all we have to separate the mind from the body
is light and dark: the reaching of god’s hands

over the world. i imagine that even the sun
asks be tucked in at night. & how could god refuse

another bed time story. a chance to be heard,
a chance to say “I know exactly why you exist,

why you need to be touched just to make sure
that you are still here.” we are not all light.

i know a boy so empty his father’s fists
       pass right through him as if punching the dust

from his ribcage. his broken breath a reminder
       that he still has something to lose in this world.

& i know a father broken and praying to a god
       he cannot recognize as his own,

holding the darkness in his church-shaped hands
        which soften in daylight

he kisses the blood off his stained glass knuckles
        & prays for morning. his god is heavy with

the weight of history, with the burden we know
as genesis. but how could the body, light and vulnerable

refuse to touch darkness. how could the body refuse
        to know that it is still here.

i stand, self-aware, and watch the upward curve of his smile
his hands fiddle with the lint in his pockets and suddenly,
my cheeks flush rosy and i feel the need to remind myself
there is nothing beautiful about wasting time
he laughs slightly and something in me starts running and
i fight the urge to catch it
he steps forward, just so much that i become acutely aware
of the shared air between us - of which i forgot to breathe
i inhale & exhale, trying to remember
what it is that scares me the most
about this moment
i can feel the suspense arounds us
and it lingers there for a long while
it begs me to do something daring, but i wait a moment more
before closing the space that separates us
i am now within one blink of his smile
and i blink and he
kisses me
slowly, like he knows
there will be plenty of traffic on the way home
like he’s just trying to learn something new before he leaves
i slowly come undone and feel the curve of his smile,
my own beaming up at him
and i take a deep breath and remind myself
there is something beautiful about this moment

i just want you to know right now
i’m grateful for the time i’ll spend writing you
because for too long i’ve been sticking glorified memories into the sunlight and naming them love
like it was alright to lose because the world was just teaching me a lesson in resilience every time i fell for someone with nothing but gravity to catch me
like it was all just practice for a hurt much worse than that
like there’s a science to breaking ourselves for the sake of staying sane

we can call our wounds victories so long as we shed a tear or two and didn't drown
and we can stick a bandage to the broken parts and pretend we’ve been having too much fun with the red finger paint but
we both know we outgrew creative solutions long before this
long before we outgrew each other

but from now on we’re done talking about the past like it’s still in front of us
done pretending like we aren’t getting enough of our share of the sun
my dear, we are not the footnotes of our own narratives
so quit letting a shortness of breath steal the stories you’ve been trying to say to the world
you can go tell the thunder its voice can’t even compare to your storytelling
tell the Rockies they’ve got nothing on your cliffhangers
nature’s never had to nurture your wounded imagination
you did that on your own

from now on
we’re gonna be beautiful without an explanation
who said these words ever had to make sense of themselves
who said any of us ever had to do the same
i swear on all the languages i'll never come to understand
these pages are gonna remember us
even when we cannot hold our pens without shaking
the ink's gonna dry and we will too but on everything
i promise something is gonna stay

somewhere we might be beautiful
at the interruptions of light or
the cross sections of earth or
        now

we’re all faded in the sun
dried out and tossed away back into the basket
like someone else’s ***** laundry
        and
someone else is coming to fold us over
        again

we’re barebacked in a black hole resemblance
        just ******* the light out of the laughter
        kissing the nothingness off our skin
try as i might
i can’t get the taste of tragedy out of my mouth

you and all the lullabies in languages i can’t fathom
i have no idea what the hell you’ve been saying all this time but
        it sure sounded nice
like a nocturne for the nobodies,
the forgotten as a body politic

so fall back outta the spaces between us
i’m just trying to warn you of the curves ahead
of the caustic lovers curated by the utter carelessness

the words are falling from your hands in the form of snowballs
chucking away the weight of what you believe about this world
we hurl ourselves at the wind under the precept that

        it’ll hurt less
to think about the things wilting underneath
three inches of a solution
melting away with the rest of us

this
is exactly the moment the collision occurred
this is the distortion of reality
the glance at your hands gripping the wheel
this is the stoppage of time
the numbing silence

you looked so beautiful knowing it would hurt
i always figured it would
i always asked you to wear a seatbelt
you always asked me to leave in peace
this is it then

this
is the tranquility of non-existence
this is the blood in my mouth that i can't identify as mine or yours and
this is the steel frame of the car and heart distorted

this is where fate meets human fragility
where the light makes sounds
where i can't remember the last words i said to you but
i hope they were clever

i hope something becomes of me
i hope you here my voice in car horns
and see me in ambulance lights

you were always so vibrant and i wonder where all your light went
back to the crash then
i felt us collide with the guardrail
and my soul wrap arounds yours

the first boy i ever loved had a freckle under his eye
and i swore
i'd never forget how that looked
and now, i have forgotten which eye it was under
and what color they were

but this, this is not a sad realization
this is not justification
this is an explanation of a simple thing:
i was not in love
but for the life of me, i could've been

and for reasons that i can't quite explain
we drifted apart
and truthfully, this may have been because he called me names i cannot repeat
and he broke me in ways that i'll never be able to fix
as ****** as it is, i stayed for a while longer
even though i knew i shouldn't
because
god, i thought i was in love
i swore i'd never forget that

but i did and i have
and sometimes these "goods" and "bads" come to pass
and all that's left is a fading memory
a fleeting feeling
not of love, but of longing
to be in love again

and this freckle under his eye, well i haven't seen it in seven months
and i don't really care to
because i've seen other beautiful things
things that would make that freckle seem
ugly
things that would make that freckle seem
insignificant
things that i swear
i will never forget

and this, i know
is not forever
i am not in love with the world yet
but for the life of me,
i could be