Drunk on gin and conversation, I slept with someone else last night
But in his bed I had to fight your name from my lips,
To remember that I was here, with him and not there, with you
And he was not you
He smelled like cologne instead of coffee and smoke, but he was kind
And he was not you
In the morning he wrapped me in his arms and called me beautiful
And he was not you
In my mind I felt you next to me and while he slept, I remembered
All those times I laid my palm on your chest and felt your voice rise up through my fingertips
So that the things you said to me wrote themselves into my flesh, leaving me with no chance to forget all these pieces you’ve left behind
Take them back, please
You haunt my body like a ghost
I taste you in my sleep
Every inch of me remembers you, my thighs still think that they are tender
With the bruises from your hips
My heart still thinks that it is broken
You’ve become a whole list of songs I can no longer listen to, the early morning sadness I sleep late to avoid
You’ve become a name in my phone I will never call, a conversation in my head we will never have
You’re just a cold place in my bed
Just the thing that he was not
You are gone
And someday I will forget you, too

In an old box, she found a shell.
It was delicate, sweet pink, with spines spiraling to a cream-colored point.
The shell felt weightless in her hand.
She held it to her ear with dreams of the ocean crashing through her head;
the smell of salted wood and ***** long dead,
proof that everything will die and live and die again
until all the world is made of sand.
She expected the sound to call her home, instead,
the shell held only a thin whine,
like the sound of the tank above a toilet refilling
after the bowl has been flushed.

The first time you told me you loved me, I was drunk,
And I cried.
And then I was having a panic attack,
And my god ****** cigarette wasn't helping
And the air in my lungs was revolting.
The first time you told me that you loved me,
I couldn't say it back.
Not the second, the third, or the fourth.
I didn't say it the night that I told you you bring out the best in me,
Or the day after that, when I told you your dimples
Feel like the parenthesis around my own laugh.
I didn't tell you, even when you pointed up toward the full moon, just like the night we had met,
Or in the morning after that, when I woke up from nightmares about being thrown in jail
And found myself so grateful to have you next to me that when I rolled over to wrap myself around your still sleeping body, I almost whispered the words in your ear, just to give you a sweeter dream than mine.
The first time I thought it was when you first got out your guitar.
In that warmup chord, I saw what my body already knew your fingers could do.
And for some reason, it made me think about how you always put away your leftovers, how you ask me, little darlin, where was I going with that
Every **** time you tell a story, call me your steel trap.
While you played my favorite song without knowing, I thought about
How long we stood in the aisle weighing the pros and cons
Of toothbrushes
And how easily we laugh.
But still I can't say it, not yet, no matter how good you look in the yard, chopping wood.
We need more words for love because
I think maybe we see it differently.
If we were on the same page, you would never put forth something so easily
That could take us so far
And drop us so hard.
Because the love that I want between you and I
Is the kind that takes time
The kind that knows how to see in the dark, that forgives all of the embarrassing things.
Like maybe someday I'll show you my poetry.
I see the kind of love that has learned to navigate the world through four eyes
Like a spiderweb touching
The bark on our adjacent trees.
It requires you to forgive yourself the knowledge of me.
And that is not easy.
You joke, tell me you l-word me
Tell me that someday I'll learn how to love, just a joke, but
I don't know if you know it's not nice.
I do know love,
I know love like the backs of my teeth,
Like the way it ties strings across time and death and seas.
I know love like the way I have so many people in my life who give it to me for free
And I am so god ****** lucky that you feel it for me.
I know love in how much I want you
To be happy.
And yes, I know how to love between lovers,
But most of what I know is about how it goes away.
I remember how to fall out of love, so well,
How to lose myself in the swell
Of a dying tide.
I know
That for you I will dive back into that ocean
And that when I say those words, I will mean them, I will believe them.
And I know that I love myself far too much
To do anything but trust my own tongue because
Sometimes when you smile I feel like I've waited for you my whole life
So, on this, I can be patient.