He wants me to shut up about before and after, he doesn’t
sleep anymore to throw off a balance
between now and then,
here and later, when it happened in regards to tonight. My mind
works as a clock of who we have become since:
my body only exists in the place of Our Great Divide.
Morning is just sheets of velvet upon a
lover’s breast, to be peeled, to reveal her strawberry scars.
Evening is when I feel her fists inside my skin as if
I am being penetrated by icebergs
and I cry, your **** hasn’t been the same since it happened.
The blood seems to get lost in the train-track
to your veins. In our divide,
I wonder if most of it was passed to her half of your heart
but that thought makes me so sad I remember I am mostly water
whereas there is simply the milk of her curves:
I have the talent
of turning myself inside out when I want to be dead.
She just curdles. I was once the same,
he wants me to shut up about before and after but at least I
can cry on anniversaries without needing a calendar or
rotting the post of my ex-boyfriend’s bed.

i'm more of the
jackie kennedy
in this affair.

i could never do
what marilyn does
for you.

Her breast of broaden chest
uncovered slight
by a sheet pulled across in the night
tangled by twitching feet
a mixture of movements
unsure toes singing
songs of unsettlement.

And her brow
furrowed as her teeth set
and clench
What does her throat yearn to garble?
instead of yarble
as her wrists slither along
like Cleopatra's snakes
that whisper trails of burnt red
and blotched white.

Bedded portrayals of lovely betrayals.

Because the guilt is clawing up
transpiring from the floor
like a mutant through a wall
weaving through taught bed springs
as a mouse after cheese
bursting from the indented mattress
like a monster in a horror movie
to grasp her
and pull her
until her screams ring out sharp
and scissor through paper dreams
before the weight crushes her.

Decapitated
as the Red Queen did to cards,
It was only a game
and always,
as silly games do,
someone had to lose.

And she
unfortunately
Won.

I am pretty sure my love will be leaving me soon
for a woman whose skirt does not lift in the zephyr of her sadness:
we kiss and we tie
maraschino cherry stems with our tongues. The
same labyrinth puts rosy skin in our teeth, here is his ***** hair
knotted with saliva. When I think I have everything,
it just means that we are stuck together –
I realize it does not mean that we are happy together. I think
someone poisoned the water
with glue, and it is I who dispenses more to let my love escape me.
He is as happy as a child who has finished a puzzle
except for a single missing piece, repeating the movements
again and again. That has got to bring it back.
For seven months, we have been handed the gift of pretending I
can feel the inner-workings of who he is and why he is
and I am pretty sure he knows he never has
to pretend again. It is there in the silences: across the room,
across the ocean where hundreds of babies have died,
babes with mothers and fathers and parents who weren’t divorced.
All I hear is my love toying with a Rubik’s cube
he never learned to complete. I have a Magic 8 ball saying
I should let him go. I mostly worry about telling my mom, who will
tell my therapist and then we will have to
close too many doors. As long as I am sad, they are locked. A
key is stuck in the mud or in someone’s molars –
my room is empty, the air is quiet, and he has not even left me yet.

I cannot say that I write about you
because we are in love,
because you died,  or because you broke my heart;
moths unravel those possibilities like yarn.

You are picked up by fairies,
a powder, the scent discharged by dryer sheets.

To be honest,
I write about you because you did the same to me;
you had me in the crook of your arm,
a dusty novel composed by
southerners, although only read in the north.

I cannot say that I write about you
at all, these verses are not about your existence
but how you could have
opened the world as if it were a book of mine.

a tidal wave from my heart to my ****
it's disgusting. I adore          you
arteries pumping harder than your hips
where you've touched leaves electric spiders; dancing.
"i want to ******* so bad, right here on the ground"
pushed up against my car: i cant feel my teeth
grab my hair just ******* pull it
smile in the middle of a sloppy kiss; my face still stings
it's disgusting. I adore          you

I do not imagine suicide as impulsive,
rather the day I wake up and travel thousands of miles
in my thoughts
to tell everything I have inhabited goodbye.

Nature will have the instinct to swallow my skin
in its blanket, the breeze whispers
to my boyfriend that I love him anyway.

A crew of mushrooms shall lay me on their breast or
beneath their umbrellas as in a rabbit hole

and upon lying down, petals spill
across my tired eyelids, and the breeze murmurs
that it is okay: I will not be missed because I will have
nature holding my bones the entire time.

She is there, playing my hair like a harpsichord,
whisking me away.