I never dream of you, my sleeping mind does not need to
make up the sensation of your touch: I
already know. the only
moment I ever forgot was while

missing you in air. I am of the land –
the sky is too much,
it swallows me
it holds me and all is static, saturated and humid
I hesitate as rain that needs to fall.

I missed you so much
that gravity had to pretend it was missing me more

there are clouds that are too kind,
feigning love
as a distraction from my loss.

underwater,
your hair moves like shooting stars. I was reminded of
that then – how I had abandoned
you for astronomy,
pushed meteors a little closer to you
and they just seem to float. they lift in slow
motion, they curl
because there is no gap between
your bed and the wall up in space, is no shelter
to feel safe. water and loss and the galaxy

are so heavy
they have to cradle you until they bruise.
I think about you –

I think about you.

I felt so big, my heart felt so hard
I did not understand
why
I was melting.

My skin said
different words than my mouth

there were
welts I called petals and
droplets of my blood
that stained like nectar on his sheets –
I used them as ghosts,
traced silhouettes
to haunt him with, but the loss

haunted me more. It
was
a dehydration.

He had me believing I was
becoming more
and more full, there was so much
affection I just had to
spill a little –

instead, I was being emptied.
Eaten, swallowed

fattened
for the slaughter.

your first love is expecting
and I know it is not yours, because that one already
fell out of me.

I have problems differentiating
between what is something and what is nothing, but in my head,
it is a city now – there was no other place
large enough
to hold its beauty. like my empathy, my *******

conscience,
the guilt I take on of other people's sins

none of it ever leaked out from my skin. only dead cells,
I plead to do something for me –
if you must breathe
for another woman, as he did, become bigger
than a town
and make her feel everyone's pain too.

there are anthills in your backyard
that I placed into existence. I gathered pieces of life from mine
and the moon
and knew you were sad
so I brought them home to you. each bug holds
crumbs atop their back
until they drip to the ground like a runny nose, meanwhile
a child
brings dead things
to the person they love
because they trust only them to bring it back to life. I do that with you –
recycling spider legs and folding moth wings
onto each other,
add twenty fly-lashes for good measure
as if anything I can find
will take the tears from your eyes. you taught me how to
caress carrot flowers
at such an angle, they can heal. my mother will drink until she dies
and I am that child holding
petals out, their extracts and oils spilling into
the last hope I'll ever have.

me and you, we communicate via ants across statelines –
today I am sending a message
that shares more like a plague than language – of sisters needing
different things the same ways. and you
tell me it can reach you
in one insect's insomniac night
if I douse the compass in primrose and my honey.

young girl from the mountains, watching her lover
make fetuses
and pretending they are
just flora with human characteristics –

all she knows
is to feign
until someone else sees the truth for her.

they are fleshy, veins
reaching outwards
like blossoms in september that want to last until next spring

they are in denial, will be an apparition at best
because it is easy to see through
an unhealthy plant's leaf
as long as
you have the time to watch them die.

the first time I don't feel disappointment
it is when my thumb
leaves prints on my earlobe, caressing the metal back of
an earring – something is there
after all, just a stud but it is something beautiful
I had
forgotten.

in a bathtub, scent of my skin rising from the water
like jasmine against morning dew
         like fog

I relieve my legs of their hair
and the razor
peels the skin from my fingertip, it undresses into raw
flesh, losing my print –            sadness
returns like a resurrection.

piling dead skin up like ******* lines,

they say
to close your eyes count to ten breathe in breathe out
anxiety will not ache you anymore

and he is in bed
with a girl he loves
who isn't me but has the same hair color

so it is a little okay.