your
face in twenty-six days but
it does not miss me.

I’m not allowed to
say I need you so I’ll say
this instead. I care.

I do think I love
you. I don’t think it’s enough.
But I still read the

notes you wrote me. I
still trace your signature with
my eyes. You should know

the spider of your
handwriting still crawls into
my heart late at night.

I haven’t called you
crying in four hundred and
fifty-seven days.

I had not written
you a poem like this for four
hundred fifty-eight.