every heartbreak at 21
will make the ground beneath your feet tremble
and you will feel disposable
like the impression they will leave you behind
on white-and-blue-striped creased sheets.
like the spotify playlist youve forgotten about
and the walls you thought were impenetrable.
but when youve learned
that your legs stand like the Parthenon
instead of autumn twigs
you'll unlearn the concept
of a boy's ability
to cut through your steel teeth
and garden bed tongue.

every heartbreak at 22
will teach you to plant flowers
and not to pick them.
and when a wound reopens
like salt on papercut
you'll recall a memory
not too far
and you will have mastered turning
those tsunami eyes
into a calm sea
instead of an enforced desert.

you are 23;
and the city could no longer fit
into the palm of your hands.
you'll realize it's overbearing enough
that people break hearts all the time
and will never have to worry
about seeing the damage
on their morning train.

you are 23
and healing
doesnt quite mean like what it used to.
every heartbreak
comes back in a second.
and in the next,
you get on with your day;
the same creased sheets,
the same bitter-tasting coffee,
the same route home.
only that home
always varied in meaning.

In the dream i run toward dead ends
that resemble concrete fists;
and we know that ghosts can only walk through walls
because they’re empty
but you’ll find creases on your bed sheets
just as vacant.
And the impression people leave behind
is something you will always take to bed
when the little yellow-lit squares in
those tall city boxes meant more than just
“other”.
and so what if we feel too much?
they say one word can stand a chance
in changing an entire meaning
and so what if we feel too much, despite
— the coffee that had gotten cold
or the pillow-stitched manifestos
that were only ever meant for display
or the flimsy dots in the sky
we’ve yet to make sense of.
Your vulnerability is no one else’s
needle felt ball.
Do not hide it like baby teeth,
do not trim your sharp edges
for their butterknife.
Do not pick out
the quiet statice petals
just because you’ll never have to
worry about seeing the fracture
when you’re gazing down
at an entire field.
"why has empathy become a relic?", she asks.
"i guess that's just how it is now."
it shouldn't.
it shouldn't.
it shouldn't.

Howd we end up here
where the music is mellow
and we’re up dancing with two left feet
after two many glasses of cheap wine.
Howd we manage the keep a veil
on the moon
like a ***** habit
I will have kissed you and meant it
And we will have parted like strangers
at the bar’s parking lot by 3 am,
but only until we’re lonely again.

I'm always talking about love
when I mean to talk about loneliness.
I find my tongue whirling into dissonance
on my too-warm skin canvas
spattered with blood
that blossom up like watercolor.
Maybe there's something
to be romanticized there.

My mother says that
you can try to smudge out faces
but the past
can still hold you by the throat--
even on a ripe ten-degree Thursday night
on Pearl Drive street.

Purple veins don't show up un-invited.
Chipping yellow paint
on the nails you bite on
doesn't exactly scream sunshine.
I've lost count of the times
I've burned my tongue on a memory;
lost track of the things I am hurt by
but don't know how to talk about.

when was the last time
you reached into a mirror
to get a grasp of someone
other than a stranger?

these days the noose
comes in a fever dream
in the form of honeysuckle vines
perfect coiled around my neck.

So often are women branded
with a scarlet letter
the moment they learn
the definition of the word ‘choice’.
So often is dissent catapulted out of crooked teeth
and whose twisted tongues belong
nowhere close to the temple
that is our bodies
in which we are the god.
The valley of our chest,
ripe with liberty;
a womb like an unmapped terrain
you cannot navigate through
for one cannot simply trudge
a course he knows nothing about.
Our vulnerability is not a curse,
it is our compass;
and your preference versus our worth
makes your jaw grow soft
like how you prefer our nails untainted with red
or our hair longer than short
or our feet glued to the marbled tiles
of the kitchen floor
or laws forged to protect anything
but us —
it looks a lot like silence.

You do not get to weep
for what i choose to lose
in order to not lose myself.
You do not get to dress
your iron fist
with empathy
that is only ever in its loudest,
when it is the emptiest.