I am lonely, not lonely

the choice up to now
has been mine

I will slip away
(at will)
into the recesses
of small shops
of empty rooms
or quiet spaces

to avoid her touch
or his gaze
or their judgement
our subconscious desires.

But all swallowed up

deep in the belly
of fog, of smoke
a vast, impenetrable

night sky

suddenly the
all-encompassing fear
grips me

washes over
so suddenly

I realize
I have not lived at all

that I am
suddenly
(forcibly)
the only one left.

Down a long, winding road
that trudges on endlessly
into the fading silhouette of trees
and broken sidelines

dim headlights

I am lonely, not lonely.

After all this compression, perhaps I am becoming something after all. Crawling away from my potential worth I feel myself writhing my way from between the rocks, taking quick, shallow breaths —learning to breathe again after all this time. Each inhale still feels heavy and constricted, and every exhale still brings a sense of dread for the rise and fall of my chest but I am moving forward. Even relieved, my ribcage is adjusting painfully to the freedom, coping with more lung space; a gift I received from you.

Optimism: I’m in love. Pessimism: I’m dying. Realism: We all are. It’s hard to say goodbye with chapped lips and clumsy words, but empty pockets feel better when they’ve spent more time capturing your body heat than bits of metal and paper. —I didn’t look at the cup long enough to know if it was half empty or half full because it was dropped before I could reach the sink. Now it’s just a bunch of shattered glass beneath bare feet in the middle of winter. My hands had become so numb just before they touched warm water for the first time since the chill and it was a surprising sensation —an unexpected pain as I started to feel again; you feared frostbite but I only thought about the painful walk home.

My boyhood pocketknife
Sits in the bottom of my bedside table
My skin is healing
But I still feel a little cut
I thank God every time I leave
Say goodbye to flat land
the long stretches of road
I forget the peonies
but they still bloom in me
My old backyard is littered
with noise and ***** snow
Cold trickles into the lungs
Slowly, like it's afraid to let go
Each exhale is proof we're alive
A cloud of condensation
curling away from mouths
Small, sleeping dragons
in an even smaller city
where all the jewels are gone

It is almost sunset but it is still too hot. She sits next to me and passes over a mason jar of crushed ice and lemonade and I take it gratefully into my hands. Instead of drinking it, I rest it against my forehead and allow the condensation from the glass to drip down the sides of my face with closed eyes. I take more of it with my fingers to drench the back of my neck, but my palms burn more for it. When I sigh because this small jar does not alleviate my apparent and immediate threat of heat stroke, she laughs at me.

She is my best friend. There was a never conscious moment that I made that decision, it just happened. Before she'd joined me on her concrete stoop I'd been turning over the idea of whether or not there was an exact moment that I'd perceived her differently, but could not pinpoint it. I’d been eyeing the patches of dirt and dead grass scattered within her yard, listening to her hum If I Ain't Got You out of tune, mumbling some of the more repetitive words here and there, picking out the sounds of her fetching things as she sets them on the counters of her run down kitchen. I try to guess what she is doing as I am hearing it, but feel unwilling to join her. It is even hotter inside her house since her air-conditioner is broken. We are devastated.

After a moment of silence she narrows her eyes against the sun tells me that she misses him. I nod, but say nothing. Three of us sat here last year and suddenly the heaviness of his absence rests between us. She quickly changes the subject and tells me she wants to start jogging because when school comes back around she’ll be thin, for sure. “I’m going to be so ****, I’m not even joking.” I smile at her determination. She talks about a girl in our year that everyone calls pretty, but I shrug. She asks if I think she is pretty. I can only nod my head. I can’t compliment her properly because I haven’t found the right words to tell her that it’s not about being thin. That is not what makes her perfect. Not to me.

I never liked her lemonade, but I begin to drink it anyway, thankful that some of the ice has melted fast enough to be a bit watered down. I don’t mind. It made it less sugary. The first time she’d given me lemonade, her father had laughed and said, “If you eat the ice, it’s like a dessert,” not knowing that dessert was literally the last thing I ever wanted. I have never been fond of sweets.

She laughs a little and crunches away on her ice and I cringe. She knows I think it’s an awful sound, but I’d grown so accustomed to it after the years of hearing it. For her, it was a typical summer treat. It wasn’t even real lemonade. In her freezer were small cylinders of an odd, condensed yellow mush that they’d dump into a plastic pitcher and then add water to. Remembering this, I no longer feel like drinking it. I hand it to her.

“Don’t want it?” she asks. I shake my head, watching neighbor girls sit under a tree with a small dollhouse as I wait for her to finish both jars. I don’t like the way it leaves the back of my throat feeling dry anyway and I never feel less thirsty after drinking it. She sets the empty jars between us and we talk about where we’ll go this summer, what movies we’ll see —lamenting that there really haven’t been any good ones recently and that maybe it’d be way more fun to see if we could convince her parents to let her join my family at the lake house. She doesn’t want to swim at all but seems excited to lay on the dock and get a bit of color.

She wants to take pictures. She rises from the stoop to return the jars to her kitchen sink and grab her camera and we walk through her neighborhood. I trail behind her consciously as she raises it to her eye, letting my fingers run along her neighbor’s chain-link fences, dreading the moment she finds a way to somehow sneak me into the frames of her photographs. She’s seemed more eager to try and capture me now that I am taller. I have grown so much in just a few months that I’m not sure how to handle my limbs just yet. They are too long and too thin and I am strangely aware of them —but even more aware of where she points her lens.

We find out that there is construction behind her neighborhood and sneak past the half constructed fences, large barricades, and signs (Keep Out, Construction Ahead). It is an odd place for nicer houses, we decide —right next to the ghetto. She laughs at the brick wall and shakes her head. “That’s not going to keep them out.” But it looks intimidating anyway. Maybe that’s the point.

In the middle of the area rests newly planted trees shading a small, wooden gazebo. They overlook a manmade pond, just large enough to swim in. She knows me too well. My first instinct is to jump in so she dares me to. Practicing self-restraint I tell her all I want is the shade and I lean against the railing of the gazebo instead. I watch her snap more photos —of leaves, of ripples, of her feet, the construction. She asks again if I want to join her and shrugs at my reluctance. She dips short legs in the water and casts a teasing glance in my direction. Her pink hair looks silly against her warm face and I smile. She tells me she knows I want to, that I’m a *****. I shake my head. She draws it out mockingly and threatens to take a picture. (I cover my face with my hand.) “Paaaaansssyyyyy.” She laughs and tells me to just get in. “You gunna just take that?” I was a lot less eager to break rules, but no. I wasn’t going to just ‘take that.’

So I jump in, glad to be cool. The momentary weightlessness frees me for just a small space of time. I feel it cling to my skin when I surface, but my clothes make me feel twice as heavy. I want all of my thoughts to feel the way your body does underwater. Light. Careless. Far away.

Suddenly, behind us, someone is shouting at us in an indistinguishable accent. We trade horrified glances, swearing we catch the word cops, and we bolt, leaving a frantic trail of water and wet foot prints to evaporate behind us. We don’t stop running until we get back to her porch, the sun fully set, and we collapse against her concrete stoop out of breath, laughing much harder than we should. “Oh my god,” she repeats over and over again with exasperated giggles and small gasps for air. My heart cannot be tamed, like it's run ahead of me. I’m sure I won’t be able to find it for a while.

“Oh my god...” She tells me she doesn’t want to run anymore and I cast her a confused glance and tell her we’re definitely in the clear, but she shakes her head. “No, I mean all summer. Forget being thin,” she says. Suddenly I feel her in that missing section of my chest. “Who wants to run in this heat?”

I want to kiss you so fiercely that I finally understand the depth at which I fall and the height at which you rise. I will meet you again, even still —in the center of it all ("Like a ring."); the two of us caught in a tangled mass of scarlet cord, wound and knotted so tightly around us that I almost feel indistinguishable from you. ("Two bodies, two lives, one soul.") I can feel all that red humming and chanting beneath my ribcage like a war song, running through my veins to deliver to my heart a desperate echo of longing.

These days
I am too cold
My palms are at rest
Down for the long winter
My coordination and
dexterity will hibernate
And I'll cloak this poor body
With anything I can

An almost married woman
Clings to the hems of my sleeves
With thin fingers
With scissors
There to cut away the warm wool
With wild eyes
and a bitter mouth

She gathers my coat in a basket
Unravels all the careworn fibers
To cast upon her empty loom
As though she'd spun them

Casts off newly sewn kisses
Threadbare affection
Muttering crossly about the weather
And how the sun
does not melt the snow

She is only my friend when
She can touch my bare wrists
Give me white hot iron to hold
And ask me if I'm warmer

Only my friend when
She can graze my skin in surprise
Wrap my hands up with stiff yarn
And ask me what burned them

Mythos anecdote
just on the brink of fiction
evening potion

Berry stained laughter
sipping slowly to savor
breath caught in the chest

Ah, yes, crystal gaze
Cards that fit the palm just so
A spark —brief luminescence

If there is a storm
There, too, are hands catching rain
and the green-eyed girl

The house I have built within myself for you
is not an empty nest
It's cupped palms that hold water just fine
a cool, stone cage for a hummingbird
the door is open
I am waiting for the right moment to fly

I've got the rip down just right
The soft tear, grated misnomer
Perforated here in my middle
Like I was meant to come apart
Out of view
Hot with friction
Hot with longing
Kinetic energy
Shredding
Dividing
The low sound of cutting construction paper
Thick with each blade passing
A sharp kiss
Maybe
Gripping like this
The right tool for suicide in the wrong hands
I have hands like those
******* I'm dissolving in a tear drop
It never left the eye
The sting feels like drowning
Waterless
and
in pieces

An orange storm cloud
Rises proudly from the horizon
A rain that burns the eyes
The bad god I need
Its altar pierces my chest
“Bow,” it says
My knees buckle beneath the weight of thunder
“Worship,” it demands
I lift my hand skyward and pray
“Live–”
I swallow each protest
every desperate plea for rest
Like hot iron in the throat
Fire in my trembling heart

She cannot sort the grain. After all these trials, I have been lost yet again. —But fairy tales have been this ruthless before; myth has given me wings, has painted my shoulders with fur, with scales, with scars. Legends have broken me down into all the smallest invisible facets of myself until I could do no more than vanish entirely. Who will love me behind the walls? Within my keep, another girl's impatient hands will light the candle to gaze upon sleepless eyes, and wake within me all the anxious demons hiding inside Pandora's Box.

I’ve been saying, “tomorrow,” for the last three months, dreaming again in a bent and hollow sort of way, shoving myself into all of my crooked corners. I’ve purposely avoided it up to now, trying to dodge it, like an expert lightning runner —my sad attempts to slip unnoticed past the inevitable summer months.

It denies my wishes for a moderate temperature and ruthlessly tortures me with its slow crawl in my direction, wrapping its clammy hands around my throat to pin me to hot pavement; sparks within me and kindles unkempt fires, burns me at the shoulders like Memorial Day fireworks —feels so potent I can almost see it tucked behind the horizon. Waiting.

I want to taste a sky that slowly darkens, bowing its graceful head to welcome a storm that may never come, existing only to fool me into praying another day for rain.

His dead wife used to spit. He tells me this on a hot July day on his porch. “Yeah, a whole fifteen feet,” he boasts. He’ll laugh, but I am noticing his large golden cat with her eyes half closed, dreaming in the summer heat behind the open screened windows of his old house.

He collects newspapers, and they lay in yellowed stacks that I can see beyond his open door within the stillness, still ******* with thick cord. Some of them rustle lightly at the corners, swaying up and down as his electric fan rotates this way and that. I momentarily question how fragile they’ve become with age against the hum of blown summer air, but his slow almost-southern-drawl takes me back in and I shield my eyes from the sun with my arm, keys in my left hand, sweat at the back of my neck.

The roof and trees have offered limited shade, and I’ve leaned against the side of the concrete steps to feel the coolness of the bricks against my knee. I’ve meant to go for an hour now, but he keeps me here with a, “Hey, y’know—” and another story will follow.

About his son sometimes, who he always says is also his best friend. I’ve never met him. He’s like a ghost of someone I think I could know but he remains unnamed and I have never questioned it. He’ll continue on —how he wants a new dog but he doesn’t know how his tired self would keep up with a little pup, and his fat old cat —oh, could I feed her this Friday and Saturday? “I might go out and see my son.”

I say that I will with a small pang of jealousy. She curls around my legs in her eagerness, unaware of her master’s weekend absences, purring at her first few bites of small, orange fish-shaped kibble.

When he is tired and doesn’t feel like driving he’ll take the city bus out for his errands and call me with his “cell-you-lar” to see if I can pick him up. “If it’s no trouble,” he says. It isn’t. I’ve taken him home on several other occasions.

His thank yous are quiet, but I feel them anyway. He is nothing like my father but some part of me hopes that when he looks at me he is seeing his son just as much as I am seeing all the years of neglect and false hope all wrapped up in this lonely man.

I made note of my run
Marked it in the leftmost lane
Speedy Gonzales Saturday mornings
with the radio on
drown out my panic
and the caricature of my self-loathing
with a schedule
song, speech, song
forgetting the nostalgic
High pitched sounds of
Getting anywhere
Too quickly to measure accurately
I'm already halfway there
My destination highlighted
On the map in my dad's old truck
Tucked in the pocket behind the seat
Curled gently and careworn
I know this route
It has your name on it
and I'll be there soon
you just got there in a hurry
fast as lightning

That moment the cage
Robs the bird its chance to fly
Ambulance instinct

Feathered wing breathing
Warbled heart monitor song
Gold horizon pulse

Tangerine lover
Citrus at her lips, my lips
Passionate headlock

Tangles her fingers
At my neck with knotted sighs
Auburn cat's cradle

Retrograde brides
Sink into the warm pool
Catatonic smiles
Beneath hooded lashes
My poor ancestors
Foolishly donning a white veil
With bright, crystalline eyes
Their still bodies
And pale, sullen cheeks
Drown me
Finger brushed collarbones
Apathetic embraces
Pull me deeper
into a wavering mirror
Of deafening static
Their collapsed chests cling
Against my beating heart
And I decide my suicide dreams
May **** me in the end
But only because
While I am alive
I am painfully aware
I have not lived

I put on your old watch. "Like father like son." ( —Not quite.) It is too big. I took a few links out but I'm leaner. All of the windows are open and the quiet fragments of unasked questions linger. I think I lost them in the newly occupied rooms of houses strangers now call home. Like an attic with limited storage space, I arrogantly discarded the opportunity to inherit your more worldly possessions —as though I believed your thoughts and memories weren't even worth it; like they would have been clutter. Unusable. But we are still too much alike. Every year I find more of you in my mirror. In my house. Downtown. At the dock.

Will I love my future children the way you loved me?

Mom still wakes up at 5:30, did you know? She makes me tea, and gives me a look she used to give you. I can see that she is afraid that I am becoming increasingly unreachable; that she is watching history repeat itself. She read it in your cards, and I guess she read it in mine too.

"You are so much like him," she'll fuss. She'll ask me to cut my hair for the hundredth time. "He liked that too," when I breathe in fresh air. Her garden was your favorite place in the world. "You know, your father..."

—She's getting married soon, but I can see that she still misses you. Your name is still on her lips, but she keeps them pursed to take a slow sip of her too-hot drink. She doesn't want to burn herself on the memory of you.

I know you like the back of our hands; I have you saved in the spaces between our fingers and have read your fortune in the lines of our palms. I know your transparent gestures and have found your eyes in my mirror, vacant only because our thoughts have built the cities we’ve been longing for. You sync the rise and fall of our chests and I’ve found your mind wrapped around mine, trapping us in the dark. Together we understand the current, wading through the fabric of space time. We have discovered us once again.

I had a dream I die
I ride a taxi into hell
I'm sweating but my driver is kind
He taps the meter when I arrive
Says, "pay up," gently
There is no tax

A flock rises from the magma
My eyes narrow from the heat
They glow as they sing
and cut me when their wings spread
Red hot and beautiful
Birds made of knives

Blue petal skin folding inward
A shivering self embrace
Trembling shoulders
and small cool notches
Freckled spine lingering
Beneath pale raised rivets
Scarlet fingernails rest for now
Having clawed at the neck
Never quite comfortable with how
She’s gotten bone deep
Unreachable
Asleep
Tucked within the marrow
Hibernating
Perhaps until spring

If it's empty does it grow?
earthless roots reaching out
floating idly, belly up
dreaming in a glass of water
rich, dark soil
a sky with no roof
freedom beyond walls
and the sun without a window

I have to shout to you over the noise of the television
In the form of a million other eyes
Standing, waiting, weeping
Watching our country slowly drip with wet paint
Stained in the color of loss
Peace, by piece, by piece

Smothered by your haughtiness and weak foresight
I have abandoned hope to the intangible concept of your knife
slitting the throats of a future generation
cutting out their docile voices
so only yours can be heard

I'm finding you in the snow again
and I can't seem
to stop
chewing on
my bottom lip

in worry
out of habit

I don't know anymore

Some slightly chapped "I love you"s
"I'm sorry"s, and "I need you"s
curl around my ugly Midwest winter;
drift in and out of the sleeves of my coat
and the skeletons of these poor trees
dust-colored oak leaves
shivering boxelder branches
("Acer negundo...")

I want to sleep, just like them
Breathe backwards
Keep still
Rooted firmly
Nice, calm, steady

But I can't

I'm still waiting
(somewhat impatiently)
To pluck your, "I'm here now, love."
Your, "It's okay."
Your, "Kiss me?"
Right from your mouth

Before you can even say it.

And with all that white, what can you do but drown in the imitation of warmth? So bright, yet unforgiving; a pale triumph of gods wishing to stamp out life and begin anew. How can you feel whole when you are born again, just to relive every trial? The journey for self-righteous winters hangs on the boughs of my family tree, singerless, and in the middle of the coldest season, I am searching for the song you’ve sung in my dreams, falling gently against me like snow.

Did you capture spring yet?
Take it into your greedy hands
and dress yourself in lilacs
(in jasmine, in ripe fruit?)
it stains your strange mouth
drunk with plum wine

Do you still smell of honey?
Hide your palms
your sticky fingers
beneath your contrived sweetness

I keep picturing you
drenched with dew
carelessly imagining
that you, too
are a daughter of the earth
even though the sun
scalds your thin shoulders
(and she thinks
you quite deserve it, I believe)

you cannot stand wet soil
and you are only truly at home
beneath the shade
of your very own
(very sad
poor girl)
weeping willow

If there is a wall
it's made of silk
or skin, my own skeleton
the veil of distance
soft, but obstinate
cloaks me in a Sunday morning
where I am yours
I forget about time
cages and bones
I only feel your mouth
static shock kisses
linger in a space shared
two worlds apart

The roots of our ghosts lay in brittle earth
drinking up all that's left of a dry well
hungry, savage rainclouds
open-mouthed and empty
tongueless and sharp-toothed
the jagged claws of thirst
we can't swallow what's left of our conversations
your salt water lashes cling to each pause
the smallest ocean haunting me
storming a little
pouring deep into the spinal column
stripped bare like bark
peeling sheet after sheet
of collapsing microscopic webs
spiny snapped synapses I wish I could tear out violently
break, trash, ruin, I don't care
while caring so profoundly I can't breathe
I whisper car crash questions
and feel so far from myself
I can't even tell if I'm asking you anything
like thunder in the distance
lightning for a moment
each spark failing to jump the bridge for souls
a suicide note when we tangle ourselves
an EVP, "remember when **** was better—"
white noise between cracked lips
the loudest silence, too
what are we even listening for
this static electric current can't leap
from my mouth to yours with a kiss
even if our hands touched
even if you keep crying
even if there is nothing left
even if we planted ourselves right here
and we can't ever grow again

What a rush, a terrible rush
At my own expense
Running blind like always
My sordid adventures
But I'll be back soon

I don't know how to drown
In your tall trees yet
And I envy them a little
Embraced at their necks
By loving ghosts

Please hold me, too?
Find me when I'm lost?
Perhaps I'll kiss you with my eyes closed
Pull you under me
Wade more gently

I'll cool you down
Leave you just long enough
To shiver in my absence
Or taste the salt
I left on your lips

Fossilize my heart
in a sticky Southern summer
Shiver and sweat an uncertain future
103 degrees (With heat index?)

I can’t tell if it’s my fever
or if the hills are undulating
Freeing themselves of wrinkles
like hanging bedsheets

As they sway, I brace myself
Close my eyes to the dance
Still each painful breath,
seal every beat in amber

In the mirror, I watch my eyelids flicker like a projector, a frame by frame film nested with worry, with exhaustion. I am a rusted suit of armor. Rattling the chest plate, my heart drums within from a distance. If it echoes, it’s still beating. If it echoes, it’s still beating.

remnants of a star
bits and pieces strewn about
death like a child’s playroom
littered without consequence
abandoned kaleidoscope
mirror fragments
blood splatter prism
heaven smeared like paint or jelly
the color violet for breakfast
bright red lip curled
crumbs of the bluest Indian summer
trapped in this grin of fire
pink gums and overturned snow globe
the body of confidence lost to the floorboards
glitter impossible to sweep up
even more disgusting to hold
shining universe adhered unwillingly
trapped between sticky fingers

what a shrill cry; a thousand sirens
I have always hated the way my mind speaks before you
every tangle of fire licks the heels of passing gentleness
I pry open the shell of us for a hideous pearl
and hold in my hands the stillborn body of trust

in a dream my mother ran into a field of flowers
each one lit ablaze by the last ray of sun
red like her lips
red like her hair
at war with the deep green sky
they dipped and bowed their heads of fire
offering a dance to their queen
fragile emptiness still with silence
no hand was offered
her Mona Lisa smile has never held me
I was swallowed up by the oncoming storm
whipped up into the clouds by rain
I watched her tip her body against the wind
and fall into the sway like a burning petal

the pullgrab
the uplift
the swallow me whole
I choke on the warmth of you
a pocket of air trapped beneath the ribs
tugging and expanding infinitely
as if there was no breastplate
and beneath is just the heart
a quivering bird nesting
enclosed in barbed wire breathing
I dig in with short fingernails
what is this skinshape
what is the encapsulated story held in my marrow
why is the muscle so hard to scrape from the bone
I’ll be a little boy forever
with scabbed-over knees and a pink nose
burning eyes that have forgotten how to cry

I carry my heart on the pelt of a rabid coyote
winter impelled and needless pacing
it runs away from me faster than it knows
premature blooms hold me by the wrists
they tear me open with their lonely beauty
don’t go as pleaded by roses
it was a climb into an abandoned house
wind howling through years of dust
together we mourn their soft petals
ignore how each step may be a great collapse
I look for you in every empty room
your rhythmic breathing is the slow drum
I rip apart the static like a seam
the same way the coyote bares its teeth
maybe the agony of its foaming mouth is a dream
maybe my bed is a pool I drown in each night
I surface each morning shivering
I never forget the snow or ice
driving the shovel in with so much force my palms rip
blood or roses or blind white
flesh broken by new thorns
panting just the same
eyes just as wild
I watch as my father pulls out his shotgun
one bullet echoes in the field
a second that feels like years
my eyes burn with sorrow and I grip my chest
“It wasn’t its fault,” I whisper as though choking
“No,” he responds, “But now the misery is over.”

train cars sway without the weight of the flock
did a new world unfold
empty out and flood the streets?
each scream along the tracks is into the void
I clench my fists in my pockets
silenced behind every pair eyes
which ones crease with a hidden smile
grim comfort with no joy
shared and sheared
no sir, no sir
black sheep with no wool to spare

in my house lives a small demon
she has recently learned to share
the heat of my lap
my time or my meals
I often withhold my supper
to show her when sharing is appropriate
that my hunger also bears importance
in her impatience she wishes to bite me
she, too, withholds
she still leaves my hand between her teeth
to let me know she could
though they never sink into my skin I understand
her small body could tear me to pieces
in an single instance of despair or fear
she may hurt me and run
and I would miss her
long for our lessons in sharing
her time
or warmth
our mutual trust