"i'm sorry,"
you muttered
with a solemn glance

but sorry does not make up for
tear-stained pillows,
3 AMs spent wide awake,
fluttering butterflies
that always led to
disappointment

it does not make up for
midnight anxiety,
conflicted thoughts,
the hopes that rose
only to fall

an abundance of stale apologies
do not make up for
the countless times i needed you,
only to be greeted by
a familiar sense of lonely

5 o’clock in the morning and I’m intoxicated by the thought of what could’ve been. I paint galaxies on my bedroom ceiling, desperately searching for the right words to let you know that my heart still sparked beautiful colors whenever I filled my mind with thoughts of you. Suddenly, it hits me like a strong gust of winter wind- that no matter how hard I wished for a sense of normality between us, things would never cease to change for the better. Too many sleepless nights, too many lonely sunsets have passed since that remorseful day. Too much time lost to recover the flame that had since been put out. I was numb to the core, trying to fix and mend something nearly irreparable that refused to die from my thoughts. I designed constellations on my walls, connecting them little-by-little each night, tricking myself into believing that there was still hope left, that someday our stars would align again. There was nothing, no one to confide into, and slowly the tiny sliver of sanity I still had left within me began to fade into an unfortunate nothing. Was it really gone? Our stories, our abundance of exchanged smiles, my collection of picture-perfect moments? Indeed, they were long gone, withering like the blossomed trees in the start of June. To me, those times were still so real, so picturesque, still engraved in my memory like a long lost yesterday. It was like a Tug of War, an innocent competition between two eager kids with their hearts set out to win. But after you were declared triumphant, you brushed yourself off, leaving me with nothing but the weight of a loss on my shoulders. 6 o’clock in the morning and I’m drowning in my own misery, trying to bury my sadness and my agonizing pain. But I couldn’t take my eyes off that bedroom ceiling, with a sudden realization that I couldn’t shake from my mind. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, as I wiped away tears, Maybe there’s still a little molecule of hope left somewhere in the world. The feeling soon escaped me and the night grew somber once more as I remembered that I was just a hopeless romantic swimming in a sea of her unattainable dreams. She was just in love with the idea of being in love, too tied down to reality to find the courage to let go. I had known it from the very beginning. He was gone, we were gone, and I was treading at rock bottom. .

so much slander
is ****** upon the poet,
who sits uncomfortably
at the tip of every tired pen
aspiring to run out of ink

she will suffer
for as long as our streets
remain flooded with the blood of the innocent,
for as long as our wrongful hands
desire to invent new ways to tighten the ropes
of our own expired dreams, hanging exhaustedly
around the same necks
that have since forgotten how
to support us

and because of this,
the poet will sob
violently, the way she prayed
to destroy the sight of her own words
sinking down the clogged drain
in her bathroom sink

how willingly it swallowed
every remnant of everything
she could never bring herself
to understand

from the thunderous sound
of her father's kind footsteps
escalating the stairs after a long day
that will leave his back stiff,
to the absence of her mother's voice
the moment she finally decided
to listen

pain, she thought,
is a remembered affliction

and it is the poet's sin
if she refuses to shelter it.

she claimed
she would much rather
feel hurt than to be numb
because at least
there was still a tugging distress
rather than bleak extinction,
and at least she was aware
that she was clearly still
alive

he claimed
he would much rather
feel numb than to be hurt
because at least
he couldn't feel the tribulation
tearing him to pieces from
within,
and at least he was not aware
that he was somehow
indiscriminately
dead

today it occurred to me
that i really don't know you at all

i do not know your favorite books
or what kind of music you listen to
on long car rides to the seaside,

and i wonder about
all the places you'd like to visit
and your favorite constellations
in the starry december skies

but i do know that you have emerald eyes
and you mumble hushed words to yourself
and you look wonderful in red
(and you wear it quite frequently)

there are still countless things
i'd like to discover,
and you are an unfinished jigsaw puzzle
(like myself)
and i keep pondering on the idea
that i am the missing piece

You are fifteen the first time someone says your name like it is made of electricity. He is made of sunlight, the kind that you wake up feeling on your skin and the kind of voice you still hear ringing like your favorite song in your head even after you hang up the phone.
You love him simply because he is real.
When you talk to him, you no longer feel compelled to think with your brain. Rather, it is the monotonous thump within the cavern walls of your chest that does the thinking for you.
When he says your name like a contagion he is desperate to catch, it skips. The spaces between the beats become less and less defines, both snare drum hearts pounding in unison for each other. Nothing else exists except for him and those hypnotic eyes, like footprints he leaves behind on the surface of your soul.
Your lips meet under the luminescence of the Big Dipper above, beneath the radiance of the same stars you used to curse before you met him. You recall the moment you had given up at the irrational idea of love, shaking your fists at God, screaming questions that only time could possibly answer. The days when the only thing reverberating against your lips was a collection of absence and everything left unsaid. But those days are over, and now he looks at you- gazes into your eyes like had found what he had spent seventeen years unknowingly searching for.
You can't help a smile from blossoming across your face because your heart, though it thinks, over analyzes, now it understands. He is your serendipity, a piece of heaven revealed to you at the least expected time. When all you wanted to do was destroy your fragile skin with the remnants of what could have been, he became your guardian angel. One that pulled you from the wrath and toil of your deepest afflictions and whispered, “You are safe. You are home.”

you fell in love with april
and the warm breezes within it
you fell in love with our small talk
and deep conversations
overflowing with continuous feeling

i fell in love with red
because that's what you always wore
and i fell in love with paper
because it was my bitter escape
from a tumultuous flame inside of me

you fell in love with my words,
my unintentional smiles
and never ending stories
you fell in love with bits and pieces
but not in love with me

Those days,
I remember them clearly-- the ones decorated in violence.
There was no one left for me to fight
but the distorted figure glaring back
in the ***** mirror,
the reflected face that suffocated my gaze,
exhaling new nightmares like shattered glass fragments of insecurity
dropped from every creaky fire escape
overlooking the collarbone roads
of my own demolished city.
Those days,
my heart hurt more than it desired to beat.
But the pretty words flowed out of my fingertips like honey,
poetry never hiding at the back of my throat
like something that was afraid of commitment.
It filled all of the empty spaces,
cursive loops imprinted upon the edges of time,
the gaps between my own hands rubbing together in the winter,
black ink serenading pale paper.
Never lacking, never losing.
But the war has since ended.
The battlefield no longer exists in the trenches of my mind,
monuments proclaiming love rather than defeat.
I now rise to the bittersweet taste of victory,
morning bells chiming in my ears
as if this is my first time hearing music. Days have blurred into warm colors and melodies of laughter, of faith, of newfound innocence.
I have learned that it is easiest to swallow life by adding a teaspoon of sugar.
It is easiest to live without the weight of failed attempts.

I miss them so.
The words rarely visit.
Rarely call.
They are quieter now, poetry confined to corners I cannot see.
They were only ever around to witness the gore, the blood, the fickle sweat.
And once they had witnessed the scars fade into pink,
they did too-- just like all of the hurt that had risen up out of my tender bones
and into the stars.

You have always dreamed of aviation,
cellophane wings glued to your heartstrings--
my marionette lover of hopes hanging high
enough to abolish the air from heavy lungs.

I watch your cavern chest rise but never fall,
tsunami tides engraved permanently airborne,
intertwining hands with time as suspension
silences destruction.

Time does not exist here--only periwinkle
veins illuminated by morning light,
wispy eyelashes beginning their ascension.

You are all light, and altitude, and grace.

I am grounded, tethered to comfort, but
the curvature of your spine breathes sanctuary.
Your shoulders-- broad, significant--
as if to fingerpaint the alpines you will ascend
once the wrath of gravity is conquered.

When your parachute soul finally gathers
enough strength to pilot the destined flight,
I hope you remember to save
a window seat for my heart.

We exist within—  
the hollow spaces between dissonant piano keys,
love notes hidden under dusty bookshelves,
the underside of the mattress
that has never been dreamed upon.

I gaze,
not at you—but through you,
translucent skin beckoning to encompass
the opacity of my own being.

I can no longer pass minutes
without blurred illusions of your face,
laugh lines and rose petals in silhouettes
that beg to be understood.

and there you are,
a familiar face in every fading photograph
I keep tucked within the musty pages of my journal,
in crowds of strangers and static radios,
within the cardinal’s scarlet flight
and oceans of words that can no longer describe
even fractions of your importance.

I can keep pursuing synonyms
to paint you porcelain poems of my love,

but then it is cheap,
nothing more than a human
worth writing about.

and you are everything
and everywhere— you and those hands
that refuse to loosen their grip.

on days I lose track of time,
you become a mirage stuck somewhere
between heaven and reality,

the remaining shadow  
of everything I cannot bear to lose.

in past lives,
my heart was a corn maze with no end
and I wandered aimlessly
searching for answers and explanations
to questions I did not know existed

I viewed life through a kaleidoscope
of blurred colors and fine lines
that could never be crossed,
fixated at stars whenever I kept my head up
for a little longer than necessary
in order to catch a glimpse
of hopes falling faster than my eyelids could
drop to tango,
at the end of a dizzying afternoon

on the 4th of August 2015
at 3:39 in the afternoon
you said your first hello
to me

I replied,
uncomfortably;
and advancing five months,
I am wrapped up in your arms
the way a butterfly resides
in its chrysalis

A summer hello,
a friendly greeting
has turned into the kind of poetry
I fear losing
the most.

I remember everything— each space on the calendar crossed out in permanent marker but never forgotten.

I remember every before and after, every minute that has passed by my irises with the impatience of speeding cars on the interstate. I keep my hands permanently cupped so that memories cannot slip through the cracks in my fingers, tea spilling from my grandmother's cracked porcelain. Every heartbeat that has silently taken refuge under the rug, every breath I spent wondering what it would be like if I peeked out and saw the soles of the feet that have replaced the metronome of my steps.

I am building a life out of the sound of my own laughter echoing down walls painted by the artist of morning light. My heart is a kaleidoscope house with mirrors I peer into and find older versions of myself, silhouettes of smaller dreamers with eyes that could ignite the world with the gentle flutter of a blink.

I am dressed up as Tinkerbell for my first birthday, fairy green and sparkling. Pictures are taken, kisses on pink cheeks and soft feet. Growing up is not an option. Blink. I am 5 years old and missing my front teeth, crying lava on the bus ride to school as my mother’s familiar face shrinks through the frosted window. No matter how hard I squint, she is still just a dot on the sidewalk waiting for me to come home. Blink. I am eight years old and playing with Barbie dolls on my bedroom carpet, crayons scattered all over my bed and my imagination sprinting across the baby pink walls faster than I can keep up with it. Blink. Thirteen hurts a lot more than scraping knees on uneven sidewalks. My own tears begin to taste like the beginnings of a broken heart. Blink. Blink. Blink.

I am sixteen and in love. The kind that holds my breath hostage in its arms, the kind that knows my name like the lyric of a song memorized in past lives. My hopes remain suspended twenty thousand feet in the air, fearless and spontaneous. There are flowers growing wildly in the way that I love him, in the way I see myself waiting for a thousand years to have this forever. The taste of happiness has finally made its way into my morning coffee.

And as much as they wanted me to live in Neverland forever, I have finally found the door to where my heart lives. Every moment is a volume. Every day is a masterpiece hung intentionally on the wall for the world to see, for my own hungry eyes to catch a glimpse of now.

Blink. It is time.

We’re sitting on the plaid couch in my basement, your hand in mine like a puzzle piece we took forever to find. It’s when we’re doing nothing when I realize that I want to do everything with you. It is almost always winter in my mind, my thoughts permanently frozen in time, paralyzed to my bed sheets the way icicles cling to shivering windowpanes. But with you, it’s different, our blossoming love proving the existence of a perpetual spring. We grow wildly- like two oak trees embraced behind the fence in my backyard, our branches intertwined and our roots firmly entrusted in the dampness of the soil. Not even the strongest breath of wind could destroy us.
And we walk hand-in-hand in the breath of October, the kind that stings like knives to the bone. You forget to bring a jacket with you but you insist that you are perfectly fine, that the electricity radiating between our fingers is enough to keep you warm for a collection of intoxicating eternities. And to us, the rest of the world barely exists, their watchful eyes and orchestral voices like anthems proclaiming the silliness of our juvenile love, a bright-eyed girl in a violet trench coat and a boy with a smile so bright it’s almost as if she had accidentally fallen in love with the rays of the sun. The kind of livid brightness that warms the coldest of hearts, the darkest of rooms.
But we walk to the neighborhood coffee shop with the combined tranquility of two retired lovers strolling through Paris and the frenzied excitement of exhilarated children on the seemingly endless journey to Disney World. Every welcoming front porch and townhouse we pass feels empty in comparison to the home we created within us, with a fire permanently kindled in our souls and between our restless fingers. You kiss me where the sidewalk ends, between the trees that resemble the magnificence we have become- the sky melting every molecule of transparent sadness I had left within me through an endless palette of pastel bliss. And in that moment, we become the fragile remnants of summer heat stuck trapped and misunderstood in the birth of autumn.

even now, there are days I spend floating
in unfamiliar skin that never stops
aching to crawl away from me,
plagued with thoughts that sit
like clumps of undissolved sugar  
in tea that tastes different this morning

outside, I can hear the love song
of snowflakes caressing my windowpane

and it is strange to think that
somewhere, someone is
holding their newborn child,
tiny hands and dark hair, with eyelashes
fluttering like trees in blizzard wind,
and someone else is hearing the ancient voice
of the father they never got to meet
at the end of a static telephone call

my heart leaps for the little girl
with pink dimpled cheeks,
her favorite polka-dotted dress
spinning in unpredictable circles, eyes up
at the kites dancing against the baby blue sky
somewhere warm, whimsical, and
dreamed of

today, there is joy
but it cannot find me

Though my hand remains intertwined with yours as we lie perfectly like plastic figurines in the middle of an empty nowhere, I am wondering where you are. You are not here, not really-- and by the memorized angle of your brow as it focuses up at the hypnotic veil of heaven enveloping our fragile bodies, I can sense that you have drifted gently, somewhere far away. Perhaps you have already built a comfortable cottage for us within the tiniest crater of the moon, our own little claustrophobic wonderland without envy or indifference. Or perhaps you are sitting upon the most pristine carousel horse at a London carnival with a woman who does not share my name, or my face, or my essence. Maybe, as the song plays its lighthearted melody and the lights create a memory of iridescent dizziness, you find yourself trying to search for fragments of me in her. I am nowhere to be found in the smoothness of her puckered lips or the salsa of her fluttering eyelashes, batting away the only expired yesterdays I exist in. Maybe you have ventured off into the limitless abyss of outer space and have discovered the loveliness of a parallel universe where we do end up together. A place where I am the beautiful woman on the carousel, buried forever in the familiarity of your childish laughter that resonates like rainfall. I have built myself an entire kingdom somewhere within the muddled walls of the heart I taught myself how to adore. Because despite the calmness of the present, love has always felt like sipping down a mug full of chamomile tea while the hot mist still collects upon my cheekbones, yet still biting my tongue the moment I realize it is destined to get burned.

I saw it coming then. I see it now, our figures floating together in the absence of distraction,
two humble souls existing as the tired stems of ripe cherries that have forgotten the taste of eternity.

I.
It is so simple.
Tuesday atmosphere bleeding
autumn rain down windowpanes,
the descent of fragile hopes
and hands intertwined a little
too tight for wondering.


II.
We are here; hazy within
the iridescent walls of my childhood home.
We slow dance to the fading refrigerator light,
our laughter reverberating down the stairs
I fell down when I was in kindergarten
and afraid of boys with loud voices.


III.
It is more complicated than they think.
We scour home decor magazines,
pointing at flattened apartment windows
overlooking the bustle of city chaos.
A young couple walks across the page
and into a dusk-painted room,
faces exuberant in the sunlight
of their newborn lives.
One day, we will be just like them, you tell me.
I almost forget that I have yet to turn
seventeen.


IV.
In my head, there is nothing wrong
with designing the future,
sketching myself into false realities
where I feel safe falling asleep
in someone else’s arms.
I have written myself within the spaces
of unpromised decades,
and I paint your hands, the ridges--
the crevices in which I have placed
an abundance of gemstone promises
that do not shatter in the light of something real.



V.
We are young
but I love you.
To the rest of the world, we are teenagers
clutching each other’s spines in grass fields
when we cannot even comprehend
what we are praying for.
Hold me.
I love you.
I cannot promise this enough.

She held more secrets than seconds in a day,
mumbling pained confessions in hushed whispers
that bled out like stab wounds trailing paths
on white snow,
painting a china doll façade made of scarlet
as an eloquent attempt to mask the fragility
she aspired to hold

And that is just what she did,

She held,

onto hopes dangling from the edge of skyscrapers,
breath permanently stolen from her lungs
despite shaking hands itching to let go

storing memories made of dust within damaged pockets
even when the weight got so gruesome
she could no longer bear to walk
with a soul made entirely of gray matter,
training heartstrings to stretch
and cradle every delicate moment
she feared losing
before they could even take place


She is the girl who will collect your voicemails,
hoarding letters like seashells
resting along abandoned shorelines
due to the danger of losing the soft breaths
of the only one who was capable
of breaking all of her rules,
who whispered her name like
unfinished stanzas of a poem
she did not know how to write

Fear,
and fear alone-
of the potential that the ocean could swallow
the glass shards and kiss the remnants of her joy
goodnight
before she could even feel them
splashing against the same skin
she never felt at home in

love exists in the crevices of his lips
when they meet mine, fluttering
with promises and words powerful
enough to knock me down effortlessly

it thrives when we're sitting on the couch,
Christmas tree lights like dazzling fragments of heaven
reflecting in his familiar eyes,
and it blossoms when we walk together
in the autumn wind, the sighing
breeze echoing like wildfire in our
ears, whispering both elation
and disbelief

that I am even here right now,
after sixteen years of mystery,
a collection of dust-covered insecurity
now an open book beckoning to be read

yet here we are, and
he holds my hand like a crystal glass
he is afraid to drop, and
I cannot stop thanking him
over and over again,
a fragile metronome of gratitude-
for willing to be brave enough to read
my very first page.

I have never believed in the principles of physics because they do not apply to girls like me. Girls who disobey Newton's straight-mouthed rules with scarlet leaps of blind faith, girls with hopes soaring past our pastel heavens, never weighed down by any mystical force of gravity measured by dead men. The audacity of the physicist's rotten rules anchoring themselves into thick velvet skin-- as if to stifle the daydreams that keep twirling unpredictably even if acted upon by an unbalanced force. There is no way to silence my momentum, I will keep blooming-- slender hands outstretched toward the flickering sun, past all of the white numerical lies and formulaic cages that ache to confine me. What a perfect contradiction, that a soft-spoken girl can rise at the break of Einstein's miscalculated morning, illuminating the sky with the poetry of her defiance.

She, who loves gracefully without friction. She, whose bones cannot be broken by the laws of heat. She, who keeps herself warm when the cold mathematical wrath of their graves fails to keep her quiet.

i was in the seventh grade
when i met a boy in a red shirt
whose voice sounded a lot like home,
and i remember hearing them say

"silly girl,
you're only thirteen years old,
you don't even know what love is!"

but who are they to judge
when their ancient bodies
have already forgotten
what it felt like to be yound
and electrified?

who cares if it isn't their
dictionary definition of true love,
i'd still rather be young and clueless and trembling
with my veins pumping his name
over and over again
than having to spend the rest of my life
away from the only thing
i'll ever love enough to call
home

You are not supposed to rip pages
out of books bound by human spines
or all of the pages will fall out
and disperse across the ground
like autumn leaves exhausted of trying.

I learned this the hard way.

If there is a cure or concoction
to heal a brilliant mind

I crave it,

because finding medicine to express
my mutilated madness
is like dying without understanding
the allegory of mercy.

He wants to understand what hides
under soft satin skin and apathy.
I see it in the way the crumpled lines on his forehead
form question marks when I cry
because there was never a reason
nor answer
as to why my heart always seemed
to perpetuate the memory
of autumn.

No, he will never know, curious as he is,
because skin is miles
and miles
and miles deep
plummeting down to a hollow core
of sickness
of sorrow
of solitude
that could dissolve all of his worries
but never my own.

we have faded
like the denim overalls
that belong to the haggard farmer
once a sturdy, deep blue
now tattered with fatigue
color melting away as did time
below the sun's scorching breath

we have faded
like pencil in an antique diary
formerly confided in with dismal feelings
once an intriguing charcoal artistry
now a hodgepodge of insincere gray
the pain receding away as did time
beneath weary shelves of dust bunnies

we have faded
like the end of a film
with the screen darkening by each dreaded
millisecond
once a glowing, vivid sight
now a parcel of despondent credits
slowly vanishing until every speck of light
has dissolved into an unfortunate nothing

i am the type of girl who is afraid of looking down
who shuts her eyes in glass elevators
and fears heights almost as much
as she fears herself

and the moment i met you was the moment
i decided to loosen my death grip,
realizing that i was exhausted of clinging to my high hopes,
suddenly feeling weightless, fearless,
flying away from the stranger i used to be,
flying away from the person i was
before i met you

they teach us poetry in school,
the kind we read in those dumb literature books
filled with stupid stanzas and rhymes
and words on paper made to make you feel something

i know you're not made of paper, and that
you aren't words or letters or rhymes
but you were the first person who made me feel something,
something so real, something so catastrophically alive
and i love you for that,
for being my favorite poem

i love you to the rooftops and to the skyscrapers and clouds
and i know i'll always have to keep my eyes shut tightly
and have to hold your hand so tight my knuckles turn white
but you are poetry,
you made me feel alive again

i wasn't afraid of heights,
i was afraid of falling
but you caught me anyway
and i love you for that,
for teaching me that falling doesn't always
have to hurt

i fear heights,
spiders,
public speaking,
and being lost

i fear hospitals,
darkness,
long term commitments,
and feeling alone

i am so afraid
of miniscule things
and i must admit,
the monsters under my bed
have escaped
and made their way
into my head,

but what i fear most
is that one day,
you'll be staring
at a girl with glimmering eyes
looking at her with
admiration
pretty thoughts
and love in your eyes

and all your fears
have escaped
because you will have found
the center of your universe
and i fear
that i'll just be
another expired star
in your sky of
useless memories

they ask me if i love you
and i am quick to shake my head
no, not anymore,
but my dreams still revolve around you
and my stomach feels like cherry stems
tied loosely together, and even though
the words that leave my lips scream
no, not anymore,
the empty feeling in my heart
feels like a snare drum of contradiction

you are fireflies in the backyard dusk
and i am barefoot and flushed cheeks
trying to catch you in my hands
you are red sunsets that fade into dark skies
and the sky seems as though it is bleeding tonight,
and so is my heart,
all for you

it's like i am holding you still, forever
cupped in my hands like fireflies in the summer
and i am sorry,
i am sorry,
i am so sorry,
for holding you captive in
this jar of broken promises

they ask me if i love you,
and i am quick to shake my head
no, not anymore
but i still love you,
i still love you,
i still really love you,
and the reckless, dangerous part of me will always love you

you are my firefly,
and i cannot bring myself to let you go

I am longing to get lost somewhere far, far away. Away from the routine hum of constantly pushing the snooze button. Away from the stress of misunderstanding and complication, the hunger of chaos and disorganization. I desire to grasp the entire world with my own eyes rather than with a microscope that can only be focused on untouched possibility. I want to view life in vibrant colors I've only ever been able to understand in my mind and to speak of my adventures in words that have never been written down. I want to drive down avenues that no longer exist and balance at the very top of a mountain that has forgotten the feel of footsteps. I am thirsty for the impossible. I am exhausted of falling asleep to the sound of my own heartbeat banging against my bedroom walls and breathing in air that has already been exhaled in past lives. I will never settle for contentment. I will never settle.

some seek art in sidewalk cracks
or between fragile spines of old books
and some search for meaning
through the gaps between the oak trees
where solitude exists and melts
together with the prismatic hues of
every sunset fading into memory

some find purpose in silence
or rather, the center of bustling conversation
and some find beauty in the enigma of the ocean
and the shy touch of the sun, warm,
like butter coating our lonely souls

everyone but her,
she never had to search, for her masterpiece
was herself.
her love was made of notes strung together
and played colorfully, radiating through the air
as smooth as mother's finest silk, and
with every beat, she painted the most beautiful
of images, dancing along to the hum of her heart
that never understood the meaning of silence

and her paradise meant being blinded
by stage lights and pride, each song
a testament built by bones
that taught themselves how to bend
but remain vigilant,
because breaking was never an option
in her pink-ribboned world of piercing perfection

but they will continue to search for happiness
in howling wind and steady rain,
never bothering to find her smile
fluttering effortlessly in the music,
that smile- the one that could put
the world's most beautiful dance
to shame

I fell helplessly in love with an angel
possessing the Midas touch
and stained glass wings
that had since forgotten how to fly,
but as we immersed ourselves
in unpredictable oceans made of
bizarre dreams and treacherous emotion,
we taught each other how to soar again.

We danced slowly to the melody
of our own syncopated heartbeats
that matched perfectly to the rhythm
of the hushed songs emerging
from the depths of our parched souls

Gone are the hopes of a future
dedicated entirely to our selfish intentions
replaced by ambition revolving around
the art of a future devoted  boundlessly
to each other

We will continue to glide together,
locked in time by fragile pinky promises
as we venture through a broken world
created entirely within
the small waist of an hourglass

And for one day,  I can only pray
that we find ways to love without the limits
of sand aspiring to run out,
because the vastness of the universe
calls me to not only follow
the hushed echoes of my own voice,
but the brilliance of gold my heart has become
ever since he learned how to caress it

When the air around us becomes still, I begin the hunt for guarantees. Perhaps they are hiding, terrified, within the glimmer of promise that always seems to catch me moments before the fall. Maybe they are written somewhere inconspicuously, in the spaces between the fingers that hold me together better than gravity ever did. Savor this, I repeat to myself, a broken record that only remembers how to play the same tune over and over, over and over; but for some reason, I keep it running. Savor this. Savor this. Savor this. But when your lips greet the apples of my cheeks with a fire that cannot be extinguished, time is all that crosses my mind.
You whisper the volumes of reasons why you love me and I am only thinking of the moment you will tire of it. You shelter my joy in a canopy of trust, but I am far too busy counting seconds until the minute I become just another pretty story for you to tell when I have been set aside to collect dust.
I have discovered art in the curvature of your temples and the way you shook my father's hand with honor that night you kissed me under the illuminated blanket of God's great masterpiece. I have discovered it in the way you hold me close on the days I feel light years away from myself, the days when my body feels more like an abandoned orphanage than something that is meant to be alive.
You promise me forevers decorated in contentment and I am waiting for the day you regret it.
We are youthful and electrified, juggling candles at the tips of our fingertips and expecting not to burn.
I tell you that I want a yellow house with light blue shutters and a swing on our porch that rocks gently in the breezes of April.  I tell you that I have visions of us warming our feet by the fireplace in December snowfall, consuming peace within the melodious laughter of the children we will have. I tell you that when it storms, we will build forts out of quilts and hold competitions of brightness between the lightning and the glow of our own love.
I almost tell you that I need this, but I only find fear in my disappointment when I realize that there are no guarantees, and until tomorrow comes, we are holding our breath in limbo.
Instead, I tell you that I love you presently, and while we slow dance in our backyard a thousand eternities away, I am losing track of days spent grieving a dream that has not yet, or never will, come true.

the woman with ancient eyes cradles her rosy-cheeked daughter,
wide-eyed and bursting with the innocence of the youth--
she is a tenement child, raised gracefully in the shadowed slums of her father's mistakes,
wears a tattered dress, spinning alone in a whirlwind of dust mites and silenced laughter.
and when she hears tales of the children with taffeta dresses and China dolls, she
smiles--
out of love, replacing envy with euphoric contentment, because
she has her mama's eyes, the voices
of the fatherless children
singing along to her same song,
shouting cries of hope against the crumbling walls
of a broken world she is beginning to heal.

The first steps you take as you enter the immaculate hallways of the first cathedral in Rome are the last ones taken out of fear.

Fear, you had always been full of it, of potential abandonment and quivering voices.

But here, the arches have beckoned years upon years of marveling, of eyes cast upward at staggering golden ceilings, light reflecting through the brilliance of violet stained glass.

This is the moment in which you realize that bravery exists in the aftermath. Just hours ago, you had boarded the suffocating plane all by yourself, red sneakers and matching suitcase, departing the same home that kept you calm for so long. With shaking hands and a hammering heart, you are buzzing with static electricity you were too afraid to understand before this moment.

Peeking out of the claustrophobic airplane window, you realize just how small you are, how microscopic everything seems just as soon as it has been defeated. And though your worries have taken shelter as a lump in your throat, they soon dissolve like sugar cubes in hot tea.

There is nothing left but tranquility.

Cascading blankets of translucent white hang daintily through the glass, blinding the plummeting ground from existence. This is the first time you have ever let yourself taste freedom.

And then, while your neck cranes down at the indigo expanse below you, you realize that the same blue is no longer taking shelter inside of your bones. Blue no longer runs through the paths of veins in your hands or in the moments in class you wished you would have said something but never did. Blue no longer remembers your writing and how easy it was to fit solitude in between the letters.

Blue, instead, is all around you, oceans below your feet like a collection of everything you were too heavy to hold onto.

Somewhere, miles and hours behind you, your mother is cooking dinner. She will leave an extra bowl of Monday night soup at your place at the dinner table, an accidental broth you will never taste. Your father’s heavy eyelids have collapsed, television humming white noise, cat on his shoulder as the peach-colored dusk melts into the room.

Yet you were there,

suspended miles of infinities above the same ocean you fell in love with back when you were even smaller than before. Back when your big brown eyes followed paths in the heavens, the soft glide of the ones brave enough to shuttle toward new horizons, redefining the notion of reckless abandon.

And now, you are here.

You are one of them.

Captivated, enveloped in the shadows of the masterpieces that have aged over thousands of lives that will never meet yours. You are a pioneer of your first real experience, marble statues and pillars the sole witnesses of your rebirth.

They are haunting, breathtaking, faces painted gracefully upon crumbling walls in colors that once made souls tremble in the same skies you had dreamed of, and then dreamed in.

You are here, surrounded by memories of light. And for a couple of moments tied together by blind hope, you forget that darkness once knew you by name.

he gazed at her
as if she was
a sunset,
and he felt
the universe
in the palm
of her hand

she gazed at him
as if galaxies
existed in his eyes,
and she felt complete
with his hand
holding hers

I am just me,
a dreamer who keeps her eyes peeled at the sky, wide open like overflowing saucers
wondering, imagining the life that exists
beyond these familiar clouds and stars
that blanket gently over the sins of mankind

Staring up at the vibrant hues of the
sky's palette, I wonder if,
somewhere past the threshold of everything we know, there exists a parallel universe of sorts,
a timeless paradox or reflection
of the lives we have lived
and perhaps, the ones we have yet to live

Maybe somewhere existing outside
of our solar system, there is a girl
who resembles myself, with the same
passion to understand
encompassing the irises of her eyes,
and I wonder
if she has tasted the bittersweet flavor
of love yet, or if she had ever experienced
the emptiness of feeling it slip
between the hollow cracks
of her slender fingers

and I crave desperately to hold her,
to shelter her from her imaginary torture
and to be able to embrace
the faraway dreamer in my own arms,
and if I could, I would
send a shuttle into outer space
filled with enough love to orbit around
the uncontrollable expanse that lacks not only
gravity, but art-
the art of loving
and being loved


so I shout up at the sky, hoping that
the highs and lows of my voice
will resonate to her, and console the damsel
so that she will be greeted with care
rather than distress,
so I am able to send her the same love
given to me-
even when I believed that
no one in the galaxy
had any left to give

Ground control to Major Tom,
please send her my heart.

I miss the days when I would find poetry resting peacefully on the kitchen counter, hiding skillfully between the cracks of the tile bathroom floor. Back then, it shuttled out from the tips of my fingers like golden lightning that kept my heart pulsing, my eyelids propped open wide with all of the secrets I had been struck with.  

There were nights I found it in the soft flutter of his eyelashes against my cheek, the glowing warmth of his hand that held mine like something he would never grow tired of carrying, even though that was where I kept all of the words that had been stolen from my lips since the first moment I knew that I loved him.

But back then, they were everywhere-- the words-- nestling in high nests perched upon branches I was always tall enough to reach, settling in the pockets of worn denim overalls and the creases of watercolor smiles I had secretly painted on strangers with no names to match the dim light of their faces.

There was a time. There is a time.

Now, I sit at my desk with trembling hands and words stuck jumbled and uncharted in the aftermath of the past. And poetry no longer spills from the cracks of the baby pink teapot, no longer falls with every tear that still remembers how to emulate the rain.

But it is here when I am with him, his arms becoming the paper I have spilled my soul onto back before I memorized the melody of his heartbeat. In the sound of our voices filling all of the vacant spaces that used to haunt my bones, in the hushed music that plays every time my name drips like honey from the edges of his laughter.

There is a time. It is now. Poetry was once written, now it is living.

Her--
whose translucent face I first met
within the irises of your attention,
vibrant in the fading photographs
where your figures once melted together
like wax dripping from a summer candelabra.

She—
is still found in every obliterated promise,
a lingering aftertaste of faint perfume
I can still smell on your skin
when I am wrapped in it, comfortably,
secured in your amber chrysalis of worry.

I watch your eyes scan rooms for her walk,
for the soft motion of her dress swaying
those pale legs reflecting shy moonlight,
the flicker of yesterday’s flame.

I hear the syllables of her name fill the air
like a word you have grown fearful of mispronouncing,
a favorite song stuck in your brain
distantly hummed under warm breath
when you run out of reasons
to remind me that she and I
do not share the same blood
nor the same bones.

For I am made of her ashes, her expiration,
carried by the winds of your embrace
whisking me away to distant kingdoms
where the language spoken is one
that only remembers her voice
and how effortlessly it interrupts mine
before I can even part my lips
to speak.

I often daydream of the places my feet will graze, eyes still bright and hopes lifted boldly above my head in a handful of future years when I will finally understand who I am. Oftentimes, I envision myself gazing through the frigid glass of my apartment window overlooking an entire city of hungry souls. Paired with a glass of pink champagne, I will study the intricate patterns in the way they carry themselves from one place to another, an entire kingdom of strangers dressed in pale blues and yellows and tans.

Who are they? What are they searching for?

I stand—a figure in a sheer black dress miles above, pondering upon the sea of incomprehensible gray swarming a thousand forevers below my feet. There exists a starving fear, one that reminds me that if my heels happen to break through the balcony, I will become one of them.
I dream of you returning home to me after an abstract day of trial and error. Even after the musky dust of today’s freedom collects upon your shoulders, you still smell the same familiar way you did when you were seventeen and unsure, wondering if I will be around to love you next year or tomorrow or only this afternoon.

Below us, they continue to travel, approaching midnight with a cautious volume that grows more and more lost as the hours waltz by. Some are hunting for a friendship that slipped like soap bubbles through the valleys between their fingers. The youthful delicacy of unrequited love. Some search for the art of escaping from a life that shattered their bones numb. Others, for salvation. A reason to permit their hearts to keep beating.

We are no longer wandering; instead, fingers intertwined at the success of a future that would not have obeyed the stars if we had not been like them before, pursuing dreams like pixie dust before they had the chance to grow up and become a little too impossible.

You kiss my forehead goodnight, drawing curtains and racing hearts. For once, I sleep. There is nothing left to search for.

you don't love me anymore
i can see it in your
lifeless eyes
and our hollow conversations

you don't love me anymore
i can tell, by the way
we talk in fading blue
and how our words don't echo
and sparks refuse to fly

you don't love me anymore
because the loved don't cry
and the love don't whisper
(why?)
you don't love me anymore
because the love
has seeped out of you,
and into her heart,

but not mine

home used to be
a fire crackling,
the furnace roaring
the stack of books
piled up by my bedside
and home was the
creaking stairs,
my favorite hiding places
and the words i could not say
written gently on my wall-

that was home before

but who would've thought
that home could also exist
in the eyes of a beautiful boy
who hid my secrets
better than the space
behind the cupboard ever could-
who understood what was written
on my walls, engraved in my mind
even better than i ever could have

home used to be
the place i would run to
whenever the skies bled
in somber gray,
and i wonder why
i always end up running to you
every time

I am having trouble writing.
It is as if there is a wall of bulletproof glass separating me from the words that are dying to escape the metal cage they are kept in. I am the only one with a key sitting comfortably in the pockets of my jeans, but no matter how hard I pound my fists against the wall, I do not get any closer to quieting the agonizing screams emerging from the trap. They get louder, aching for liberation, tethering their syllables around the bars as they sit, confined within a reality I am desperate to free them from.

They are starving to live. I can see the outlines of their bones through the transparent letters that blanket their elastic limbs, each day growing more tired, forgetting the taste of hope every minute that passes. I can feel them collecting dust, shrinking down to fragile skeletons that have begun to lose meaning. What if one day I will no longer be able to see them? What if one day I have nothing left to save?

I am starving to live. I cannot feel love without a knife stuck wedged in the back of my throat reminding me that I have nothing to describe it with. I can give all of myself to the one who thankfully accepts it but my teeth chatter at the thought of having to apologize for stealing joy from the cookie jar. I am sorry for having no words to say sorry. They told me to tell you that they are sorry for their absence, but I do not know how to say this without them.

For now, I am waiting. The same way I do for Fridays, for your call, for my heartbeat to obey the speed limit, for time to run dry.

I will continue to wait
patiently, tiredly, averting my eyes to the hopes that maybe tomorrow, they will be small enough to squeeze through the bars and set me free.

my stomach sinks to my feet
whenever i think about you leaving me
and my mind is occupied
with the same haunting thoughts
of needing you to stay

i think of you as a thunderstorm
but i'd rather drown in your rage
than be forced to live without it

our fragile hearts are tied together
with a string of pinky promises
and when you finally leave me,
the best part of me will leave too

i am not a metaphor
for the cracked sidewalk
that sprawls outside my door
growing unwanted weeds,
littered with faults and things
people don't want anymore

i am nothing like the sidewalk
my heart is not made of cement
and it is not used to being walked on
yes, i have faults, but i was not made
to be stepped on repeatedly
because i am human, not asphalt
and my heart is often stuck in my throat,
not steady enough for your heavy words-
not built for your harsh footsteps

i am not a metaphor
for the card games that are played
in rundown casinos
filled with bustling people
with foreheads gleaming sweat,
the sole ambition to conquer the first prize-
people just like you

i am nothing like the card games
and i can't keep pretending that
nothing bothers me, with
a permanent poker face
and always settling to be the sore loser
because i've spent too many forevers
hidden under your shadow,
and it's about time that i pulled a joker
because i am tired of always letting you win