he asks how lovers
sit still when one’s hand is not
holding the other’s.

mania is everyone you have ever met hiding in your bones
and depression is feeling them break, this
is supposedly the beginning and
end of life but I heard that those you love are
not even as large as the sky (I just don’t know for sure).

the thing is
everyone is a body of water, but nobody is an ocean
we can drown inside ourselves and

most importantly, we can drown inside another person too
(I just don’t want to believe that the man
I love could hurt me anymore than he already has).
somewhere there must be an island.

Someone should explain to my parents that I have
very good reasons for liking other girls – for example, fields of flowers.
My mother, the gardener, must see the way our long hair
meets and forms an orchard
when I sleep beside a beautiful woman. Translucent
wrists, veins folded into a glasshouse –
if she wants to know how I can hold another girl’s hand, tell her that.
Farthest thing from unnatural, tell my mom
about how she and I build whole habitats when we touch – earth’s
parents, this is our offspring
trailing up everyone’s spine, curling around raspberries
as a toddler would climb onto furniture. Tell my parents that
I am not a lesbian to spite anyone, but
because I loved Mother Nature so much I thought there should be two.

From the age of seven, I decided it was easier
to throw myself against a wall
than to cause any harm to the stuffed animal under my arm.

I attribute feelings to everything that can be touched
or confirmed by science –
on May 23rd, the wind wanted a companion,
by July, it lived with a birdhouse, in a happy yellow –

and so I fear hurting a chair,
suffocating my hairbrush through tangles, angering some
blankets left unused at the end of our bed.

I do not fear hurt, I fear causing it. I smack my head with a
fist when mother says
that sometimes punching pillows can help ease pain
because I need to stay on their good side.

The Bible says
“I loved you at your darkest”
but I loved you
even when you were not mine.

(I am asking strangers if she is prettier than me
and feel the guilt of a burglar. I
am taking your property,
I can do what you
did even with my hands behind my back.)

You wrote in
your childhood notebooks
about feeling a love so great that
it puts you in handcuffs.

(You do not write about being in love)
you write about
being loved.

You have been loved twice
and took the
membrane from between my legs too.

I loved you when you were in the darkest part
of my body, when you were
under my skin.
(I make strangers remove pieces of you.)

I have my heart open like a winter morning, like his birthday gift
wrapped in brown paper bags
clutching at the shreds
as if loving me more will make me less sad. It has not:
see, my bones shatter like icicles,
I am weak. His affection melts like snowflakes on my tongue.

I want to taste him until the flesh pares
and someone can finally take me to the hospital where we kissed
have a glance of what’s intact,
better, what isn’t.

It has been December every day since I last visited you, Doc
but you have good eyes – can watch hell freeze in
my chest. The calendar says July, but my body doesn’t believe it
possessed from memories of a woman
retching in this very room here, behind a screen
you saw my boyfriend naked and behind your back I kissed him.

He will not say that sorrow is eating my heart out,
nor have my veins been cut by scissors –
that does not mean that he is not thinking it. See me cold and blue.