I am thinking that maybe there is no such thing
as outer space,
there are even planets inside our
bodies
made of minerals and
water. I want to believe that nothing can be empty –
that inner space exists instead,
gravity exhales
so that the sun and stars will sag above us.

I am fat
and he wants to see my clavicles, my thick
white skin is bunched
up onto even paler bones. I
wish to hide them
as they are proof that I can be broken –

and he has a cigarette
between his teeth,
moving it like a **** before it enters me.

Dragging it into my deepest places,
the hollow
of my bruises, empty me
so he can see just what keeps my shoulders
from splintering under the weight

of my heavy
head. My heavy everything –
he sears away the flesh and it feels as if I
am evaporating like milk.

a relapse
is like reheating coffee on the stove
hoping it tastes so stale
you won't want to drink it anymore

but even then, I
will pour it on my skin and
hate myself for days.

I once wished
that we first met as friends, rather than
lovers,
that I knew your tongue

rolling against your teeth to
speak something honest before I felt it curling
around my skin.

Ever since,
I have tried to stay separate – I wanted

to paint portraits of the
earth, of luminaries and geodes,
but every picture looks like my body after ***
with you,
little crystals of you

cornering the emptiest parts of me.
I part as a flower blooms,
two years

and I realize I must believe in falling stars

now.

to ****** someone by
crying for them.

I am so sad
that my eyelids have begun to take the
appearance of an apricot,
sickly,
bulging, too ripe, easily bruised.

Please accept my apology
for hurting
whether or not

you love her still, whether or not there is
a mention of her consistency
between your legs –

please
think about how sorry I am for
not being cold to you
when it could save us. I have fallen in
love with
pain

because it looks like a rose's hips
and I am reminded
that she is not a flower because flowers
always die –

nothing else could make me smile
like
knowing the truth will hurt.

they have
become so nothing that they are everything. I
hate myself for
liking the stubble that inflames
my skin

I hate myself for caring so much about
being hurt
by them, for wanting

to show them
how bright my blood is when they turn me inside
out
and my veins show like
the splitting seams of a shirt, tagless
for more breathing room.

men are of no importance to me
so much that they have become everything. I

wait
to fall asleep in
the ocean spilling from their bodies

because I always have this desire to drown where
another girl did not want to.
I learned
there is no god, just
love addicts and the vulnerable
who piece together memories out of

salt. all

bodies are made of salt.
water, ***, I want to care so little that I love the
thought of men
breaking me open like a clam
that dies when they take the pearl out.

His hands were as long as legs,
god, the kicks
could bruise my skin
but I learned them like planets. I can’t hate eyes on me
so much if they are like a telescope,
stargazing. Some
have purple freckles, are healing, and I can
think of those who hurt me
as children who
think they want to be astronauts
but are scared of the dark. So, the blue
sky walks
slowly down the aisle to night when I mention
maybe my constellations are too much like veins to
be seen yet. Who do I
save by making
him
not want to rip me open and **** out my
gravity again?
Sometimes he reminds me that
dark matter is not
the space between two people, but the color of their
skin when they touch. So, I
wish he would not touch me and
slide planets inside that hurt to stay in orbit.

After the bleeding ceased,
I was supposed
to be

okay. There would be no more sharp things
inside me,
and even better,
nothing left for them to slaughter.

(My dead baby, pelted with thorns,
knows why roses
are red.)

Yet
I am still hurting. I
am not empty like I should be.

When the dry ache turns sharp, I still
think
that someone
is kicking their way to my heart.

for weeks, I believed
there were field mice scurrying under my skin
and dust from their toenails gave
me a cutting cough
as if they had been walking
on hateful words written in chalk

but it was you,
my body treated you like *****.

after I lost you, I grew a second layer of flesh
that covered your face,
a white towel, the white flag of peace
although
I already saw you in pieces.

nobody could have given you
a better funeral
than my swiss army knife and I

its blade wrote your would-be name where
you never got to touch
so maybe
bacteria would crawl inside
and I could still believe in the mice.

I became so scared of hurting you
that I stopped
wanting to touch you,

and now
I just wait for other things to do it for me. A
sapling has reached puberty
greening its leaves

while an old oak dies, limbs
creating air
around your face
almost like wind but more like breath:
it

is syrupy
stuck to your chest hair. I do not

need anything more than the knowledge of
how my cotton slip
would pull
against you, or how your skin

reacts when it is
about to rain – how the clouds react
for you.

Without me
you can feel how promises begin
to feel like sea foam

and

why

when you wake up
in my bed every morning, it is because
I whispered
an apology too loudly
and little vibrations touched

something
in your ear. I am sorry for that, too –

sorry for the times we
forgot to take our glasses off
before
you were on top of me

sorry that it takes less than a month for a
habit to form
but years to break them

which is why
I still
want
to touch you

before someone else can show you
how walking barefoot
boosts your immunity system.

My biggest fear has been
that one day, you will get so deep within me
that you will realize
I am just
a child stuck inside someone she hates.

Why is it
that after I cry
I feel as if I have been
washed inside

but when you **** me
I cry

because
I never want to be
clean again.

I think that you will feel better
if I remind you to keep bottles of seawater and a spoonful
of honey on your
bedside for the next time you get sick:
a detox, this will climb into your pores like a
pillow
this will smooth any of the scars in your digestive
system, your fear is in
you like it is a new ***** that is destined
to fail. Sometimes suffering wants to be silent but I have
tried to talk yours down, promise
that it is okay to be
soft
and okay to need to add sweetener to bitter tea
and acknowledge pain like
I do when I imagine myself as a little girl again, palm out
because she knows she is lonely for
someone to hold her hand.  I
pass pills to you, maybe they will stretch out your throat
or decrease your fever by a couple degrees
without realizing
you would feel better if I just
thanked you for taking care of me when I’m sick, too.

white hot morning,
deep enough I feel your heartbeat in my belly
and all will dry like cement

when I reached in and drew our initials
with
the bend of my fingers
stir up the dancing dust only visible
beneath sunlight,
you drug it into me with your tightrope your i’m sorry
i won’t be so rough this time

promise
your veins mumbling against the parts of my
body that are a sponge,
i am only going to bleed for good things
now and you should too
but every hole I have
wanted to say that they only ever bled for you

because I like feeling warm in winter
trick myself into thinking
I do not have to wear socks, you look like the moon
with shooting stars
of sweat pouring down your back
and

everything drips
like it is trying to make my ***** wetter.

While you
had me check to
make sure you are still alive,

I noticed
the most beautiful
embroidery on your heart. (It did not say

her name
or my name)

The valves open and shut so
quickly
not because you are
dying, but because you have so

much love
you could overflow

you are too big of an ocean to just
up and leave me.
I am learning

to tie my veins to yours
so
breathing becomes a little easier for
you and the thump da thump

(I have a heart murmur)

will draw
a portrait of two lovers not abandoning

each other. Red as a rose’s
flesh, pink as ours:
together,
we can never become threadbare.

I wanted my taste-buds
to feel like sequins on the tip of his tongue, to be
something that
could attach to him and decorate
his insides. Maybe he would not hurt anymore
if everything looked beautiful
from his throat
to his intestines – like water washes
blood
away, dyes itself red to save someone’s wound,
I wanted us to trade saliva. Trade
mouths, he could have
my strong stomach. I could take the mud
out of his esophagus for keeps –
trade bodies like school lunches between friends.
To be as young as me again,
to build it all again
so he has veins of lace and vines connecting from
his heart to his lips, to my lips in case
I ever have to **** out
the flowers that never got to grow
inside him again,
taking up space he could use to just feel better.

Nobody really talks about how
their lovers swallow
between sentences, or **** their knee into your
girl parts
bruising them like a too ripe peach
between his dreams. I am having a hard
time being separate now,
when I have learned
all the things I can miss of his. Our tongues
pulsing in sync after swallowing
cinnamon,
music playing that does not match the thrusts
of him inside me,
changing clothes in front of each other,
a rose garden on my bottom
birthed by his palm,
little gemstones of wetness, how stray fuzz
clung to his beard more than I even
could, the certain words he
pronounces like
others. I came to trust their existence,
bits I was alright with not being able to predict:
separated, apart, alone, a divorce
and I have returned to
fearing the realization that we are not the
same person. We came so
close to
melting into our mixed body fluids, and I was
so happy because then he could
never leave me - if he touched another
woman, I would, too. I
would know
and feel everything and understand why it
happened. I would sleep upon
his adam’s apple until
he needed to swallow between words to her.
Being separate
is like having to pass on these things
nobody else cares about,
the torch, the Intimacy Olympics. I believe
the next person won’t notice what
he mumbles as he falls asleep at night. He
may as well not spoken
rather than it dissolve into the air. I
wonder if atoms feel this way when they split
or if they trust
in the science of what their
partner will do once they are gone. But
atoms do not pick up
the winter weather on their face like he does,
do not turn pink in the cheeks in
cold: nobody has
such beautiful things to miss as I do.

He has been lying for a hundred years
and I have too,
only good on my back. The flower you never want to wilt –
placed in cement, eternally beautiful even if
you will never see her again. He
lied for us, I lay down
hoping he can drink nectar from two women at once,
I lie on him and he lies to keep me happy.

When he left
I thought a lot about a leaf I once saw, who sobbed
while it fluttered away from its
tree –

it begged for a soft landing,
a good home
with a good view
staring straight up the trunk he fell from
remembering how much greater things can be.

I fear
others falling asleep when I need their attention,
loving those who are not
conscious enough to accept it. When
he was all eyelids and we were not eyes to lips
my heart rate increased. It whispered a
secret to me,
so I could tell him.

So he would wake up and kiss me.

The weather tomorrow
will never reach above freezing
but my flannel sheets are still in the wash, still *****
because of you.

On Thursday, the temperature will be
fifty over freezing

and I won’t need you anymore I won’t have to miss
you anymore
you won’t have to hold my dress down in
the wind anymore. Nature

wants me
to pinprick my own goosebumps to death,

wants
to show me how fast things can get better or worse.

I have not even been able to
touch his ghost.

It is the morning after the morning after
and he has left cinnamon sticks beneath my pillows, I
inhale and exhale when I sleep
until all their dust has been swallowed –

dissolving into me
like water from wet linens onto skin, to be a naked
root love has taken everything from.

The sky has parted, giving a warm yolk
of light:

his first tear has fallen.

I see it like melting clouds and
baby blues
that ache to open

their ribbons of
earth lace
tying colors down to the sky, our last
seconds hot enough to

be condensation,
to rain.

Dew

saying he misses me. Of all the
compositions
of air
like syrup
being the blood in the heavens’ veins

it is milk buds
honeycups, butter becoming silk –
of all compositions of air

he is mourning mine.

The day
your train left
we caught the stomach flu
to purge our bodies of everything
but me and you.

you put something (someone)
inside of me

and it left.

does that mean
that you are leaving me too?

I have not ****** in my stomach for over a year,
but I have reverted to
wanting to be a tear on your face again
that evaporates so slowly, it looks like an angel’s
halo for a little while. We never
have good nights anymore, me opening my mouth is equal to
desperately taking off my clothes like I
used to
when you had not been inside of me in weeks. I am an
infant begging for attention,
crying, my need for love is incessant and miserable
and you hate me for it now. There is a filter
in your voice,
if it had an appearance, it would be the bottom of a mug
of tea or static on a television screen –
you don’t sound far away or distant, just full of something I
cannot touch. A wall, immunity
to my advances, this sort of mistress made of brick.
All I want to do is
keep your sadness company, but you
cannot recognize my body in the dark. You have me pinching
blood vessels beneath my skin
so pain will not
keep me alone in my room like you do,
it is getting bad again.      (I am getting worse again.

My own body is abandoning me,
the flesh and blood falling out like clumps of hair.
I never wanted a second heartbeat –
already have one too many

but it came with
a full moon; my cycle in its final stage,
to purge and be young again

purge and be hollow.
He or she has whispered, vital things can leave
too, stain your thighs
red like footprints down a path. He or she found the
door easily. I whisper back, you were

a light
too bright for my house
so you set the whole thing on fire.

Ashes, singed skin
float from my crevices like a cloud –

I did not know that
some things can take up too much air before they
even need it
or that I can mourn what
I would have wanted dead anyway. It is

like everything I could
never love
just wants to remain a pink bloom on my *******
until I wish they would have stayed.

I want to ask if you know how wet our noise is
because my tongue
against your
jaw, against your earlobe, has the same
melody as rain.

The air is never dry with us
water is our blood, we breathe lightning storms
into each other and call it a pulse (

where there is silence
where there is
no weather
there is no way for anything to grow as we do).

He needs the rain hitting car windows and
air being ****** through them
without motion sickness, the waves of the ocean falling from
night stars. It is being safe
and keeping safe, being inside his mother’s womb
when he closes
his eyes
the lull can almost fool him into
believing he is the boat, safe in her sea again.

He has a mouth like morning
and picked me up
from the ground by the ten second rule,
the time it takes for one hundred thirty million
babies to open their mothers,
four hundred times he could have been
on the train to come back.

He says I say I’m sorry in circles
but Earth does it,
her new cycle every day,
why can’t I.

He should say
he is sorry in circles: there have
been nearly three hundred sixty five trains
since
we knew how to **** each others’
sadness through a straw
and not puke, he would try to swallow it all.

He must see me as
moss now, frizzy-haired, meant to be
laid to rest
on the floor for everyone to
trip over
because I am the reason that leap years exist -
the skipping stone, spread water
on the ones I love
so they’ll be heavy and sink with me.

He must taste recycled beauty on me,
the way new light
turns the beds of his lips pink.

(I could not be her)
he needs to say sorry until our hearts are
the same shade of blue
from suffocating below everyone,
the bottom of
the ocean waiting to resurface as a wave.

I used to cry when he put things inside
but now I
think about it as having
my cobwebs cleared out and replaced
with what might
make me warm-blooded again.

If you stare at something long enough,
the next place your eyes travel
will hold its outline
even if only for a second

and I wish
I would have done that with his hands.

I have searched for a year, who gave you two hearts
and did not bother to
cross-stitch, knit them together to touch –

more and more
you have become the day that my clock broke
and the ticks sounded like my lips
reaching out for yours, and how you never kissed me
so the tocks never happened.

The first night I came beside him
we ****** in braille. It was quiet the way some fog
drifts low
touching your head, but too much of a 
phantom to ever feel inside you. I squeezed his
hand in code - once, this is
good. Twice, I am sorry this has to happen now, 
three never happened because I
could not let go: 
he was my air and he was the ceiling when
I arched my back, he held me
when I gave pieces of myself away to the summer
moon
whispering about my hands. The finger I
awoke his pillowed lips with and
we had the idea
to exchange chewing gum in the morning because
Suddenly it was important to taste each other:
I broke the barrier of not
knowing. Our mattress squeaked in
tongues as I told it how we would feel together
when I hold the sheets that way 
I clawed through his wrists to exhale the first time.
And we have kissed
like hot rain ever since, silence saying
how I once had no one to touch me but myself. I
did not know
how to hold him without believing it 
were an emergency - desperate 
places hands go when you smell me in the air
haunting the room and filling the inches between us.

clothes worn too tight
so it feels like there are needles who need me, who bleed me
a million parasites ******* and taking me.

he is *** and surgery, he is far too in love with life
wants to be inside of everything

but i like the miles
i like being so far that he cannot take things out of me
or even know they’re there.

i am a parasite, i want everything to be inside of me and
that
is why we
fight with him in my mouth (having is feeling.

builds midnight with paper stars and dark attics
because then the sky can be ripped
into shreds, stuffed down my throat and suddenly i possess
the whole world without needing to live in it.

The best thing you can do to get me to forgive you
is take off your belt
and make me bleed, better than I can.

I have slit my wrists into mouths for air and
pockets to hide unhappiness in

because of words
like sorry
like I wish I did not have to do this
but everyone always has to, I know, and I need

for someone to carve the
flesh from my asscheeks the way my
parents wanted to
that time when I was six years old and dashed into
the road really hoping to get hit

for the first time. You
could hold the blood and guts for the first time and I
promise
when I am empty, an apology will feel full.

You can tell if someone is rotting by looking in their eyes. I
get the look of smoke on cotton,
my mother's childhood house burning when
the doors became more difficult to shut than my legs:
her father died
her mother drowned
so she could pass the bottle to mine. The only ring I have
been given are the purple
bags and bruises and tapeworms
everyone says were alright in childhood,
the rings around my eyes tapering like the sound of
morse code. Read me
listen to me please because my body fluids are like ashes
that will go up in flames again if
ignored: I will burn you. Your black eyes will
get blacker, darkness is the only thing that can commit to me.

Petals of red, the newest bloom in a cycle of seasons I
wade through with my body
holding nothing else but the ghost of a child:

supposedly this is life
and life is a horror story, but it is no coincidence that
this did not happen until I grew
to be the length of the train on a wedding dress.

I will not apologize for finding gore so beautiful, I am
saying so because it is mine –
a slit of skin that is not from a cut
filling the whole
bathtub with blood. I dilute water and material to
make sure they stay mine, the same to men.

If this is a temple,
I want my heart to be in the basement

where everyone I love can run and hide when there is
an emergency, the safe haven
that will flood and dye his face my color because
I did not keep his child this month.

I don't know what has made me so
fluid, how I go from empty to full based on what everyone
wants to drink
or the amount of lovers I can drown just by
breathing.

I am so weak
that I am something
that cannot even be cut open (I am

so sorry that the only thing I am good for is soaking
your clothes so you
feel like you can never run away from me.

I know a girl who has a tattoo
of the words “hold on” and it is mostly sad because
her skin
could not hold onto the needle that
breathed the ink
into her bloodstream. She keeps the words
as a petal on the flower of last
summer, reminding her that we can become bruised
again and again and again
without ever losing our sense of touch.

1.   I am trying not to be the kind of girl
who is wrapped up in
initials and baby names when
all that matters is
if when we
touch, our fingerprints feel the same

2.   I have seen you
in too many hospital gowns
for you to have to see me in one

(I am trying
so hard not to **** myself

for you, every day).

3.   The day we fell in love, my heart realized
it is okay to be black if your
hair is, too.

4.   I am trying to hear your heart live
but sometimes
the empty parts of you
speak louder (and not just your belly)

5.   I am trying to think
of you
as something as bright as the sun, not
just something that burns
when we get
close enough to touch.

6.   You are more than just skin on top
of my wounds.

Your shorts leave their handprints, not a bruise
but the color of a forest fire
where you fell asleep on your right side.

The pinks
as fine as through a fairy’s wing –
orange as when the sky is not a sunset but there is
some resemblance –
a sickly, burning, faded green
where you are not a tree

but you are not dead either, where the days
are ending
on you. The way someone gets when
he throws up, flames vomiting from somewhere
and your skin becomes the fumes.

Even inanimate objects
do not want you to forget them –
we rot other people just to leave our own mark.

The clouds are shy when you are around,
they stop peeking around the shoulder of the sun and simply
dissolve
into particles smaller than pores, pills
that I can swallow – I am their mother, the bulk of
their weapon
pass all the greyness through word of mouth. I hurt when
everyone else is scared to,
I water everything so that the sky does not have to.
You said I should be gentle with you
so the clouds are afraid
to be awake when
you are. You do not take up too much space
but those stars in your eyes had to get there somehow, fog’s
only here in the morning because our
souls are making love –
all of the rest of the day it is up my skirt. I
am the mother to mist, but you get along better with sun.

i know where to find ghosts
just take my hand, and we can go where bubbles
never burst

where the sun hits particles of dust

where cars in rain
and streetlamps have those bursts of light that
extend farther than the bulb

dandelion fields, clubs where singles know how
to make hearts with cigarette smoke

where holes are carved in dirt that has never
been caressed, where
bruises go

when they are no longer on your skin

because i know about
searching for what is left of the dead with fingers
cupped like a shovel, knowing
you were the last thing they ever touched

well,
they're not just in the ground
ghosts are somewhere in the air i promise.

She has red roses as asterisks, the star-shaped things
that are just scar shapes on me

and with her, there is
pollen
that she'll drag her fingernails across. She will
sprinkle colors on your chewed up,
cratered lips, saying you

will look beautiful and
feel full again. Well, I'll be the one to kiss you next
with grains of sulfur glued to your cheek

the rotten taste
making it so your mouth glows in the dark. I
know where to kiss and never tell: I
am sure you must notice my cigarette burns when

the lights are out. I have lit myself
like a candle,
and say
I cough from the smoke because no one can know
that I swallow all your poisons for you.

I am a waterfall that's too happy to cry
and so it floods the river
which floods
the roads, I ruin everything
but pretend I am making it grow.

I am just god’s excuse to make a ****** nose
and bruises surrounding
eyelids, even when I get the perfect amount of rest

and when autumn comes
barreling leaves from god’s big sky
I am what catches the sand, blonde grains changing
the color of my eyes.

It is just as true that he cuts the tails
from mermaids and tells me that I can find girls
who would rather be a worm instead, my

flesh is already rippled
pale and translucent pink, the best of beige between

my thighs. Because one morning god called
and I said I would not wake up
and he said that if I did not, he would wring mud
from his terrible angels’ wings and I

still never woke from my sleep.
I am his gross girl, pleased to be the queen of slugs
as long as this is the worst my sins can do.

december 29th –  i was a blizzard
infant, had
not gained my first color until the new year

even my eyes went white, were made of snowflakes
even my heartbeat had
a murmur, landed on my ribcage like snowfall

and every three months i give myself
up to my childhood
dye my hair so i stop fading into my white sheets

their threads are stitched from
the breath of ghosts, my mother never called to say
she wished it were hers

now
i only ever believe i have skin when it is
not being touched.