Someone should explain to my parents that I have
very good reasons for liking other girls – for example, fields of flowers.
My mother, the gardener, must see the way our long hair
meets and forms an orchard
when I sleep beside a beautiful woman. Translucent
wrists, veins folded into a glasshouse –
if she wants to know how I can hold another girl’s hand, tell her that.
Farthest thing from unnatural, tell my mom
about how she and I build whole habitats when we touch – earth’s
parents, this is our offspring
trailing up everyone’s spine, curling around raspberries
as a toddler would climb onto furniture. Tell my parents that
I am not a lesbian to spite anyone, but
because I loved Mother Nature so much I thought there should be two.

From the age of seven, I decided it was easier
to throw myself against a wall
than to cause any harm to the stuffed animal under my arm.

I attribute feelings to everything that can be touched
or confirmed by science –
on May 23rd, the wind wanted a companion,
by July, it lived with a birdhouse, in a happy yellow –

and so I fear hurting a chair,
suffocating my hairbrush through tangles, angering some
blankets left unused at the end of our bed.

I do not fear hurt, I fear causing it. I smack my head with a
fist when mother says
that sometimes punching pillows can help ease pain
because I need to stay on their good side.

Somewhere there is
a boat made of sunstone crystals. Watch the
river flatten
its tongue underneath your sails and color
night. The world around you
always shimmers, the sky’s full of gemstones.

Sometimes we play boyfriend and girlfriend. You tell me it’s
thundered at your house right as it
thunders in mine, we share the same weather that
our lovers do not. Together, they are their 5000 miles away.
And together, we are still alone without them.

how do you love someone who wants to be dead

how do I love someone
who didn’t
want to die when they made me want to

something breaks my heart every day
I’m sorry

The Bible says
“I loved you at your darkest”
but I loved you
even when you were not mine.

(I am asking strangers if she is prettier than me
and feel the guilt of a burglar. I
am taking your property,
I can do what you
did even with my hands behind my back.)

You wrote in
your childhood notebooks
about feeling a love so great that
it puts you in handcuffs.

(You do not write about being in love)
you write about
being loved.

You have been loved twice
and took the
membrane from between my legs too.

I loved you when you were in the darkest part
of my body, when you were
under my skin.
(I make strangers remove pieces of you.)

After saying I want you inside of me,
you became everything – miles and music and breaths since we last
touched. It wasn’t that you possessed me in any way,
rather the other meanings left
however they could. I have had grocery store coordinates
falling from my eyes and removed gingerbread paths from my thigh
because everything is how far you are from me right now.
It isn’t that the earth belongs to you, rather
the earth no longer belongs to me. You fill me more than I fill
my bathtub and I love you
in that way no one understands, which is why I asked if you thought
our names sounded beautiful together: I want them
to mix, like every grave in a cemetery
like they are inside each other and sift everything/everyone else out.