Everyone I love
is mostly water, but I
am made of fire.

we talked about it at my place and yours
but mostly I mourned
seeing the socks pulled over your
ankles

while walking across streets during rain.
how warm
like a second skin, they rubbed

against my thighs and it chafed and you
kept cotton to shove down
our throats
when being broken felt like too much

for two people so in love
and so far apart.

The plants began to wilt the day you met her,
got sick and shriveled up
without wounds. Much like how people
age, how people die
every leaf of ours browned. The veins split.

The first thing you
and I had in common was not having chicken pox scars.

If you are searching for where perpetual love is not
look at the last bed I will sleep in
where your father died
and moss built his corpse a second beard, wide as
a noose. Nature gave me two hands -

one for holding my head underwater, another for pulling
myself back up.
I can only replace those who are not dead.

The skin between my thighs
smells the way that yours used to, the scent I worshiped
like expensive perfume. I now realize it is
just sweat.

That is the second thing we had in common
after the 500 times I acted as someone you once loved.

I wear minnows on my wrist –
they came from my eyes
but at least they swim
and I am not alone when I cry.

I am guilty of emptying
my loved ones
into picture frames

so they will last forever, and
I have thought about
tattooing makeup to my face.

Everything
I try to hang onto releases me
like rainfall salt from
cypresses, leaving a bad taste
or nothing to trace at all.

I want to leave rose petals
in everyone’s pocket
to attract hungry bumblebees

because I feel
my least lonesome when
something’s being slid
into me, even if it stings a little.

is that my heartbeat
or thunder eating its way
through my bedroom walls?

I had a summer love once, but my fingernails were too long
by autumn. I slit its throat with them and
have done the same to mine more than once over,
more than twice over, more than fifty or even sixty I assume.
My summer love sang songs to me in winter
that sounded like a harpsichord
although they were made by a computer or something. It
is not ruined as long as I feel like strawberries are
in season – I taste maple syrup on him,
coming from places too cold to stick on your fingers, I have
myself knee deep in the twelve months of a year.
The walk to orange groves will take
too long. I know I’ll be sick of calling him my summer love.