Someone should explain to my parents that I have
very good reasons for liking other girls – for example, fields of flowers.
My mother, the gardener, must see the way our long hair
meets and forms an orchard
when I sleep beside a beautiful woman. Translucent
wrists, veins folded into a glasshouse –
if she wants to know how I can hold another girl’s hand, tell her that.
Farthest thing from unnatural, tell my mom
about how she and I build whole habitats when we touch – earth’s
parents, this is our offspring
trailing up everyone’s spine, curling around raspberries
as a toddler would climb onto furniture. Tell my parents that
I am not a lesbian to spite anyone, but
because I loved Mother Nature so much I thought there should be two.

From the age of seven, I decided it was easier
to throw myself against a wall
than to cause any harm to the stuffed animal under my arm.

I attribute feelings to everything that can be touched
or confirmed by science –
on May 23rd, the wind wanted a companion,
by July, it lived with a birdhouse, in a happy yellow –

and so I fear hurting a chair,
suffocating my hairbrush through tangles, angering some
blankets left unused at the end of our bed.

I do not fear hurt, I fear causing it. I smack my head with a
fist when mother says
that sometimes punching pillows can help ease pain
because I need to stay on their good side.

Somewhere there is
a boat made of sunstone crystals. Watch the
river flatten
its tongue underneath your sails and color
night. The world around you
always shimmers, the sky’s full of gemstones.

Sometimes we play boyfriend and girlfriend. You tell me it’s
thundered at your house right as it
thunders in mine, we share the same weather that
our lovers do not. Together, they are their 5000 miles away.
And together, we are still alone without them.

how do you love someone who wants to be dead

how do I love someone
who didn’t
want to die when they made me want to

something breaks my heart every day
I’m sorry

The Bible says
“I loved you at your darkest”
but I loved you
even when you were not mine.

(I am asking strangers if she is prettier than me
and feel the guilt of a burglar. I
am taking your property,
I can do what you
did even with my hands behind my back.)

You wrote in
your childhood notebooks
about feeling a love so great that
it puts you in handcuffs.

(You do not write about being in love)
you write about
being loved.

You have been loved twice
and took the
membrane from between my legs too.

I loved you when you were in the darkest part
of my body, when you were
under my skin.
(I make strangers remove pieces of you.)

After saying I want you inside of me,
you became everything – miles and music and breaths since we last
touched. It wasn’t that you possessed me in any way,
rather the other meanings left
however they could. I have had grocery store coordinates
falling from my eyes and removed gingerbread paths from my thigh
because everything is how far you are from me right now.
It isn’t that the earth belongs to you, rather
the earth no longer belongs to me. You fill me more than I fill
my bathtub and I love you
in that way no one understands, which is why I asked if you thought
our names sounded beautiful together: I want them
to mix, like every grave in a cemetery
like they are inside each other and sift everything/everyone else out.

I loved him
when his words reflected a shadow, he was nothing more
than a cloud separating Earth from the moon

told me that no one’s heart  has ever been too big for
their head
but he never held me up to the light

(and he broke mine).

This morning
I remembered I am just small pieces of my mother’s body
yet I fear falling asleep beside her
in case she knows
that I want to **** myself, cells that came from her.

It is selfish, now I wish I could be
as opaque as him.

I wondered if it is okay to break your mother’s heart in
some ways, though not others
and remembered that he wanted to paste
another girl’s hair onto me so that I would be happy.

Up against fog
I wondered if it is better to be the moon
or to imitate the sun.

I wish I had the time to research
biology and chemistry and physics to relate our bodies
to electricity, come up
with a simile for *** and science.

But I doubt there would be any translation
of how your breath
raises polka dots on my skin.

I do not know what else that could mean
except there are insects
with as many legs as I have minutes spent on thinking
about well you learned to whistle.

I have my heart open like a winter morning, like his birthday gift
wrapped in brown paper bags
clutching at the shreds
as if loving me more will make me less sad. It has not:
see, my bones shatter like icicles,
I am weak. His affection melts like snowflakes on my tongue.

I want to taste him until the flesh pares
and someone can finally take me to the hospital where we kissed
have a glance of what’s intact,
better, what isn’t.

It has been December every day since I last visited you, Doc
but you have good eyes – can watch hell freeze in
my chest. The calendar says July, but my body doesn’t believe it
possessed from memories of a woman
retching in this very room here, behind a screen
you saw my boyfriend naked and behind your back I kissed him.

He will not say that sorrow is eating my heart out,
nor have my veins been cut by scissors –
that does not mean that he is not thinking it. See me cold and blue.

You bought me spaghetti. That was nice of you,
we carried it to a bakery and bought cupcakes for dessert.

The rain hit us
and the plate of spaghetti warmed my knees
and you bought me a book of classic love poems
that said nothing about how you would break my heart later
and I cannot write this poem anymore.

We sat on two different benches,
one in front of my college and another by a long stoplight
holding your beautiful gifts in my arms.

It was the first time
you loved me where everyone could be jealous of us.

Think of how much world is wasted on
bad eyes - by blindness, or ones that merely do not want to see.
The next thing you know you cannot miss a sunrise
and french kiss both moon and stars
goodnight, your head will hug its fallen hair on the pillowcase,
strands telling stories of when you were not conscious. I
realize you will visit jewelry stores and
watch how gemstones are faceted. You will imagine the galaxy
within an amethyst, publish novels on their bouquets
of cigarettes, worry about how pretty things can **** themselves too.
Everything is a story: you ask to see my cellulite,
you tell me how it got there, how my skin stretched to make
room for every place we shall go
including statelines that do something similar. We stretch apart
and still we are okay. We think about how the same
dawn reaches us, I can almost see your pupils dilate when the sky
dances - I watch but you hope to learn the ballet.
Someone is taking a photograph right now that they can look
at later, ours never came out the way I wanted them to
or perhaps the memories just go by another name.
I learned about homophones when I hurt you
by trying to sound beautiful. It is so much easier when we can see
morning peeling open our feelings, easier when you're here.

Hair dye is on my bathroom wall -
now everyone knows
I put myself together like papier-mâché.

My stomach is empty. My heart is too full for me
to eat anything
tonight,

tonight is about biting someone's hand
because they are ******* me hard and because they did something wrong
seven months ago. Then,
licking the blood from his knuckles whispering, I am sorry
but you are just too much for me to take.

I open his skin for all the times I
needed to open mine. For every sore morning-after.
God gave me the gift of sweet revenge and the curse of loving
so much my body is a storage unit without a lock.

I am sorry
but my teeth chatter whenever I get overwhelmed. His
blood is so much warmer than mine.

I think I know what the problem was, your heart is twenty meters wide.
There is the west wing, and there is the right
but you forgot about the center: the most important part
where your two halves touch, I was there but you still weren’t full enough.
She left a nickel-sized bruise
she spoke the language of little dents and drilling holes for
water to sit, you gather mosquitoes like moths to a light. I sound how
it must taste to swallow wind. Empty empty empty
while crisp as stale bread, I swam to the gods to make you mine but she left
airholes to keep breathing inside you.
Please let me plant lilies there, not roses with edged thorns. I wanted
your pain once, before I understood that a person can love
too hard or too much. You deserve to hold her memory
in some small way, even if it is just
a beautiful grave - as long as I am in your heart, I am touching hers too.

let me hold you, he said.
he wants to help me open up my lungs
but another man has his fingers
clamped around them.

and I don’t want him to let go
I don’t want to breathe
if it means being
alone.

There is a city that only I inhabit, and there is one in you, too
but that must mean houses are there
or a hotel one may stay during a visit. I guess it depends
on who you ask, if they believe in an everlasting love big enough
to fill the whole metropolis inside a person.
I did not know until I met you that cavities within me
could welcome a second resident and he would stay staring at
these organs without
thinking they look unnatural, like paintings x-rays EKG screens.
I am sorry for explaining this to everyone but I am just
so happy that my heartbeat  sounds like
a ticking clock to you – we hold bodies that tell their own time.

I understand
why some girls call their lover “Daddy”
or at least why I would.

Bare feet, rubbing against jeans

free
for yesterday’s
moon to pour itself into today

the craters like petals,
he loves me, he loves me not. It doesn’t
matter because he will protect me
anyway.

Wrap me in his veins
and we

‘ll blow as cold air swims past my lips.

I paint my nails from that feeling
in two strokes,
small, flat umbrellas for dirt.

Baby, baby,
I hear that calling now,
your hands are chilly, let me touch you

well, I guess that’s okay.
Put me on your lap and I’ll behave.

He placed me in a watering can
holy water, I said fetch me a blanket quick
fallen into warm holy water –

he said no,
that is all you. He must be my sunshine.

Please, I want to know everything about her
and why what happened
was not about me. I never did ask, but I never learned
how a person can not love someone and still
break someone else’s heart about it.
All I see is the pillow you abandoned at my house,
the warm patch of **** on its case
I put there in case she could ever lay on it and drown.
If we are marking territory, I do not know who
would win you. She had your “I love you”
before me, adolescent and as rocky as a mountain top.
But I ****** your ****. Held it up with my right
hand as if reciting some vow.
Mostly, I need to know which you preferred
whose mouth was more comfortable –
one spilling lies or one with drool, dripping ***. I
have a memory of you telling me what
her voice sounded like, but I cannot remember now.
I think that is a good sign. I think
it is beautiful that she hasn’t come chasing after you
and I hope you are not hurting for it. But
I think, too, that I have finally fallen in love with all of
what you are and not just all that I know you are.
No part of you is a phantom anymore.
I know how you sound when you want to lick another
girl’s ****, now I need to understand why.

I am small
call me baby, or love, anything but doll.

Call me angel, not honey
I am not sweet
nor could I ever stick to you.

You left me three weeks after holding my head
underwater,
shrinking more and more until
the brain could only process our memories.

Later, just the absence
of pet names that would have made sense.

We met in the sandbox, which felt kind of like a beach
but hardly forbidden – the Garden of Eden without any fruit.
I had small hands, his were smaller
and were likely to drown in any sea we touched,
a forest or a wave or teardrops when saying goodbye. Well,
I gave him a kiss on the cheek every few minutes
so he invited me to his house.
The selling point was a tire-swing, big enough for two:
he said, milady, I saved this seat here for you.
When no one was looking he would hug my stuffed kitten –
our daughter. I didn’t even get angry when he rubbed
chocolate onto her nose, split water on her tail. Our first kiss
was shared between the three of us,
her bell dipping between our chests as if we were pets too.
In some ways we were. I
pushed him off the bed at night and he bit my toes
then spit up, saying my skin still tasted like salt and sand.

My childhood
was stubbing toes on pool railings
while trying not to drown
four foot tall, six feet under.

I sat by houseplants
on cold tile.
I lost my teeth to salt water taffy.

My parakeet was named
after a character on Full House
who had frizzy hair
and did not have her mama either.

One day,
she broke her beak.

It was my fault, I brought the
blood to my face as I would salve
to apologize

but it was far too late.
Daddy set her free while I slept.

I would rush to the
school supply aisle in Kroger
for pens and pencils
and bought Barbie dolls to glide
against the bayou’s surface.

Later, Katrina came
to sink everything I ever touched.
  
I thought
about the black men and their
saxophones downtown

how I wanted to replace the reeds
so badly
to hear New Orleans jazz
one final time before we moved.

The whole time
my sister was made of sage.

My brother slept on my Powerpuff
Girl sheets so often that
I kept my ******* in another room.

And I thought that
mothers came from fireplaces
because mine
hid her liquor in there sometimes.

With everyone but you, the photographs are scrutinized.

My mother says
we do not look close enough
or even as if we like each other at all.

But with you, she changes. Our skins seem tucked in
towards each other
the wrinkles know where to slouch,
I see not through the windows of my eyes but by braille.

There is a drug in us
leaving track-marks for the other to tongue.

More potent than wine, not as thick as moonshine,
this young and living love
amends the lighting in my bedroom and bathroom to the
consistency of honey, a shade of citrine.

Strangers are stopped from seeing
our pale complexion,
faces so close that the blood between us seems to blend.

I will rub your back until you forget what she did to you –
she was your first love, you were mine. I want to explain in words what
beauty looks like, but I have learned that the
fireworks when we cup our fingers together or sit too close are
even better than a kaleidoscope
unfolding holidays back into normal days. The 5th of July, January 2nd.

Well, in two days, they will have you under anesthesia
and I keep hoping you might say some
nonsense about my eyes. I keep worrying you’ll dream of her tongue.
You are on the side of catching any morning light –
but there is no comparison to a spark that has already burned out.

Touch me sweet, God, you gave me nine lives and
I would waste one to say something to
someone from three and a half years ago when
I still humored my pastor
and got guys hard past midnight, at every midnight.

Could meet them again, two by two
and forget he would love some part of me in the future.

She called me a loving *******,
I wasted three of my lives
loving him in silence. I could have shouted
that I deserved better than someone who never did

call me baby just because I am young.
I deserved to have God caress my shoulders like angel
wings, pick my feet off the floor, glide on tile
like soap bars on skin
I will use to wash his slow escape away from me.

In 2010, I mostly thought about *** on the beach.
Someone falling into me
when waves crash a whip into their back –
I, on mine, my heart filled with the weight of sandbags
packed for a Miami hurricane. When I was that
young, I believed I could show up
at a grown man’s house and hide the evidence in my
****. He would listen to music with a lot of
rhythm, it would influence the way the ocean breathed
and came salt beads on my skin.
The conversation was. The ******* was never –
I went to a smaller beach four hundred miles from his
anxiety and songs without guitar riffs. I
vomited every made up memory,
did not ******* for three weeks because I realized
the gulf could not break my ***** alone.
Broken-hearted. The end. We were so good and
my touch so smooth he thought it was just seashells.

I imagine I must talk to my dead seventh grade teacher
who told me to be better, who
told off the children when they brought me a butcher knife
because I cannot learn algebra if I am dead.

The deceased are more than likely with the sun
wherever it is right now. Tomorrow’s twilight, I will find
my dead seventh grade math teacher
stand on my tippy-toes,
try to be as tall as him and ask if he still thinks I should be
alive. Five years later and I cannot understand
why a person with his same name could
ruin my life when he, in turn, saved mine. I am a bad
person for wishing she were the one that the flu took then.

Unlike the others,
Mr. Kats did not mention the SATs or growing up. He
would not be there to see either happen
and I bet he believed God knew.

Then again, I knew the side of him that did not
know God well enough to remind me of a Mormon church
until I saw his youngest daughter alone on her knees
whilst the eldest sang about how
her father would never need to move with
a walker. I held my best friend’s hand
when we met his corpse, because he had saved her too.

I imagine we must talk, but not for me to tell him
that I do not care about algebra, I guess he already realizes.
We were never really special to each other
when I think about it,
he was too strict and I was too sad and now it’s too quiet:

I haven’t entered a classroom since, died some as well
but my only punishment
was a broken heart by his reincarnate. There was no lesson.

Your two syllables
swirl upon each other like strawberries and cream,

I speak it. There is drool chasing my chin.
Talking to yourself is mostly talking to your
two separate halves, or the two girls you’ve loved.

In there, there is you
but mostly it is our two halves of you
and how your name’s the same but can be divided.

Oh my love, my sweetheart, my strawberry touch
the part of you that is mine is so beautiful
                              it has filled my whole heart.

The first boy who saw me with my shirt off
did not like girls, not yet
not ever

and asked me if it was stretch marks or cuts
decorating where
other men would soon touch

as if he were wondering
the color of my eyes. (Blue or grey, maybe.)

When I was working,
I denied the men access
so they might **** me.

Music pulls me into its arms,
made a bed for me in this sea of white noise

and for some reason,
it makes sense to sing about crying too
loud or unpacking suitcases or
open windows or
a spider’s web when you are as sad as I am.

It comes and it goes
as saltine waves or a heartbeat or drumming.

I wait for the day when I will become
a mermaid, able to breathe
underwater everything I have ever felt.

Tonight my body does not want to sleep, but
drown in a song of existence.

She floods my ears
through removing lesser known parts of me.

He thanked me like a mother finding
her lost child, could not even kiss me back he felt so
relieved. I did not want to be
the one to ask if he remembered how it felt
for us to become distant and alone, even together
because I knew now
an idea he had about fidelity. He said he believed he
could be faithful to both of us in our special,
different ways. Neither existed in
writing as more than “she” or “her” or “mine”
but now he cannot kiss me. He liked it better when I
was a sculpture he was familiar with every
arch of, he liked it better when
I was in his left pocket and she was there in the right.
He thanked me because he is so happy he
still has something to empty out
of his jeans before the wash. This is a feeling of
release, not solid enough for me to let go of his hand.

This was supposed to be the poem I wrote without any reference to
my love for you, but it seems the only pretty things
I can say are about us.

I question what you have never wondered about, but
somehow I wonder because of you.

How is it that we survived last summer’s big rainstorm without an
umbrella, and were motionless under it
until you shook me so I would remember to breathe.

Thinking
I have never slid my arm into a man’s sweater when I got cold,
put the other ***’s fabric around my body,

would have been nice that night.

But it could not have been so bad. I peeled my wet clothes off
like a tease, wishing that somehow you
could be watching me through the closed bathroom stall.

Soon
I don’t know if it was you or the blankets
that swallowed my hips, as if being inserted underground,
I just know that six hours later I woke up sore from feeling so safe.

From you, I learned that no one can rewind seasons
to take back mean words or return pine trees their old cones

and the next time you call
I should thank you for telling me what you have for breakfast each
morning, what you make for dinner and midnight snacks.

I used to hear the moths tapping my blinds at night
but chose to believe it was you instead,
getting out of the shower, hearing the doorbell ring, I would
pretend it was you having come to visit me.

Eventually bought a compass for the curtains
because I wanted to see
what direction the rocks you threw were coming from.

Well, the thing never moved
eternally pointed south, and I wondered if distance could be
silent when our love is so ******* loud
but it seems I had only fallen for the moths at night.

Moonlight gives us fainting spells
the fall changed your face shape, touches your white back
until it is as freckled as Planet Earth itself.

For three years
I have been dirt under your nailbeds, no one’s gotten
close enough to see me. This skin
is a cage
and I know how everyone looks to you

sticking to you in some place, the green goo of
a dead firefly or
an old sweater hung by shoes you no longer fit into.

Your mother is not
from America, but is a mother yet –
I am not from her, nor am I foreign to you.

She watched us in bed together when you were so ill
you thought you would die.

But mostly she saw how

I put more fever
on your cheeks – I wished I would die
for you. No one would miss a crescent of filth you
touch them with or loose hairs
on your sheets. No other girl would notice.

I know about reciting love verses when you are supposed to be
writing your grocery list – fruits and vegetables
become a metaphor for why I hold my hand to your face
and I realize you told me not to fall in love with you, so I fell in
love with how we exist together instead.

Like salt in the ocean,
wires from a wall, I know I breathe for you a little too much –
matching the exhales to yours. I have a language that
only accepts the two of us, sounds lovely only because you live.

Once, there was a man who wanted so much to love that he
snuggled butterfly bodies back into a cocoon
like a small manila folder. He married their two existences together
and braided her antennae to signify an engagement ring –
never kissing, not as a husband and wife would
just would light up the nerves below his skin any time he showed
his butterfly what became of
the earth outside of air holes. In a way, he lived there, too –
breathed through the sheer fabric of butterfly wings.
He knew how to love, every eyelash looked like her flying again.

Paper thin are the words I have composed to you:
I despise this fact,
hours and ink spent on my ruminations
form letters not more substantial than cigarette smoke.

As a little girl whose excitement of snow is
wasted on stained glass windows
that are unable to preserve the print of her breath.

Your comb on the dresser where you left it
would take days to be delivered, and your birthday gift
can only be seen on my nightstand
in photos I take. But I purchased something made of
porcelain to write love poems on so they will
not be ripped or

vaporized when August and six dollars gives them
to the famished mouth of your mailbox
empty, but for bills from
hospital visits caused by my hand heaving onto yours.

I just want to write your way back home to me
and I know the wind could
blow away my every wish, thinking you may ever stay.

My mind does not sleep through the night, the questions
have their before and after. This is the
after. I ask again if he was ever really here at all,
this is June
this is very nearly July
and I am colder now than I was last December on his
breath, that I could see wiggling
wanting to escape into me as a pillow would into a case.

My mind is full of his absence,
I think it grows every morning I wake up without
a moat of our bodies cut into my bed. We were only just
children playing house
without the need for plastic appliances and plates,
made linen from hair lockets, leave

seed marks on his skin. I ask again if it still remains
touched like an early ripened strawberry.
That was December,
was supposed to be, but I cannot trust a memory of my
head resting against the fabric of anyone’s jeans
because then it may be true
that he really loved me after all, and maybe he does still.

God made girls full of sap
so we chew on our hair when we get nervous
and blood falls
from us like butterflies from cocoons.

I want to be inside every girl you ****** before me,
show you the birthmarks you never noticed
shaped like canoes and rocketships.

I will get her chest to rise, then fall,
steal the very source of her breath and curl my fingers
around it –
into dough, how you never could knead.

I have my hand on her throat
because you hated when she would talk.
We could work together, tie her hair into a knot.

I just want to be inside the girls who have intestines
like cotton candy and ******* like watermelon
explain why you should
have loved her as a woman sometimes.

You say you prefer my skin, and the way I whimper
but maybe you just did not
**** her hard enough.

June 23rd was the day of the super moon, the day before
was super moon’s eve. Well,
someone must have had too much to drink last night
because the street gutters are full
of something that comes from craters – so I am thinking about
how you said you see my face in the sky
when the dark clouds open up and begin to cry,
how you explained that we can make flowers out of this
watering can of tears or else I will just let them
evaporate. I never know if I am in
a boat or in your bed, if every black coil is a spider in its
web or my hair: you would tell me that I have enough
loose strands to knit the moon a sweater,
plus one for each planet and sun.
It is me, and it is you, we are what make the sky –
other people is how these oceans have gotten in our eyes.

******* no longer feels like I am trying to pull a
glass heart from the smallest hole in my body
but I can still exhale poppy seeds
from between my legs,

have sweat catch my hair with its Elmer’s glue,
split the mermaid fin into ten spread toes,
tune guitar strings with my fingers,
and paint a postcard whenever moonlight spills milk.

I capture every **** in nature
fantasizing about the points of a star protruding
like *******.

It is natural for my skin to slip inside my skin
to break levees the way waterfalls open for summer –
drown sorrows in the sink
that creates freckles on my love’s face.

And when I think of him, and when I finish building a
bridge to the self-nirvana I taste,
I am as a mother bird making a nest twig by twig.

fire storms on my
skin: they look like honey on
toast and it kills me.

I think I have figured out where all those bobby pins went –
of the hundreds that appear in my school’s
lost and found, at least double
could be discovered a little bit under my chest. Where
I breathe, where men touch me, there
are sharp things a beautiful girl could pin her hair up with.

Moths are born from spider webs,
creatures who make love with seven legs bent over their heads
and that is how I feel for you.

Almost invisible upon the back of plush blacks
merely caught up in a game of Twister, twisted, tied,
birthing beautiful flies -
I want to feel my saliva crawling out from your ****** hair.

My skin keeps raising in a certain spot,
the surrounding veins looking like orange juice pulp. I think
about my boyfriend in Florida, how he ****** my
calf right where the spider bite will return
again and again, and maybe he has sent his teethmarks
in the papery flesh of grocery store containers.
In that case, twisty-ties on bread bags are fangs I can finger.

He says I have the look of white chocolate everywhere
but so do zits, teeth, and milk, if we want
to use logic. He tries to make me seem beautiful but

it mostly falls flat, not until last week did I believe in bruises
as a method of communication or appreciation.
Now it would make me happiest
to mix our blood and call this relationship romantic.

There is this disease my friends complain about
called a “food baby,” how after eating it feels like small feet
create rocking chairs from the dull edge of my ribs. I
feign labor and birth nine months later:
she’s yours, congratulations. It stopped being cute
after the first time I made my boyfriend’s face spark up in
confusion and fantasy, it makes more sense to
say there are maggots getting married
under an arch made pale by my intestinal track. I say so now.

I miss my boyfriend in Florida very much,
although I only have to lift my thigh up and he is here.
He leaves scars on me from insects that need to escape their
venom, I am the Golden Gate Bridge
that they climb merely to jump off from, to die.
He would probably say they are just strawberries on my
hips and hands, white chocolate that would not melt for him.

I have not yet decided if I want my body
to be a weapon, or if I want to use weapons on it.

It came from the constellation
Capricornus, which is parallel to the planet Earth –
the swirling element I am associated with.

Not air or blue sea
as you might expect from someone as blue as me.

The first time I laid on someone else’s legs
I remembered the man who loved me was a Fire sign
because my skin became as easy to
flake off as chalk, and I liked that very much.

Pomegranates peel quite the same
without knife, perhaps I am fruit more than I am sad.

This is a type of fruit originating in India
where round is the most honored shape and
my mulberry smile may give someone an element
of Fire between their legs.

He wants me to shut up about before and after, he doesn’t
sleep anymore to throw off a balance
between now and then,
here and later, when it happened in regards to tonight. My mind
works as a clock of who we have become since:
my body only exists in the place of Our Great Divide.
Morning is just sheets of velvet upon a
lover’s breast, to be peeled, to reveal her strawberry scars.
Evening is when I feel her fists inside my skin as if
I am being penetrated by icebergs
and I cry, your **** hasn’t been the same since it happened.
The blood seems to get lost in the train-track
to your veins. In our divide,
I wonder if most of it was passed to her half of your heart
but that thought makes me so sad I remember I am mostly water
whereas there is simply the milk of her curves:
I have the talent
of turning myself inside out when I want to be dead.
She just curdles. I was once the same,
he wants me to shut up about before and after but at least I
can cry on anniversaries without needing a calendar or
rotting the post of my ex-boyfriend’s bed.