goodbye love,
goodbye midnights and jars of sweet tea,
fairy lights, "overcoming" anything,
crooked fountains and oaks;
goodbye love,
goodbye to your mother and your sister,
to the mary in the rocks,
the knots in your forehead when you were at a loss.

I hold my own hand and I snuggle myself to sleep,
there is a hole in my heart if you get close enough to look,
goodbye love,
goodbye to these words you'll never notice,
to the moment I knew this was the autumn I wrote about before.

happy one year, love

last night scraped painstakingly
from the fissures in my brain
scraped like ink from wood-latch boxes with
fancy carved roses on the top

chewing apart memories with
your nails clenched into my hand
I am falling out of love all over again

clicking keys and snapping wrists
ripped strings and fractured minds
slipping into different facades
of distances that felt closer
six trembling months so
long

touching your palm
with a face that isn't real anymore
pillow cased fingertips touching cheeks
bumping elbows ripple through ponds of
tension seething just under the skin and
details throb in my temples

I have vanished from the city skyline
I am taking back my couch, I am stepping on dried roses
pilfering paint from butterfly wings
frankly darling sweet pea
there were these picnic baskets and sunflowers

bitterly lamenting to everyone but printed on both sides
of your business card it says "heartbreaker"
and printed on both sides of the fortune cookie it said
"not your business, move on move on"

stitching holes in my cheekbones, I
haven't got the heart to put up walls
haven't got the nerve to break them down
still painting you into my sunflowers and I am
so wary when I scrape elbows

these last two weeks drag on.
I wash my hair all the time, rinse and repeat rinse and repeat rinse and repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat
slithering out of my follicles and sliding down the drain
toweling my hair dry, and
then you're creeping into my skin
you're creeping in creeping creeping and there's a whole bar of soap, gone.
and I think I'm finally clean and you've etched yourself in the pads of my fingers
that I rub on sandpaper until they bleed, ****** ****** badges of I'm winning!
winning this game with you in my lungs, pushing out with all your hands and your feet;
I can't breathe out, you won't let me, I hold it hold it hold it I touch edges of darkness feel my eyes
clog with pinpricks, stars, explosions and I've suffocated you, let out my breath,
calmed by your soft murmur in my ear, your touch on places we always went together,
I am cleaning cleaning cleaning trying to get you out of my skin and my hair and my thoughts
thoughts like you didn't even care and you don't even think about me anymore and all I do is think about trying to scrape your brains out of my innards.
vivid intakes, passionate obsession, cleaning cleaning cleaning the house the yard my hair (again) the door the mirror you wrote I love you beautiful the car seat you pulled me into the feel of your lips and your hands and your hair when you sweat because I could make you
feel.
and now I look in that mirror where I can't erase your words and I don't see that girl you watched anymore;
all I see is ***** of skin and listless hair and blue purple circles stalking my eyelids and profound sadness and I see so much that isn't even there because the one thing I need to see I can't because it's
you and you're wrapped up in her like a present
and all I got this christmas was coal to match this listless hair and an inability to see reality and a really awful obsession with wanting to cause you pain
pain pain pain pain what is pain, pearl white
what is pain

one o'clock in the morning
switch switch clack clack
there's a train and it's streaming swirls of
steamy illumination
clack clack
eyelids drifting; icebergs, somewhere, melting.

there's a part of my brain and it's
it's drifting back to you
you're walking on those steaming lights
palm on palm and eyes on eyes on faces
creased and turned
with curiousity
and the beginnings of devotion

there was a past, storied; perhaps too complicated
and it's faded; I have managed to turn my head
painfully removed,
toward blue jackets being pulled on
blue and maroon
blue and maroon

you're different, and she's absolutely different
I do not know how I missed the mark
(but oh I hope that she does worse)
blue and maroon
when patched together minds of mine
**** backwards and--
I can't feel you anymore, I can only think
so maybe this is better

blue and maroon
he's getting better; he's not perfect in the same way
but you weren't either in a big way
his faults don't rattle my teeth in my head
and blister my fingertips completely out of bitterness
my eyes don't bleed of acid when he strikes an ill-planned chord
you're gone
and I am staring at this train
eyelids drifting
thinking of blue and maroon

I have been bright, hovering for weeks with the edges of ovals I so narrowly believed to be bicycle wheels,
discovering good friends in places right under the windowsill, freshening up the roses
in the pots I'd forgotten about on the back porch.

and there's you, a dream perhaps,
a sliver of pecan pie left over from the holidays but increasingly fresh
I'd like to twinge the tremors in your body that make you hum
and satiate pulsing bodies in flat, parallel lines of desire and decisiveness
I'd like to be the twisting ivy on the brimming edges of tentative youth,
to scale your walls and snuggle in the safety of wonderment and lack of knowing,
any better.

I'd like to make the bluebirds sing with throats of slim-cut rubies,
to have contentment and a battle born, hand held, period of time in which
I can enjoy a piece of dessert, well deserved

I was magnificent.
I sat there in the dark, alone, and I clutched christmas lights to my chest.
whispering, "here,"
I have wept for my broken hearts, I have meandered down paths that led me slowly here
I am content. I reach backwards with my left, to
those I see stumble,
to catch them if they fall, to see-saw them to the
right there ahead, glinting with age 25
and the sunshine on newly tinted hair.

I haven't caught all the hands or all of the tears,
but I can grasp the holes they left behind with a strength anew

my ghost will haunt the space of that old cafe;
nestled into the air above the second booth to the left
or tucked into the corner above the fish tank,
delicately breathing memories of proms and first dates
to renovators and brightly fluttering couples.

molecules agitated, eternally lingering in pursuit
of love lost to time and particular circumstances
dancing in stasis and unable to drift away from that cafe
and pink sheets in the sunshine, of longhorns
and the feel of a waist

caked on makeup, lyrical lash lines, clear
thoughts for the first time; trying so hard to type
out the right words to make the world stop spinning ten
times too fast in the wrong direction. can't you see it's making me ill,
the way you casually can't decide and lean
on calves of glass and card towers of achromatizing dust?

I am a kaleidoscope of many other ashes to ashes to dust;
cut across from rib to rib and leeching out the clear
air you breathe. I am perennial, the one to clean
you up when you fail to break the mold and fall back on type-
casted stereotypes of who everyone else thinks you should be. still,
I am the one who doubts and falters, often

has the idea that we are erased and quick forgotten
the moment our idiosyncrasies peter out and dust
replaces bones we came to know. I am shrill,
and I talk too loud at all the wrong times; I can never clear
the plates I stain with blood and pile high with subtype
after subtype derivatives of things I should do and glean

vivification from carefully, anxiously. you have this lean
skin and enviable, insouciant lilt to your walk towards me at ten
o'clock when I can't see straight anymore, can barely type
the last letters of my poems. your eyes are clear
and you're free of that indestructible and obliterating dust
that clogs my lungs and makes me feel so ill

so often. shallow peaks of your shoulder blades, time at a standstill
when I merge into highways of veins and clean
breaks from responsibility, softly tracing jawbones that clear
my head for just a moment; hands that tremble to fasten
the world back onto my hollow aches and faltering nervous system. I dust
off your window sill and think maybe you're the type

that complements an irrational daydreaming messy busy type-
writer kind of lover. you know, the kind that hates to pay the bill
on time because that's another deadline to miss, who lets dust
fly around because vacuums interrupt abstract art and lean
cuisine, who likes cats and very, very often
misplaces her phone somewhere on your clear

floor nothing like the type she has, like the type I have, like the way I lean
toward your infrastructure to hold me still; darling, you brighten
my mornings of habitual stardust and glass not quite clear.

subtlety is not a trait I possess well, when I mention
late night texts and infatuation here and there I mean you,
the problem is that I've been here before and I've
fallen too fast.

the problem is that I build these walls that cave in
quickly and resolutely;
I am a dreamer of romance and like
procured fat bouquets of sunflowers unexpected,
quilts, meaningful embraces where the whole world
drops right out of your stomach.

I worry myself because this heart is so brittle; it's known
to have been dropped a time before;
I'm sick of sweeping up slivers of organs like glass,
always laying everything that means anything out on the table for people to poke around in like
I am some kind of mystifying tag sale.

even though things seem different this time,
they don't, really,
anxious wrists and fingers that don't
hold pencils very tightly,
hugging sweaters and the memory of a
quite lovely monday night
and some really awful ones time and time before.

late october,
today my heart is wandering,
I still listen to your music.
things I like fall in my lap and I pick up the phone to tell you,
someone I can hide behind

maybe I just like warm waists and strong arms
maybe I like feeling small,
I met this boy today, love,
he reminds me of home, of fresh tortillas wrapped in tinfoil
he reminds me of this summer, and of you.

he doesn't like the things we liked,
but he's a different fabric
and I am patching this idea that
we never stop loving anyone

you will be happy again.
you will have dry eyes for months on end,
walk the beach in the evening,
laugh until you ache.
it gets better. you know that. you hear that every day.
but you're sitting there losing your hair,
slicing your hips with a shard of glass
blaming yourself.
girl, you know lows but there are highs you don't know exist.

and one day, you will breathe in deep and fill yourself
full of good food and the company of people that are meaningful and real,
again. you're going to crawl out of that gaping hole, take a shower,
pay your bills, and realize you aren't as small as you feel right now, today,
this week, this month, this year.
and even though you'll also watch dear ones fall into ditches that cave in on themselves,
skinning knees and breaking your heart to pieces,
you'll also watch them live better than they ever had before and that,
that option, that light in their eyes and strength in their soul
makes it worth it. and you'll have it too.
and one day you'll look in the mirror and stop hating yourself,
stop caring if he calls or he doesn't
stop shattering to pieces the moment you step into a solitary space.

and even though maybe tomorrow you'll wake up and
have to stay in bed for another week
swaddling yourself in that familiar black carpet
you will be happy again because just like it is impossible to
stay happy forever,
just like it is impossible to ever fill that crack in your foundation,
just like you are sad now and have been sad before,
I swear, I promise,
it is just as impossible to stay miserable forever
and you will be happy again.

remembering moments on hilltops, suspended in
the sky, we were the fibers in a weaving, close knit
in lingering patterns of threes and four.
do you wonder about this freshwater ocean that blossoms at my feet
I wonder of the appeal and the repeal of the oak
trees that always sang me to sleep, and carried me into the light

I've long had this obsession with windows alight,
when the air shimmers with floating pieces of lives in
technicolor, I have something to watch as I lie, wide-eyed and left to soak
through the evening; you see, no matter how tightly I knit
the people in my life to my chest, I am always left twenty feet
apart from them when I need them most for

keeping me in touch. four,
five, six, seven, eight. trapped in my own prison of increasing daylight,
I drink coffee after coffee and fret about the things I haven't done, and the feet
of clothing piling up on my floorboards. within
the scope of a week there are three solid days where I am unable to knit
myself properly, truly together. a half-sodden cloak

of apathy, drenched by rain-misted windows and thimbles of oak
pollen I've sewn to my heart to remind myself of the four
years I haven't talked to my father, of two closely knit
souls bitten apart by youth and distance. the days when I softened the slight
pulls at your shoulder blades, where I could see miles and miles of a life in
shades of red. I'm burying myself in the sludge of desperation, I am fifty feet

under the swirling surface of a frosted lake michigan, clutching my feet
in a position where no one can hear a word. I am left to croak
when I'm aching to scream, "**** it, *******, I knew of this mess I'm in,
blistering in the cold, one thousand one hundred thirty-nine point five miles, four
years I had to take and knew you wouldn't wait." light
creeping in on the horizon while I sip my twelfth coffee, carefully knit

between my comforter and the sheets. I've never had the patience to knit;
I'm a wanderer, a dreamer, a vagabond on feet
bound by restlessness and the ache of a lifetime spent catching the flight
of the wind on a clear autumn day. I notice the shaking of my body while I soak
in the trembling of treetops, the bursting of my seams for
things I can't have, the running of hands over fabric worn thin.

I had men I could have knit and purled, I had trees I might've loved like texas oak,
I had feet, I had solid friends in fifteens and four;
I had these in the light, but I caved to find you lost within

today I found my heart on the sidewalk,
grey and purple; streaked with the past few months
I said, hello there
picked it up and put it in my pocket.
darling, I said
I thought you'd gone missing forever

it's not so,
said my heart
things can get rough,
but someone will always find where you have hidden your stars.

I remember that picnic in the summer,
gold sunspots in the cold
and now I lay in my bed looking at the city
thinking that maybe I can just remember
about my filing closet from time to time
so I can stop misplacing my organs

I keep writing the spaces between heartbeats,
I keep touching the things that aren't real,
I keep saying how I'm going to change into something,
I keep erasing the lines that I've written before,
and when will I write for myself.

it takes skyscrapers filled with polaroids
it takes little white lies and telegraphs
it takes reflective puddles of gasoline
it takes armfuls of daisies and paisley print napkins
it takes princes and paupers and slurpees and silver
plated bracelets and philosophical books and memories
of people sitting on cracked green-brown bus seats
it takes things I knew and throws them away; it takes crispy hot nights
when cheekbones are sweating and boys who know nothing
of what they want filling their hearts up with and euros in pennies and sitting
on six clouds of old medications and basements with just too much dust.

it's a matter of time,
it's matter of perspective,
it's a snapshot hold-back parallel circle of constant irrevocable dimensions of porch swings
and merry go rounds undeniably irritatingly provokingly making me sick.

swish swish go cassette tapes I keep within reach
I can pull out their insides and stretch out the tape to reach to the moon
past the treetops and over the sun and into my head while I sleep.
someday I'll tinker with those that dream nothing,
and someday I'll write for myself.

the sinking sun keeps calling
poetic bones and walgreens; three am
flinging glass, nightmares, explicit
circles of the wind

singing into daybreak
shutters slamming shut; flickering eyelashes
and flopping into pillows fluffing up
shifting clouds of how you smelled

porch swings, heartbreaks
capturing breezes soaking skulls
red wine and "oh-take-mine"
tracing outlines imprinted
swaying grass lays flat

where you were,
but the summer sun keeps calling

I watched the city disappear, then
watched it re-emerge from the night sky,
dabs of watercolor on a surface gathering pigment
I hummed and watched myself shudder and stumble and balk because,
(and I want to sit you down and tell you this
somber eyes, twisted fingertips)
I loved deeply, completely, and I crawled down the steps
of letting anything and everything go;
I moved on, I moved away, but I lacked the strength to disintegrate
the questions pooling in the bottom of my gall bladder
"well what if
would you..."

I was different then, I fell so delightedly!
but things did so hurt, time stole the breath from my throat
and I soaked my pillows so thoroughly I drowned.
I want you to know that,
I want you to know that I have had my heart broken violently
and softly (and perhaps that was worse)
I have loved and I have ****** and I have watched a boy like you fade into the sunset.

pacing through the motions:
feeling bright, content
things are new and better but
I'm capturing unextraordinary in all the traps I set for bliss,
like a maze I'm losing where all the dead ends say
unremarkable
and screaming at the walls
"start feeling, you ****!"
because I have sweet and loving and caring but I find myself craving
the instances I hated when he would spit fire
and I would burn bright, because I am a purveyor of highs and lows and I
just feel flat.

sometimes I wonder
like a clock-worker, twitching gears and springs
why we are programmed to fight for each other's survival

I watched my sister wrinkle;
crumple in place over problems for which she
lived and for which she cried
for those she could never stitch back whole.

what is it
when self-programming is charted and mapped,
through simple fixes like plants and a weekend spent painting
empty gridded sketchbooks and hand-picked
letter combinations,
that makes us turn to those who fall apart in our laps over the inability to place
into the proper places their springs and gears

I'd like to spend summer making you look at the sky and realize it's blue because
you woke up this morning and noticed it
but maybe I will stay here protecting
my plants and my paintings from uncertain puzzles,
wrinkling puzzles and springs

fragments
pool under my skin, press outward on the thin layer between
here and now and
me and now
when they fissure and seep out
they are glass jars on my desk, dotted with fruits,
plants watered and green,
they are summer days spent living
in short dresses, feeling everywhere on the bottoms of your thighs.

I am walking around in a haze of love,
melodies of days spent into the ground,
the perpetual feeling of contentedness with these
broccoli concoctions, incredible people,
the beauty of how a warm day falls into place
and filters through glass jars
blossoming with the hardwood floors of tomorrow.

to three zero four turnstone, back right bedroom, one red wall,
one year ago.
things improve.
I remember how much you hurt.
I remember how badly your skin blistered inside those cinderblock walls,
the ticking clock, burning eyes, deadened.
I remember the way your voice wavered over the turf and into the pitch-black sky
pinching yourself, aching with the one pounding word pumping again and again:
finally finally finally finally finally finally
you had plans to fulfill and places to be and you knew what they were and that you were going to get them just as soon as you could crawl through the sludge of the months holding you back.
I liked to be free on a wednesday morning, just before lunch. there is always something about the allure of a store so many hours before you will arrive out of breath at the door just to watch the "open" sign flicker off.
I learned to enjoy that summer, I really did,
but lodged somewhere behind a kidney I remember a pair of teeth so tightly clenched that they were beginning to crack.

to three zero four turnstone, back right bedroom, one red wall,
two years ago.
things improve.
I can dive inside my memory and watch your face distend and bubble with tears as you painstakingly pace your way through every ******* college pamphlet you were ever mailed.
I don't like to remember; I still know how acutely you bled,
and how much I'd like to reach back to pull you from your misery and show you what we have done.
I know that you know things will sharpen and blossom and that's why you're crying so wholly;
perk up love, hold fast to your countdown,
fail to combust with ravenous envy as others cross the illustrious stage,
I'm waiting for you here and I promise it really is everything you've ever wanted.

to eight five zero jerry's lane, second floor, front right bedroom, lavender walls,
four years ago,
things improve.
I remember those dry eyes and that flawless exterior,
I remember the knot in your throat and the clamp on your heart that played games with your head.
for the love of god and your health
will you shake your own shoulders so hard you see stars?
no one you meet worth a dime of your time will judge you as hard as yourself,
and I have found even in darkness you will never face demons completely alone.
I want you to climb to your rooftop and fill your lungs with the air of the ashes that haunt you;
for every heart that is broken we also break ground.

to six two three zero north kenmore, fourth floor, southeastern side, western bedroom, perfect white walls,
present day,
things are whirling forward.
*finally finally finally finally finally finally

when did I wake up okay?
when did the sun stop hurting my eyes
when did I start being able to get out of bed everyday
no problem,
when did I roll over and get out of bed and dress myself in clothes I liked,
walk the streets with clicking heels and bright eyes,
when did I start knowing how to spot a pothole a mile away and avoid it
or hop out of it the minute I felt myself slipping,

when did I start ordering coffee and
enjoying the stillness of a night or a day,
able to look in the mirror and be content,
even pleased,
with softness and curves and things I can't change,
when did I become happier than the women that look in the mirror at their tight ***** and hate themselves?

when did I start saying take me or leave me and then
doing the leaving myself,
confident in my ability to start over;
when
did I wake up strong?

pushing toward the things I dreamed as a seed:
a particulate of matter nestled under the blankets
of earth and potentiality.
I cried, I stretched my arms and felt the sand tucked around my shoulder
blades start to fade away with the miles covered in a greyhound bus.

I breathed, I blossomed;
I held the moon in my hands and used it to put shimmer in my step.
I tucked the unfinished pieces into my pocket and swore to return to them later,
I picked the brightest flowers from the field and wove them into the braid
that wrapped around my collarbones.
I wrapped my sweater tight around the life I made,
I watched it unravel with dwindling wonder.

I found the fragments in my pocket gathering dust:
some I set free into the fall air that smelled like my grandfather's garage,
some I melted back into the veins of my heart,
some I wrapped around the pigeons to keep them warm in the winter.

I am a sliver of mica retrieved by an eight year old girl from a lake
warm with the seaweed of summer.
I glimmer in the sunlight and flake away piece by piece,
floating to an atmosphere where I can reconstruct myself into the glossy
details on the edge of a wave.
I am all that I remember and all that I am becoming, constantly
part of a new wave, of the same ocean, from the same lake.
*aren't we all just runaways?

you're a little festival of light,
that crackle in vhs tapes that makes you miss home,
a snarky crunch in a brand-new bowl of
cereal and milk.
sometimes I wish the battle scars left over from failed art projects
were enough to send me to the hospital in a panic
so I could sit on a metal table wringing my hands while I called you to calm me down.
maybe you would realize then that you're still very important
in my little world of crackles and
sunbursts.

I walk around each day endlessly reminding my toes to keep up
with the pavement so I don't fall down and stop short
to remember I am not quite the independent lady I aspire to be.
it's human, maybe; I want a warm body to tuck myself around
I don't know what kind of present I even am,
but when you call me talking of mushrooms
I always think that maybe I'm okay.

across that pavement still warm from the new spring sun
your body saunters; shirts that smell like clean cotton
and hands that saunter across my trembling ribcage that for one
moment today feels actually weightless.

wrapped up in your arms and your blankets,
I think of nights when we walked downtown and saw those city lights that
drew me in like a moth to a flame with a camera;
bright rectangles softened by blue black that drew me away for august.

you kept saying that this wasn't a mistake.
liquor soaked through the phone lines and bright almonds
in my face cried out; I loved you and the way your hands felt
so cool when I sat on that warm pavement one terrible night
crying for everything I was worth because I didn't want to lose you
in august or september or ever.

I loved you, and you didn't even know what you were saying.

the world feels lighter,
a shade of grey, floating, airy;
in december I swear the world was deep maroon, people were falling off the edges of a flat piece of paper
and now, spherical,
self-saving, breathing, alive.

we trudged through sorrow, fragmented bodies,
we huddled together in the wind and waited for something,
anything,
someone.

the feeling of sliding tthrough a crack and miraculously appearing in a cavern of gold
and blue skies for miles,
curving over the horizon,
just so.

there's this way things slip into the past,
quicker than it feels like;
I miss old brown jeeps and something
to do all the time. these same walls,
breathing but just barely,
sleeping, waiting. you seem
forever ago but showers at one am seem
fresher than when they actually happened;
I don't know which way it is to that restaurant
anymore, and I watch people change all around me
it's this irritating feeling of feeling like I've been there,
and wanting to escape,
or wanting to live,
and I swore I heard my brakes squeal tonight right
when I passed over the same railroad tracks like always,
flickering lights and I feel there is something significant here,
though it is probably my overactive imagination
and no one to ponder with.
do you know how last week I laid in those purple flowers on my lawn
and listened to the bees buzz around my head
like I was in the center of the universe
or a highway, everything streaming past on both sides
something extraordinary but
most likely just a star in with about a billion others.
just like the ones you have to put
binoculars on to see.
didn't you lose those in your attic?

pressure pressure pressure
hollow paper skin
I'm not a paper airplane and
I can't pretend to fly
through stormy wednesday mornings
when the rain begins to drop;
here begins the tailspin
structure folding under
paper-coated hollow bones
the skeleton that shivers

here begins the pressure.
irking little seed
with roots deep cut,
knees cut down
to bleed you on the street
and stretched upon the ground
pressure curls you under

I've got here this paper skin with
tons of flesh to mark
reorganize to find inside
organs tucked in battered skin,
with paper thin
crumpled in your hand
you thought it ripped;
really only crinkled

listening, alive,
tracing my own shadows
but failing to disintegrate,
bleeding fingers hung up five hundred strips of canvas and what I didn't
paint on I carefully sliced my way through.
remember the day on a playground with a sunset
I carried on, even after the sheets and the day I felt my insides buckle

I think what was worse were the days I cried
to lose a sense of importance in a life other than my own,
I dreamt of her lungs collapsing and I think about driving around my father's driveway in the middle of the night
never sure what anything means but I like how you said "I miss having you around,"
I miss having me around too.

awake, sitting on pillows
thinking about "bluebirds with cancer" and
sometimes last summer laying between your sister's pink sheets in the afternoon.

this time of year things grow piercingly
into your heart; blades of grass push through
tender flesh and harden into sand-sharpened
needles that ache so delicately-

covered in spines, and ailing,
touching the face of the boy you have loved
and telling him softly "never forget that."

we wander through piles of photographs lost in time,
moments drifting off trees of held hands and cracked green bus seats
that are whispering the laughs of ashes
and the thirteen year old love for a best friend who
honestly knows why your heart is so sore.

we move on, we surrender things we loved and those
we loved,
I can take your hand and tell you all the things I want to believe,
but stagnant, I wonder how I will ever live,
lively,
with the hearts so dear to mine left so far behind.

soft rain slices skin apart at the seams, watching rain
slide down and pool in my lap. watching you pile things into
duffel bags, watching my hands wring themselves and
pick apart the flower growing in the space where my lungs were.
he loves, he loves, he loves.
petals are put forth in clustered buds of brighter times, bear the dyes of vivid days,
cascade and separate in the fall.
I'm breathing in the spaces between yours; even here
somehow you got away.

this winter I will pull off my coats and notice that you are written
down my arm in ink that doesn't fade like time left,
fails to blister and run like chalk drawings on the pavement,
keeps over seasons, over marigolds, over strangers and coffee,
and he loves me nots.

do you know what it's like,
standing on the edge of a cliff screaming at the top of your lungs
but nobody seems to be around to hear you
or respond, because even your own echo ran
off with your shadow just last week,
and you're patting tissue to your face, crying
leave me alone!
but there's no one here
and all those ratty voices tearing apart your eardrums,
peeling off your kneecaps,
they're in your head.

curled in a ball, breathing in damp pillowcases;
heaving gasps that search for time and air that is long gone.
I thought I'd buried this heart that searches out train windows at night,
thinking in what if and what else

paperback words of loss take my hand, paint
the silver trails back to lost love, to memory, to
remembering skin, and sunlight, the ache of
desire and imminent separation.

I lay sleepless on swollen eyes and wonder if you
ever think about that day, tucking our faces into our
damp collarbones; knowing that talk remains unchanged
but now, there will be that polite distance between our bodies when we embrace

I have love that stutters on the edge; in
lines of chalk bent around the figure here
ghosts linger, waiting for another dear
to gnaw away tomorrow and fresh skin.
see, you marked upon a canvas so thin
and fluid that sheets, scents left from last year
took whole seasons to fade, to disappear
into folds of paper and soft chagrin.

those I left behind with purpose remain
scattered around, but you cut off that hair
I loved and left. I found a simple thought
somewhere in my head, "come home all the same";
lashes curled some thousand miles from there
but faint memories lost when ships are caught.