your mouth is on fire, i am
between it. the smoke
which we are forever in need of
swims like salmon in between brain and skull

scared (rinse and repeat this part)
i beat into you, desperately
carving the cold flesh twitching
as though recalling a bad dream

but you cave into yourself. a sand castle
shifting and dripping with sea
eyes cast off like anchors
i want, w-want, sorry (in a whisper)

stuttering and shaking and trying,
forever trying, to save
something, anything
of this moonlight which wakes me

i break open my chest, unzip the seams
of my lungs and invite you inside
offering a home,
how selfish. how heavy,

and you crumble into dirt and ash,
prayers answer, destiny
met. left behind, i am buried under you.
asleep. unseeing.

come back to familiar couches and concerned words that run like bugs across your skin,
back to a sliver of window and never-any-snow-days,
not a ******* one.
nor summers that mean anything but uncomfortable skin,
but what else is there to do but check the weather report?
i’ve got it carved into my palm, butterknife wounds and burned
kisses, your name hurts the best.
(sit with me on a greyhound bus while i drink blue apartment buildings and handicaps)

the clowns are getting crowded in here, little
multicolored car, painted blue eyes and i will never stop dancing in big shoes, but
compromising is the most useful major i could choose. learn how to;
stop saying i, stop saying no, stop consuming the eyes of boys
very far out of my reach, forget your very special language of misunderstood gestures and
keep getting older

the orange-bleached days in the company of my 24-hour loves were worth it, worth
every salty confession shed off the side of the Belle,
worth losing faith in everything else. maybe, someday,

we can share headphones.

whether i said it or not
i loved you all very much*

(act 1)

this is an ode to the dark room
in which i made you bleed
and you found the courage to laugh
at my clumsy hands. you,
forever cloudy eyes and sideways glances,
think you love me. you are mistaken.
but when the carpet seemed
like grass, and you reached out
for something i will never understand,
i let myself shake with the moon, let myself
escape guilt for the first time.
and new lovers flooded in
because i tore myself open for you.

(act 2)

“right now, r-right now,
i love you”
drunk and desperate, i threw
my middle school needs upon you in some kind of
suicidal mission of my childhood,
you took it. you smiled.
and you did not understand.
sacrificial and first.
pure.
you fade fast.

(act 3)

sometimes i return to
kind puddled visions of the night you taught me
what it meant to make love
and what it meant to apologize.
i would like to defeat you, to not have to imagine
my tears dripping onto your stomach
and you far away, too male and hard.
i would like to think that i could darken
the yellow light reflecting from your skin
by badly hung christmas lights,
even if your confession was the only one that was holy.
i can forget.
it is what i am best at.

(act 4)

now
    there is another
another sinking stone, with full eyes
and hopeful hands and when i dream
he is there
curled up in a life
in which i am awake and unafraid.
i have known you for a week.
you told my father i am wonderful.

(act 5)

i went to a wedding for two women
who were together for 25 years, even
before the ceremony, even after
they had explored every part of each other’s bodies.
i cried
and prayed for the power to give myself up.
but i renounce god everyday.

the soft movements of movie people through
stained glass, you will never know
never touch,
him
and that burnt sunshine hair
and the lips you almost escaped through

and the neverending sound of bells

on fire and tossing in cold dreams
in a glass house where your voice is echoing.
it’s a strange faith, now of all times, but still;
the pattern of moles on your back is more inherent than constellations,
the gods drawn there are soft.

i am still in possession of the night,
still possessed, of that which was
dimly lit and outside
of who we are outside each other, and now
i’m only
horribly aware of the beauty of your shoulders falling,
shut down brain, shut down hands desperately
turning to birds in your hair

hollow bones and
movements, words you said into the back of my ear
i’m keeping clutched under the flapping skin of my breast, open
to the cold air of this early dying november.
but i know how unfair that is.
i know what this looks like.

others have left me purple and painted, oozing
with fake laughter and lies about what i need. but for once,
because i could love you;

i could love you. their eyes don’t matter,
nor does the extraneous world
keeping our ribcages iron stiff, shut.
it is not possible for us to save each other,
but we could make a home in your sheets, and
that’s the closest
we’ll ever get.

so because i could love you; this is cutting me open.
i think about your hands all the time.

in the morning i peel you from my eyelids like wet leaves. still breathing out cold smoke. clutching at an empty space under small light.

yesterday’s lipstick creates footprints across a quest that deems me the villain, i am angrily embossing (could not press the pen hard enough) what does friends mean anyways, what does touch mean without ALL of you touching ALL of me, the invisible rope around my neck is a vindictive love letter explaining how much i do not need you but those words keep me open and pulsing for the day you will curl up in my hands like a sick bird. i will feed you curling ribbons of half chewed words while i curse the clock.

our timing was always movie theater doomed, a sad fate tastes like blackberries, but when my empty bed becomes too much, memories of your wet eyes swell. what could have been, hurts, what could have been makes my dreams wet with tar, what could have been

haunts your harsh hands. but please, keep them on me, eroding the illusion that you

ever

could have stayed

could have loved (me)

shaking with the insurmountable distance
between their skin and my own
moon people shifting darkness with the mystery of snow.

i have never been able to dance,
i have never moved in any kind of godly pattern
of emotional symmetry, my actions
are a perpetual breaking of glasses onto linoleum.

my tears are a tricky laurel of thorns,
constructed for a cause useful to no one,
prayers become active tumors of apologies.

somehow (i know nothing)
the carving afternoons of applications and *******
sweet smelling kisses, chocolate loves
the sea has fallen with the resolution of biblical music

and you are very far away.
i would have held on tighter, had i known anything, had i known
the smashing confusion of this heart.

i will wake up and cook you eggs (fried and dry)
in a kitchen with too little counter space and cheap paintings.
i will still be naked and buttercup yellow, the creases
of your pillow tattooed into my cheek.
i will close my eyes and feel you slide your hand,
kindly, under the curving fruit of my breast
and whisper something into the soft part of my ear.
i want to know what you will say.

maybe this time when i cut myself to pieces
your lips on my skin will swallow the coldest parts of me, quietly
you will hold my flesh on your tongue and every sigh
will ring inside of you, never empty, never
quite useless, or alone.

i’m addicted to touch
craving the love of another mother
from which our love blooms
like a ******* child.

arms inflamed with bees,
bones protruding in awkward angles
from our elbows
never asleep,

your back is ripped with claws
oh, how to love, they told us
lies, to keep us up at night, to keep us
trapped behind skin

little petals at your ******* fold away,
wither with red and blood, falling
as though writhing, angry
snakes. but we’re gone

disappeared behind dreams of clouds,
perpetually propelled
by great tails of thorns, by
a force grown from seed.

darling, our hearts curdled, we
stand at the hearth of a fire
kindled by secrets, burning
memories of love

your lips part, the chapped walls
of a great fissure.
my tongue carves your teeth like water
there is something i’ve been dying to tell you
this is the best way i know how.

counting your heartbeats  
ironically
tracing the lifelines on your palm
hoping, my hand pulsing

your ghost presses into me like a sheet
whispering, and all
i ever wanted

to forget myself
to live within your blood

is forgotten