Where the light is almost navy,
we press our shoulders against the wall and I no longer
can differentiate between my hair and his
torso, his fingers and my cellulite.

One of us is a pin cushion
for the other fingernails, I writhe in the motion of
letters that may spell out I love you
(or just, I love your skin I love how your **** makes me
hiccup) his wall
bruises my back and gives me butterfly wings.

We adapt to whatever corner we’re touching
or have come close to denting,
confined to the bedroom not any broader than his heart.

I dye his collarbones with my hair
everything can be black but tongues, he says I should not
smoke because he would prefer if I breathed
but nobody makes me more breathless
by filling my lungs with nameless sort of things.

The shadows turn his sheets into mulch
my flesh into threads: I shift in such a figure it shall
creates twinkling stars out of everything.

He will pull me down in minutes,
when the needles stop injecting euphoria and I can use
my butterfly wings to fly up and down
onto his lap
where nobody can see that I am no longer pure.

here I broke my heart,
no wonder I cannot sleep
at night anymore.

I wanted more than anything
to wash your mouth out with soap and rot
your teeth so no girl
would ever want to kiss you but me.

Told her things in ***** words you thought
you taught me,
but you weren't my first

tongue,
blood, use for a bandage.

-

I wanted to say I had swallowed pills
that hurt more than you.

-

I wanted to adopt lilies
as my little sisters to help them grow with
my tears -

something has
to get fertilized (has to be real).

-

I wanted to believe in fairness, that I'd
done something wrong

wrapped my lips
around the base too hard
you are what I needed so much, perhaps
it put an ache in more than just
my heart.

-

I wanted it to have been loneliness
not desire

(that is why I let someone's father put his
fingers in my mouth
and napped in lingerie his wife
never wore, and his daughter, aged

one year farther along
than me, heard us

me being his good girl, and
her understanding why she never was.)

yet you were not lonely
just painting a still life of two girls
with rubenesque thighs
you had hoped would last forever.

-

I did not want to be saved.

the clouds walk as slow as you,
fish never get any rest
they don’t sleep on their backs.

we are their
heaven, full of broken hearts
(i once saw a cloud that looked like one –
that is our heaven, too.)

the day you broke my heart i
temporarily stopped using my toes to
get you hard, stopped resting
my feet on
your lap and kissing you

like i were smoking a cigarette. inhale
without breathing,
that is what

it is to be a fish.
we are their heaven, eggsacks

the kind of person who spells lonely
wrong because somehow
he only has
forty-five chromosomes and

cannot walk
more than a few feet without
evaporating (breaking my heart.

please, baby,
let us buy a jar of honey
and attach ourselves
together.

borrow my organs
please,
get better soon.

I would want to be a mermaid if it did not mean I would
be the reason why houses crumble,
saturated in salt, starving for plaster, unable to hold its bones together
as anything more than a butterfly cemetery.

In cages their baby wings can slip out of
but won’t,
coffins engraved like million year old fossils, rings on trees.

I would want to be a mermaid if it did not mean I would
drown any flower I touched or planted in a vase,
laid to eternal rest, unable to nurse sleeping butterflies back to health
and fill pea-sized bellies instead of locket-sized graves.

Your pupils are tiny and starry,
lifting your eyes from that dark canyon
the dust sea

dying them brown, giving them
black skin that won't peel
under sunlight.

I understand moths surround you
but you are strong,
they only
fill your eyes like tears

attracted to the light
your nameless energy, where life touches

you
it just begins to trust.

Insomniac plants must squeeze
their eyelids at night
to build the crystal white structure of
you, hues shadows hold onto

saves, grows to, trusts
as a lullaby verse to become glued on.

We sprout from energy
bright and warm, float in a hot tea bath
chamomile up out of porcelain

rosemary and roses and honeydew
lit by candles,
we feel your energy and just believe.