Some part of you is like the moon
softly glowing beside me on my too-small bed,
and the monumental loneliness you wear as a halo
must be a trick of the eye despite keeping me awake,
hunched over a folder of unedited poems at 2:45AM.
I wonder what the moon dreams of when the sun
tucks it into bed at dawn as your eyelids flutter
and your breathing hitches for a moment
before you roll over, face the wall,
parting clouds with a small sigh.

She has a bruise on her left knee
reminiscent of science-book nebulas,
and the veins reaching into her palm
look like the ivy vines wrapped around
the old oak at the end of my grandmother’s

driveway. But as she presses contacts into each eye,
her pupils dilate and contract like a camera
lens shifting to accommodate for motion
blurry as her unaided vision, and her wrists
crack as if made of ill-fitted cogs chipping away--

both a tempest-tide and midnight snowfall,
yet the sum of neither.

My chest feels tight as a blindfold
wrapped around my eyes, and
when did it get so hot in here?
Turn down the heat, someone, please
get me a glass of water and a bucket,
my stomach is turning,
I feel like throwing up.
Count: one, two, three, four
my heart races, my breath comes
hitched as the sound of pattering rain
outside, where the wind whistles
like the ringing in my ears.

Am I the only one awake?

I have an old farmhouse inside my chest,
wooden siding rotten in places and windows
fractured from too many winters,
the roof of which sags near the chimney--
faint smoke-clouds rising, and a light
glowing yellow inside the kitchen, a beckoning

invitation into the faded blue walls
full with portraits of four--my mother, father,
and little sister--brassy frames hung close
together above the wooden table,
nicks and scratches connecting each placemat
like dots of the coloring book page left
magnet-stuck to the refrigerator.

The countertops have grown dusty.
fruit-bowl collecting gnats and mold,
but the zinnias over the sink flourish, replaced
daily and blooming red as the teakettle
rusting on the only remaining stove-top burner,
the others broken, tossed into the garbage
beside the back door, which leads to a forest--

rib-like oaks bent and bowed
over the farmhouse, ivy vines coiled ‘round
each trunk, stretching limb to limb, weaving
webs tangled as the unruly branches from which
they hang, caressing the slumped rooftop
as if to remind the battered, tired building how,
despite everything, the hearth still smolders.

Standing on the scenic overlook,
(the one just a few miles out)
the city lights shine brighter than stars--
multicolored luminescence burning
its image on the insides of my eyelids,

and you, who drove me here,
(some 3AM adventure created
from a series of “I-don’t-know”s)
inch closer to the precipice,
sinking knee-deep in snow before
facing me with eyes that seem
backlit by street lamps and 24-hour signs.

You told me how you so loved
the feeling of being awake and alone,
while the city slept and yet--
I felt only loneliness,
stinging silence scratching marks,
my ribs battered from working
too hard, and I could feel them
cave in beneath solidarity’s weight--

alone, though you stood beside me
speaking of snowflake matters
that melted as they touched my ears,
your words dripping into my hair,
wasted on a mind preoccupied
with retrospective tunnel-vision:

First: the morning I woke to find my mother
screaming and stomping loud,
her plate broken on the carpet and
when she left, my father’s eyes, they
turned to sea-glass as he stood blank
(gone, I suppose, in a different way),
leaving me responsible for my little sister,
who hid behind the corner.

Then: the time I found my little sister
crying into my jersey-knit sheets and
asking me to help her skip school--
she couldn’t bear to face the boys
whose uninvited touch lingered
painful on her adolescent skin
(self-inflicted cuts would appear
in the following months)--
the memory drowned with whiskey and ***.

Later: my mother’s cancer--
no, liver failure that nearly killed
everyone who waited in the white-walled
hospital, bad food sour on our tongues,
stomachs cramping hard as if we felt
the surgery deep inside our own livers--
and I with my classwork, face buried,
because no one should see me cry.

I suppose the sandbag solidarity fell upon me
in parts, dragged me from lofty childhood,
each moment a simultaneous end and beginning
to all that followed and held me far behind--
further still, though you stand only
one foot away from me, near enough to reach
(and I can imagine my hand outstretched)--
somehow the cityscape seems closer.

The walls howl at night--
they shriek, they
moan aloud and wake me from sleep.
My House is haunted
(it’s been haunted for years)
with all the shadows I’ve projected
just to empty my tired mind. I
tip-toe quietly,
speak softly,
because my ghosts, too, are light sleepers.

A ghost used to dance in my mirror--
she moved like a picture taken in motion,
though her dress remained still as the background.
But she has since stopped dancing and
grown bruises beneath marigold eyes.

Once, she whispered to me “It’s not your fault,”
but her breath reeked of rotten flowers
left too long in a molding vase--
her skin delicate as dried viscaria petals,
flaking and crumbling ever since

a man’s uninvited touch lingered there.
She stands pretty from across the room,
though her beauty is measured by the distance
I have forced between us--
five feet and counting.