sand carved songs
still embellish your ankles
six-four twirls
a hazel salt water dance

dead love letters from
when we once swam through
the skin of the horizon
with our two winged shadow

morning funerals
the sun apologetic; her
knees kissing, our ashes float
in her hanging furnace

i’ve been peeling, unglueing
cigarettes off my skin
like flakes of rain
scribbling prayer
on every snowflake

smoke festoons
this passé system of patchwork breath
kissing my cheekbones
the way you used to

under too many starless nights
i’ve lost count of
how long
i’ve been addicted.

i wanted to clench a
lithe, flimsy sky in the thicket
of my veins like
preserved butterflies

seize gale, glitter
pollen, laughter between laced
handcuffs
quietly, lovingly beneath
the tender protest of old stars
i wanted to break something beautiful.
i wanted to hold you between
the rubble
cluttered consonants on my tongue,
your cracked glass soul, the constellations in your smile,
i wanted to
cradle you like a dream, and break you
like a promise.

The sky painted itself
the color of candied raven
and the tingle of your touch
still flooded
the river beds of my soul; false bravado
tattooing its flaxen lies beneath my eyelids and
blood stains on my wrists
i crushed my own heart seventeen times a day

but you were so beautiful with your hair dyed the color of freedom
wings perched, loud crimson lips and hollow nightingale cages
a sizzling sip of obliteration

like pallid ceramic
angels on forsaken
attic shelves,
teardrops from rusty faucets
decaying family portraits
swooned on
glassy tables—

i fell
i dropped
i cracked
i shattered

i broke along
*with you

in pealing season, she is a girl of lousy ingrowth
she is an unkempt corner; kitchen sink. legs pulled like knives. phone call her curled tendons; isolation in
grit and fibril      
she is women with wings. this is how we stymie the rapunzel. we carve the ugly into her. we teach her to wear skin like saran. skin like punishment
                        cut-coin the rumpelstiltskin. how she is  wound and string, paper-doll; bird-in-a-box
how we wring the juice of her on washcloth. hung upturned from the ceiling fang; plucked and feathered
like apology. cherry-picked; veins like mikado. how it is dark and she is blind-bat wind-warriors; waterboarded with no hands
upturning the paper boats of her in every follicle; how the flipswitch insecurity eats her like pickle. in a storm
she is neither nor tongue nor limb
just breast, bone, the weight of mirrors
how we jettison when the grief is heavy. abandon. thick, empty abandon.
alone in grit-cusps when the monsoon has eaten into the white, wispy mortuary. dark in hallways; yet pale and slender. she is beautiful.
we lift her ribbed corpse off the shoreline.
we unload the offering like red carpet;
this is how we wrap her in white and weary-eyed
translucent. how unavoidable we become when we are the last hope. crippled. when we look hope in the eye. askance. how she will beg you to look at her with the heart in the honey-jar; torso in tourniquet
how the walls are ripped in shades of askance. how we look away.

how us, walls, look away.
how, us, walls, askance.
how we drip of askance; how the pink flesh and cherry-limb slips like matchstick on brushfire
how there is purple and primrose and bruise
there are some spots on the floor where it still reeks purple and yellow and bruise
how we are
               lousy
                         ingrowth
here.  how we
                                                              ­   try
to
pluck
                             and *erase

three two one. fade in. you
are a dream                     time
will                   molder.
i return to you each arm.
the wildfire of you; flew rubies.
pitched; and scalded. moonless,
we carried the night like
flying-carpet fabric of our
soul. the way your words
shone, fluttered.

clung to the frayed spine. radiance
and immaturity. counting you
in ribs; starved of stomach. crumbs
                                    like gratitude.
the shades of you in
                                    detuned strings.
                                    you wanted to see

slide. i dream of pulling
focus and zoom but maybe
it is better a dream. yours
were those of emerald;
mine, abstinence.

i watch you fade fast
fire gone grey fire famished
trickle and then
drowning; rhythms of limbs
and limbs, downy limbs
and waterlungs

i close my eyes
you are a dream
                        time will drown
and it feels right. a hollowed-out
kind of right.
fade out