Baby, angel, I have begun
growing chamomile on the left side of my mattress:
you left it warm enough to grow something
as impossible as weeds. And I know
I am preferable to the sun
at least to you, but what about the moon? There is just
something about luna, the moon, lune.
Sometimes I want to talk to it the way I would
you: moon, oh my stars,
I did not believe in naturalism until I believed in you.
Baby, angel, we are only embers
of what we once were. I heat us up as tea
and grow herbs where you once would breathe.
Warding off bumblebees by
taking their stingers into my paw, the air can hurt us.

I have a friend who says he cannot be my friend anymore
in case I want to kiss him one day.
He is the type who makes me guess what language his favorite singer
speaks, and if I guess the right answer, he will present a

shark tooth that I can make into a pendant. Yet
he does not want evidence
that females exist at all, all the way in Denmark or just downtown,
driving forty miles to get to a movie theater so no one will
recognize in case I want to kiss him one day. I will not

yet he worries my parents will throw him in jail as if it is our
culture, the way the girl he is in love with
wears capes every day, even in summertime. She is the type to
sweep dust petals from the floor in a shape of hearts.

My friend in love with her, is still more worried that he may kiss me
and what it might do to their thousand miles apart
if we get caught. He forgets it would be like sliding my tongue
into a shark’s mouth to whisper some sweet goodbyes.

I am pretty sure my love will be leaving me soon
for a woman whose skirt does not lift in the zephyr of her sadness:
we kiss and we tie
maraschino cherry stems with our tongues. The
same labyrinth puts rosy skin in our teeth, here is his ***** hair
knotted with saliva. When I think I have everything,
it just means that we are stuck together –
I realize it does not mean that we are happy together. I think
someone poisoned the water
with glue, and it is I who dispenses more to let my love escape me.
He is as happy as a child who has finished a puzzle
except for a single missing piece, repeating the movements
again and again. That has got to bring it back.
For seven months, we have been handed the gift of pretending I
can feel the inner-workings of who he is and why he is
and I am pretty sure he knows he never has
to pretend again. It is there in the silences: across the room,
across the ocean where hundreds of babies have died,
babes with mothers and fathers and parents who weren’t divorced.
All I hear is my love toying with a Rubik’s cube
he never learned to complete. I have a Magic 8 ball saying
I should let him go. I mostly worry about telling my mom, who will
tell my therapist and then we will have to
close too many doors. As long as I am sad, they are locked. A
key is stuck in the mud or in someone’s molars –
my room is empty, the air is quiet, and he has not even left me yet.

I cannot say that I write about you
because we are in love,
because you died,  or because you broke my heart;
moths unravel those possibilities like yarn.

You are picked up by fairies,
a powder, the scent discharged by dryer sheets.

To be honest,
I write about you because you did the same to me;
you had me in the crook of your arm,
a dusty novel composed by
southerners, although only read in the north.

I cannot say that I write about you
at all, these verses are not about your existence
but how you could have
opened the world as if it were a book of mine.

I do not imagine suicide as impulsive,
rather the day I wake up and travel thousands of miles
in my thoughts
to tell everything I have inhabited goodbye.

Nature will have the instinct to swallow my skin
in its blanket, the breeze whispers
to my boyfriend that I love him anyway.

A crew of mushrooms shall lay me on their breast or
beneath their umbrellas as in a rabbit hole

and upon lying down, petals spill
across my tired eyelids, and the breeze murmurs
that it is okay: I will not be missed because I will have
nature holding my bones the entire time.

She is there, playing my hair like a harpsichord,
whisking me away.

I’d like to think that I touch something
in the people who I am not in love with but have names for me
like sweetheart, honey, or doll,
perhaps in some way I am their daughter or lover

and I hate thinking that somehow I could be both to every one
I have ever wanted inside me.

The child in their hotel room, too tired for breakfast
or the body of bruises
born in motel mattresses, creating stories
from the popcorn ceilings. She sees stars and bugs but gets lost
in counting sheep because no one has ever been able to

hop over a fence as long as she has lived.
I wanted to ***** out the contents of my life with the bile in
my stomach

and all I got was a few years missing so I am too big
to touch things in people
but too small to touch their outsides. I know people who can be
called honey but not be sweet,
I know girls who get ****** and never are full.

Your morning breath drips as honeysuckle into tea –
I drink it, refreshing. There are days
where I can nearly see the heart in your chest like a Valentine’s Day
card and you are not just flesh and bones when we touch.
You are full the same way my scalp is a street of
gold streaks. Our love was once not more
than a **** planted in a coffee can, now there are roses
whose thorns lead a trail back to the day we first met under umbrellas
and dewdrops slightly sweeter than rain. I catch all humidity
as if I were a cloud – stormcloud, suncloud, so rich
with your every season I could boil it in kettles and make steam.

The last time we had *** it caused something of a
deforestation, I realized that I love men so much that I could not
possibly do their work for them. Double the amount of
calluses on my fingers and toes than there should have been:
two for every inch of hair cascading my back
when fifty-year olds would grab me and make an ocean of trees.
I cannot count how many times we have left someone
ourselves or others for ourselves, there is no difference because I
feel goodbyes in the same way that I do when I think about
missing my subway train or having hot tea
burn my esophagus on the way down. We leave people as often
as I fall in love with my thirty-six inches of hair cascading.  

Moments that did not matter, forgetting I was the one who
could have a second heartbeat in my belly
even stronger than the pulse felt in any man’s ****.

I do not want to remember you as the man who broke my heart
not long after breaking my *****, so I emptied everything
for you and pretended it was only the phone bill
I racked up that we had a problem with.
Every call amounted to a page worth of reasons why we did not
break up when maybe we should have, there were fifty
year olds making my hair cascade like rain down my back.
A precious later reminded me that I am a woman
and so I do not have to be empty:
as full as a god, there could be two lives inside of me from you.

She has been dead so long
that if you were to slice open her shoulder,
the flesh and blood would be purple.

She has the feel of curdled milk
but too cold –

to pour the pitcher out would merely look
as evaporation, and condensation
would return its stench.

I still feel her sister ghost

splitting infinities down the center to share
like matted hair in a side pony-tail.

My poems idealize your tongue on my tongue
your breath in mine,
these verses will romanticize how we skipped from street to street
our arms swinging between your left hip and my right
like I did not think about how my parents
never doubled their strength to pull me up above ground as
we walked through parking lots. I
needed to fly and no adult could let me but you.
The sudden hurt, I have not yet dramatized that morning
you returned my voicemail unsuspecting
unknowing my intention to whisper I hate you I hate you I hate you.
Every bone in my body had broken because we could not
levitate any longer: you were not even strong
enough to keep yourself grounded. I make you sound beautiful
I make you sound ugly, but neither is real, just as
how there are no words for the New Year ball dropping.

It was on the first day that we made love, and the second
and the third

waiting for the eyes to become glossy
when we practiced letting go of each other’s hands

I never saw you in any light but fluorescence
the flaws escaping your face

it was on the fourth day that I recognized the taste of you
as the blood that seeps from skin cut

by broken glass.

I worry when I see girls that chew gum like ******,
the bubbles are as pink as their cheeks
before applying blush. Then, I see their fathers memorize
them just in time
because when they grow up, girls leave everyone.
We are sunlight pressing our ******* against moonlight
so close,
     we no longer need our heart-shaped sunglasses.

On the way back to my rural house, I thought about goodbye
and how you just left as a deer crossing the
highway. I could do that now –
I have a paycheck, I do not need my parents to sign
for us to marry or be taken off of birth control so we can have babies.
My feet no longer wobble when I climb into a train car.

These rainy nights are like gingko supplements
because now I can remember everything about you and I.

Your too-thin-for-winter pajamas on the carpet, your nonchalant
manner of breaking my heart. I knew
then to be a detective: my mission to abort goodbyes
just to forgive you for old hurts and

whatever else
I may find.

Through my veins runs cranberry juice, red as blood
frozen over from the
winter of mine that you ruined. It is June and you are still sorry for
what you did, it is June and now I am sorry, too.
Sadness made my ribcage sprout into a ripened peach tree –
cut them open, nothing’s inside. We are all runaways.

I knew a man who was born under the Sun,
a Leo, and his image is posted at a bus stop saturated
by rain. I do not know if this
man I once knew is just missing or dead, I do not
know if his lion curls will ever need cut again.

The body does not have to be stiff
for the Sun to forget its place, be doused by rain –
the Leo man is missing all but his breath.

When my birth canal becomes important, I want to create
nature. Unforgotten nature.

Her name will be of the moon or of the heavens –
my Luna, my Evangeline,
I even thought of giving her my stuffed pet’s title, my childhood
best friend. She was a cat with a bell around her neck
but I cut that off, I already knew of lone *******.

When more threads between my legs are loosened, as I only
would slit for beard or baby,
it is not a wound but nature unforgotten, fresh fruit.

I want to have a daughter
who someone will **** the morning breath out of and remember
that her freckles are midnight stars, that he or she
has a piece of heaven within them. Oxygen and eggs –
my daughter, a woman in the twelfth grade.

I recite your scent to my every acquaintance
as if I have spent a lifetime living in fields of it, canopies of
you atop a jungle. Truly, it has only been a mass of airplane rides –
maybe two or three or four or five with one stop – that I
have sifted you through my candy-and-smoke air
and that makes my stomach turn over like soil and earth.

There is no distance and stretch in time that’ll give
me a stuffy nose: we have had bike-baskets filled to the brim with
tropical rainstorm waters, and we have never caught a cold.
Nothing’s bitten me hard enough
to uncurl my toes, swinging above you on monkey bars.

I smell your scalp although it is not visible, I have your shampoo
memorized by ingredient and chemical property
to play scientist when the park closes.
All I need are cinnamon roots long as asparagus. The
morning dew climbs the tree I am in, this is a room I can never
escape. This is you materialized – buds still in growth.

Volcanoes in your eyes
when you cry

that erupt
and burn my mean words into magma.

You weep so dully

I wonder if that says something
about your pain
because

it reminds me
of the way people laugh on sitcoms.

Still,
I am sorry
for your eyes red as my anger.

I am not sure which is bloodier, more gruesome –
birth or death. It is like asking God if he prefers Eve to Adam
for demolishing that false sense of security,
specks of pride dissolved in snake venom apples.
There is mourning in creating monsters
as there is in killing them: I see starving children with
round, pregnant bellies and somehow they are more at peace than
I am on my best day. We will understand when we are dead,
not in the act of becoming a ghost, but once we are one.

When I was little, I saw the house on Camellia’s corner
crumble: attacked from behind, the same swamp I had in mine.
I had not noticed its yellow shingles before
and suddenly, this nine year old girl felt lonely for
bricks and plaster and the refrigerator hung on its balcony door.
On its side like a woman in labor –
midwives have her in a kiddy pool, the origin of its
name. Imagine being baptized before you take your first breath.

Ametrine is an amalgamation of two gemstones:
amethyst and citrine. I am that of my parents, one quarter grandma.
She who I never met but got my alcoholic mother from.
My clumsiness stemmed there, the constant
stumbling on invisible rocks and breeding ****** knees –
having two daughters who bleed monthly, but it’s never in sync.
Still, I cannot grasp being proud of ghostliness  
when there are millions of invisible children in clear blood.

Months have been named after
girls who broke my heart, four whole weeks
a year birthed in the honor of those who
should have never been born
delivered in my heart like a box of fireworks –

I half-learn foreign languages to believe that
there is no such thing as remembrance
and so her name is different
than each fourth month, the one of showers.

Cometh no flowers or forgiveness
enough to forget, just new words for old pain.

Everything I do not know
is scribed in pages floating on street corners
of every city in the whole wide world.

Strangers know more about his love
than I do.

He cannot talk too loud or
I may hear, and I run after these verses like
live words can save my soul or
better yet, **** it.

It is the worst case scenario.
My knees hit the concrete, I am unloved.

I am a secret
one that cannot be articulated, written down
for my presence is like a funeral.

Not the birth of something, rather a death
a lack swimming internationally.

Everything I do not know is
everything that everyone else already does –
whispering more beautiful secrets.

There is something to be said about me loving women:
I did not love them gently. I had rage and
though their skin was smooth, their hearts could be as hard as
a man’s. Then, there are the men who I held when
mugs of green tea were only something we could burn our
tongues on, we would slide them together
and their wounded bodies slept on the other’s welts.

I have learned it is okay to be soft to those who can hurt me,
that there are hundreds of ways to love someone
that his hurt and her hurt is not always similar to mine.

I have relationships with and in watercolors.
The paints are conversations we could never bare having or
dishonesties swirling, permanent on some canvas –
picked up colors as wiry black hairs and straight auburn ones.
She folded my dress on the balcony but
a grey windstorm violently stole it. She made it happen.

I have learned that purity can hurt me, too,
the skipping stones that stub someone else’s toes and make
their feet taste like salt. The women I have loved
saw moonlight brighter than I ever would,
just so they could dim it themselves, like a dull knife.

When the soft bodies became too hard of hearts,
someone told me that I was going to love again soon
but it was not the same. I do not hit my pillow when my head
becomes insomniac, thinking of their faces.
I love men who are as fragile as tea leaves and taste so
sweet: their hurts feel just like I am vomiting my breakfast.

Your infinity ring turned my finger green.
The figure of something
eternal
there, on my skin, and it is not beautiful –
  we are imperfect and lasting forever.

Dust and silk on your lips when you left my house –
murmurs, call me when you find your train
but you never did. Just existing in the last passenger seat
before the windows stopped, arching your neck to
see Christmas lights in towns you have never heard of,
pretending we own an apartment in every one
so we can be as far or as close to each other as we want.
When everyone else was outside
smoking cigarettes, you put your head in your suitcase
and smelled the tobacco air of my bedroom –
mouth full with particles of me, a sand-smooth tear sea.

Your hair has grown *****
from all the secrets I have whispered into it. I even had
you sleep on the floor mattress and
butterfly wings, detached spider legs, found a nest in you
swayed in a way that sent you straight to sleep.

There are beautiful things within you that you do not
realize: your scalp is black for their blood,
you are the perfect place
to hide ugly things in because you make them less bad.

Just last week, I heard bugs buzzing
probably in my kitchen or the bathtub drain
missing you.

I told them that
wherever they are, I missed them, and I missed you, too.

How can young bones have old blues
when they do not keep strands of their dead wife’s hair
in a kitchen cabinet, too lone to rot or grey.

The sun moves not at inches, but in miles when it sets
and that is how I feel every time I am left.

My fingers creak when he touches me.

He trusts my heart enough to sleep on my chest
breathes onto the origin of my breath –
I do not dare move a centimeter, forgo our bodies’ sync.
I do not trust that any minute stays existent.

I met him with old scars
have been given young ones on the heel of love.

Mostly, the blemishes appear like a blush
which is only just blood settling in and surfacing by a
titanic of skin.

I think of a young person twirling their hair
around everything, pencils and fabric and water bottles
that both new and old lovers will
touch and believe they got the closest to her scalp.

My insides are silver, his are as
gold as the trail the sun leaves to remember dawn.

The only silly part is his asking for more air, I want to
say that he is alive and because he is alive
he has plenty of air
(but I would gladly offer the remnants of mine).

My mother gave me a locket that has, “love is patient,”
engraved on its hind, in English and in French. I wonder if that
is another excuse for her not being able to love me
the first fourteen years of my life.
The necklace has a cross, too – her saying He took care of me
when she could not. Second in importance, yet,
am I to an absent father too busy upstairs to say morning.
“Love is kind,” is a sort of finale, somehow fireworks
say that no one has ever loved me up to my mother’s standards.
She did not flinch when she gave me this. It
is understanding that she was not the only love I did not have.

I am lonely.
I have driven past the house I thought we’d share
going on eight times now, and there
is no proof that it has gone back up for sale.

To be honest, I am not fond of it anymore:
its lime concrete and white wire fence are a little
too outdated. Painted cleanly.

A clean escape –  a criminal fleeing
(it was you who left me).

Nothing is natural or mineral
about wood doors looking like an emerald
but the expense was high.

I was lonely.

I called and a real estate agent confirmed I did
not have the means to hold you there
or anywhere, really. The line
broke like pillars crumbling from a lost war.

He is walking toward the Pacific Ocean,
the man-I-had-once appreciates salt water so I refill our
pillowcase with it when he falls asleep every night.
He could drink it straight,
like whiskey or milk, and it’d fill him like calcium.

When he decided he needed more
I became one hundred percent sodium – sometimes salt
flakes from my skin like translucent freckles.

I do not go out anymore:
people talk as if he still exists although I
have him no longer. Mother Nature touched her hand to
my face and said she does not mind if I only swim
in public pools now, chlorine and all.

God told me he understands
if I hate the man-I-had-once, for breaking my heart
because he jumps into oceans and rivers
for enjoyment and I jump off of bridges because I must.

I forget that you can wake up with me on your mind, too.
I think of you as something that happened to me
as a prize for smiling plenty, baking a lovely chocolate cake,
whatever.

I forget that we happened to each other
and that specific corners of your brain are devoted to me,
that the texture of my hair is in there somewhere
that it is what commands your tongue to silken my lips.

I forget that we happened to each other
and that something so beautiful, or anything at all, is capable
of loving me back. Not one person made for another,
but two made for each other –
you breathe and you love me at the same time.
I breathe and love you at the same time that you love me.

I keep dreaming of you in that strawberry patch
we had – my backyard, 2007.

The barn was already haunted so I planted my nightmares
in bushels of berries for others to ingest –
you know the old fairytale about watermelon seeds,
well, it also works with spores of sadness.

I wish you could have seen it,
but you must have some time or another. You picked
me from a lineup of a hundred black-haired
offenders, most with blue eyes the color of a package
of ramen noodles or Pepsi cola cans.

Suggestions that I vend my fruit, their ovaries,
were fortified between phone calls from state-over friends
I just did not have the ovaries to do so, no strength:
it would feel like the hair being pulled from my scalp

before I even knew you.
Present day, it is easy to understand why –
I keep dreaming of you in that old strawberry patch
choosing to taste and love my sorrow
over someone else’s happiness, as if it were beautiful.

I hope that if I were to **** myself,
you would regret not setting up the voicemail on your phone
so you could get a tattoo of my last breaths –
the kind seen in hospital meters and beeping machines –
trailing up your spine. You could never see it on yourself but
somehow it would remind you to inhale, exhale.

I count the number of women you’ve slept with
by how much lint I can pick from your shirt. Girls who staged
a camisado: by evening, a washing machine’s dream –
supposed to be in slumber but you come out
needing cleaned. I love you the way a mother does
her son, even after he has said, “I hate you,” ninety times.
If I cannot remove you from them,
at least their particles stay unattached to you and
I am a bobby pin broken in half because it tried to open a lock
sewed closed with a special heart-glue; other
girls are newspaper articles read with coffee at dawn
you forget until the story’s repeated on a nightly broadcast.
God, you look like opal when you come home –
curly-cue dents on the back of your knees,
the kind of handwriting only made by fingernails or teeth.
I wonder if it is because no one can find your birthmarks but me
if a woman can be self-righteous enough to want
to inscribe her own, and so, you have just become a gem
littered all over with worthless pearls.
Invisible, I am invisible. I can want you, but it cannot be seen
how your love is intangible and cannot be felt.
What he sees is so important that he does not realize
just as much is too bright for his eyes –
when I believed our breath was a single, everlasting force
and why would choruses sing a staccato song
is the same question as, why would I continue to flirt with you
knowing that every day I crawl further outside our
three-year bubble into something more like
a bunker. I sweep the floors behind every midnight attack.

A little sight, him sauntering over to my side of the bed
pantless and looking eager as a child to see me:
he had her ******* in mind. I know now,
I only feel sympathetic about it, I know it pained him
when he touched mine.
He said her name so few times I just thought of her as the
animal homophone, and if I were anyone else,
I would not have worried when he said
she thought of him on occasion, because morning came
as morning still and he still had a big heart for a liar.
The thing is that our rapport was honesty –
if I laid on him too heavy, he would request I scoot over
if he did not want to sing me a song
in that baritone fluid, I would seek another shoreline.
Submissive, yet, I would ask him what I wanted without
asking if he could simply love being loved,
I could not understand. Only a scruffy teddy bear could.
But we do not talk about it, maybe I mention
a bunny an ex gave me, one I cut the ears off of when
the apocalypse came, but he has not a syllable.
Nobody wants their lovers to exist
with other loves, and sometimes we do not want ourselves
to exist with other loves even more so.
I only feel sympathetic about it, because I first felt I had
a sibling when we connected, became all carnal,
sweet nature handed me a body.
I only just understood that I was not given the right one.

Against the lavender of a Capricorn:
less chubby at age fourteen than at eighteen,
produced at the wrong time.

Her stars are their least private in December,
moths pick up ovaries and eggs
from below her dress
left behind from relationship number one.

A lesbian curse, no offspring
for her girlfriend was a Capricorn spirit too.

A nymph who took ten seconds to leave
though eight years to disappear:
nurses say, “it just hurts for a moment,”
but needles ruin your whole ******* week.

But out of two Capricorn women,
one is sure to get pregnant.

The first’s not heard of powdered milk,
nor would she have any,
calcium-deficient so others break her bones.

She has a cabinet of amber orbs
held with sickly insects, a million years old
and brown hair in like tiny ***** of yarn.
Some parts of a person can belong to another.

This was not their cornflower-eyes
but an ability to bear child from straight ***
female parts tangled like herbs and stars.

He once said that he did not feel anything until it had a name.
It was invalid, inexistent. I decided that the worst thing about me is not
that I want to **** myself but that I cannot ****
everyone who has ever ruined a piece of me. Their numbers
are still in my phone in case I need to call and apologize for nothing,
in case they still want me and I can cry when I turn them down.

I let people hate me more than I let people love me,
I need men more than I want them. My sexuality is fictional, he’d say
because there is not a name for what I do to everyone I touch.
There are only their names polluting my heart.
I let people hate me, I let them keep me dying more than living.

A pair of identical twins, a pair of ******* –
I wonder if we shall stay as similar when I become an adult
or if December 29th, 2013, I am to be a sleepyhead
no more. I wake up early and go to work and come back home
without needing you, broad man, to prop up my bones.

I wonder if adolescence is merely acting as a canvas
perhaps off-white, but not intricate,
expecting, waiting for an artist to sculpt from the material:
mine mine mine a man of twenty-five, small feet
big fingers soft toes a heart that bleeds paint clumsily.

I became him somehow, and the opposite of him, too.
The body language, stepping chest-first,
it appears so similar as if we were ghosts of each other but it
nevertheless feels that he and I are never in a same room
watching separate films on TV with the same words.

To be careless, I wonder if that is adult
because if the contrary is true I have been there forever
and the train I made him venture did not have that destination.
I wonder if being a lady is different than being
a man. I wonder if we can be identical when I turn 18.

I am getting tired of the sea
every morning, whispering, “duermete”
like we are lovers
who kept each other awake all night.

To wish her goodbye…
say, I am leaving Miami, him, not you.

Reminded it is not just love that can sweep
someone off their feet –
also thinking I left some of my food
in his refrigerator, two gallons of milk gift.

I believe I will return,
not for liquid, not for anything tangible
just a redo of our last embrace
without an ocean of salt lulling every

******* thing,
and I believe I exist in there somewhere –
sea-wide, seaside, we rest just us.

I want to erase
every person who touched you
before me

how I wish you were a notebook
I could just turn to
the next page.

you only
know how to write for me
because you wrote for them first,
because you ****** them before me.

I have the breath
of other women now:
you kiss me, and it is shared.

everyone should die
when they want to touch someone

new
not just a little, but full
cellular reincarnation, new hands.

and I am mad that they still
exist

with pieces of you

and I am mad that you still exist
with pieces of them

and I am mad that
we use the same language to say I
love you that you did with
them.

There are loves that can create a new universe, there are
loves that would fill outer space
where stars are just drops of mango juice
and every person you wish wrote poems about you, does.

A macrocosm so vast that
tragedy is only powder and cold coffee does not break
my heart anymore, sadness does not fit in

an oven but float, phantom-esque, in black air
no longer pollution
that slowly asphyxiates, hardly discernible in our palms of
tangible love. You will not have to tell anyone that you
love me because the whole world is our bedroom.

I felt I was dangerous the first time
you tried to **** me, like I would be too tight
and shatter every last porcelain bone under your skin.

Like my body was a vacuum ******* you in
unable to escape, inland something other than a stranger.
Instead, we became the cosmos
pouring fruit-juice-stars on the unlucky and the unloved.

Bellyaches originate in a forest
of as many organs you can imagine, assaulting each other
tree bark hung like Christmas lanterns on the border
that fall and kiss the **** floor come January.
When you cry out, remember anyone can kiss and make up
and I will remember too. Even your most painful places.
Inflammation is clouds billowing on sunny days,
digestion is their migration to the next downtown over,
your body is just nature, and nature is always, always right.
All too often, we believe we are a cathedral
of glass that can be stained and hit by baseball seams:
bellyaches are hiccups that do not dance out of your mouth
earthquakes are from monkeys hopping
from vine to vine, realize hurt exists because you are alive.

I should be writing an essay about Syria,
there should be more meaning in civil war than in your freckles
one two three no more than three
on your pinky finger, your big toe, above your eye (at least
that is where mine are)

and our bodies share the same soul
which is funny because sometimes whole countries forget
that they are conjoined.

I occupy you like pearls in an oyster, six total
and while we birth beautiful shells, war kills six people at a time.

My heart spills with everything I have learned in the past six months,
this is my anthropology homework and how to mix paint
the exact amount of seeds (two and two fifths) to grow a proper squash
how many raindrops have evaporated on your tongue as well as
how much of your saliva that has been on mine
sugar from three hundred cups of coffee, that image on CNN of a bus
filling with gasoline then flames on the way to school
an elderly gentleman who called me sunshine at a restaurant
and that somehow you know the perfect way to break my heart so
it shatters, overflows, thunders, a bird bath of these experiences I keep.

I wanted nothing of this, but you poured warm water
to scrub your dishes with and I decided to wash my veins of you instead;
I did not erase the memory of you but the feeling of you
severed my arteries like the levee that broke in New Orleans when I
was nine, it flooded the whole neighborhood.
We regret different things every day, but they both mean the same thing.

A band-aid, ace bandage for my heart so it can swell like a basket
hoarding chicken eggs and pennies and feelings inside,
we both want the nerves repaired
so I feel your touch again, so I can risk being broken again, so sweet.

I like old glass windows,
how they’ve blurred and frosted over
looking like the back of a used postage stamp
everything behind them a shadow.

I laid in a conservatory, a glasshouse,
after ruining your relationship.

The green things just barely hid me:
I wished I had been some place more antique
less inhabited, less cared for.

I wished I had not been seen.
Leaves danced out insults, all were true,
*** tourist, homewrecker, and everyone knew
because I became proud to have hurt her
when I had only meant to hurt you.

To run would have been preferable
although wine-colored flora may tango up my
ankles, spiral to the belly of my heels.

You know how my feet seemed ******
in the red Georgia clay?

Yet the arch remained clean, elevated by itself?
That is how I was,
ripe and daisyed in a surrounding brick.

I wished I had not been seen,
rather purchased a futon set that is not more
than a silhouette behind stained glass
and ended myself as well I as did you and her.

I want to mow the grass in your heart
so maybe weeds will stop growing in the chambers.
I see how your breath is interrupted sometimes, you hiccup
out of an intoxicating sadness
mall fountain no one tosses their dimes and wishes in.

I bought you a set of those antique hairbrushes, hand mirrors
so heavy in their silver lace
beautiful like doilies or handkerchiefs for sneezing.
May it bring you silkworms rather than one from slimy earth.

Dear you, it can be okay not to talk about
how you feel and who you love and why you love me
as long as you feel it, please know that I believe it is there.

It can be okay to brush your hair looking into a vanity,
pretending that I am your lover overseas
because you feel that way
vines as big as the Berlin Wall block your heart from mine.

And still, we love
despite the wasp nest, the sadness bugs inside.

Pretty gates over our head, the first time my eyes
made you hard, had no hands for an umbrella because one carried
plastic-bagged groceries the other held down my dress,
an aura dark as ***** hair,
pain so comfortable in your waist I felt like I fell off a train too,
I saw you squirm and get all glassy, all I could think about was how
sad it is that most people stop reading after middle school
else we may have known if a hospital was necessary,
else I may have known the way to get there
without getting a bump on my forehead, white picket fence
in the sky bruising my high
when I first realized I loved you so much I needed to fix you always.

I told a man that I did not know much about Pride & Prejudice
mostly because I had none,
he laughed and gave me packet of Earl Grey tea.

I wish all men did this,
all women too. I think there should be more free herbs
that you can add honey or sugar to,
I think that would make everyone’s day better and sweeter.

I am sorry if this hurts your feelings,
but writing poems about you
is more thrilling than loving you.

We are nuzzled in our bean-pod.
Our friends believe that honey hit our heads
when we slept, clandestine morning dew,
that stuck us together like glue.

It has not come apart yet,
saying you are not going anywhere
even if the gun-holders bust our seam.

I do not have to worry about you leaving
but that is why I do.

When you are not watching a ***,
it begins to boil,
& I watch it so hard I am writing about you
as I am in my underground
6AM consciousness, only awake in heart.

We are so okay
I have to think about you hurting me
to remember no one believes in infinity.

No one else is attached like us.
It is actually kind of boring to be eight
years younger than you, settled down
for everyone to laugh at & disbelieve.

But some of the things that sound so silly
make the most sense.

Childhood stress is not living in a two-story home
when your best friend does,
even though your mothers are the same. All day long we talk
about weeds and leaving our husbands for each other.

Then, you go on to ask
why should anyone wear clothes if they just leave scarlet
dents on our skin, then you will answer,
someone’s branded us with barcodes like cows.

I once cut my ******, the right I think, while shaving my legs -
cried for weeks afterward wondering
if I would be able to breastfeed twenty years from now,
thought if I could not, I would be less of a woman.
This was before I met my girlfriend who has a ***** and is
just as much as a woman as I am,
this was before I learned that womanhood is a fine powder in
your soul, like *******, but not only white, brown too
and black and mine is pink, and womanhood is
every color of the rainbow and gender is fluid fluid fluid.

Childhood was ignorance of ignorance,
adolescence taught you everything you needed to know on
hating the unique,
but in adulthood, that can change, we can know better.

Almost always, he falls asleep before me
and I get to listen to his breath slow and soften -
this does not happen during the day,
he hates his heartbeat in a different way than I hate mine.
He views it as a rhythm that may stop
while I often wish that my song had never begun.

In December, I got to feel him cling.
I got to feel how he must feel every day of the week -
when I am conscious, I barely let him think
now he has his hands glued to my cheek and I
realize that he can be strong though still needing me.

Almost always, he sees the morning before me
and I reach out my hands like a dead flower
but he says that I am fragrant yet.
He likes to listen to me breathe, he likes to kiss my neck
because he fears that someday I’ll be gone
not seeing that when I wake, I’ll make him breakfast.