I remember being told
that what I found with you, I will find again
and I did not know why but I
cried

cried
and cried
               until my body felt so heavy
            it could compare
       to how you would feel on top of it.

         your eyelids, then
    began to look like little halos
             whispering
          that they were still pure – your heart, then
            
             would beat
     every time I thought of you
   because I never
ever
ever
could stop
   (even when I was lying to myself,
           I only wanted to lie about you).

for weeks, then
I only knew how to speak
                      in organs and flesh
                      in fluids and ***

when all I needed was a way to explain
          that
  somehow, when we met

                     we found a corner of the earth
     no one had
ever
ever
ever seen before
              and we inhabited it together
         so no one else would find it again.

Men have always told me that I am nothing
like “her” - the woman, the women,
before me.

I love like powder

silently leaving pieces of myself to sink
into their skin

(making them softer, sweeter).

My emotions are a hum in the room,
they steal all the air

but I am hush
and small; I exist in only the smallest ways
like noticing a man’s veins
then

caressing him in circles,
tracing him
connecting them like vines. I pretend

it does something,
I pretend to cast a spell

but I never say a word – I am the ghost
of hope
for men, I am

their good luck charm

(my magic
never noticed unless it works). Never am I
like the women before me
but how

I wish I had the strength to be.

I watch humans fumbling to make a connection between the universe and our bodies, as if without their metaphors and poems likening birthmarks to galaxies, we would be two separate entities, a collection of particles that inhabit entirely detached spaces from one another. Truly, the connection is evident in far more than freckles that resemble specks of dust and planetary material; our skin is not just branded by our environment, but bloated by it.

We are made of mostly water.  We are oceans, our insides are swampy, and when we bleed, the sight is reminiscent of sunsets. There is a universe beneath our flesh, internally, like how we exist within the flesh of our universe.

I feel this connection most when I consider him. My body deflates into a cloudlike existence –soft, floating, pacified. His touch warms me, it calms me, it grounds me but in the sense that I am still free to kiss the stars, and my lips become soothing to them.

One of our final nights together, about midnight on Valentine’s Day, he took me to the beach and faced me in front of the ocean, stood me below a dome of astrology in the skies. Lucid blue from the constellations and water stretched for what seemed like days, all-encompassing me. But my eyes could not leave him, especially his mouth slipping into smiles, because somehow he appeared even more beautiful than the immensity of our earth enveloping me. He cradled me there, he lifted my dress, and still I felt warm against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean in winter.

He is a dream, and he is an angel, and I believe he steals ornaments from the sky to gift to my heart so that I can feel as beautiful and as grand as all the universe combined.

the first breath I took upon seeing you,
I swear,
split my ribcage
so my lungs had room enough
to smile

we are the possessors of hair
whose instincts
tell us to wrap it around our neck,

we think about
bottling our spines in jars
for good luck.

in the summer
our veins fade into our tans
as if drawn on with a teal colored pencil

and we powder our flesh to look like
sugar cubes instead.

this hatred and this worship of
our bodies
translates into
an aversion to our fluids as if to touch them
is to slurp creek water
but it is not poison: it is magic

little ***** being,
the petals that swathe you are pinker than mine
and your nectar is sweeter too. you
deserve to have a name
that matches
your melanin – pure as infant’s skin, not
human
but better than.