The food rots when it is already in my belly
baby mush, cinders from its graceless fire trail –
I dig my tonsils with ******* but
you will not return to our winter, the exterior.

So, hearts slip backward: a new abode
these intestinal earthquakes applauded in Hell
have stolen fruit I certainly could have froze.

In the woodshed, I discover a scalpel
and attempt to dislodge you from my hipbone
but now my stomach’s been kissed by Satan
I am birthing premature infants from a wound.

Another hour I shall give a funeral
for the apple core, swallow each seed so you
will grow once again safe and sound in my belly.

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.

our ***
is how it feels to be a skipping stone

at first, cool to touch
and level
then dripping with
the sweat of the sea. it is loving without concern

that the love will become
too important,

loving
at dusk

swollen lips, red like they are blushing

sunset dyeing the sky scarlet
like it is blushing

he gets under my skin
where the flesh is so pink, it looks like i am
blushing –


          small strawberry pores.

still, my head
stays above the water

it just hits me hard and i swallow
waves
of salt.

lingerie lace constricts my hips like seaweed
it is exhausting to love him
the way i do,
my breath moves
wind through his hair
and i pant oceans into his chest.

he must feel
my eyelids flutter

in an ache
to be opened into a path, the trail from
body to body to

     shared dampness
         shared passage across it

              the skipping stones
feel plush
if i want it hard enough
caressing the body of water.

quietly
learning to let my heart rest, but never my
thighs

his remains on my stomach
like wax.

girl, falling snow

I imagine the cold air
brings braille to my skin, my entire body to be lifted
from concrete
and read like a goodnight prayer

blood braids
my hair

cheekbones break and collapse as craters
on the moon

they sink to cradle dust
and atop, feed other little rotting things that do not know
gravity
sticking like a new ***** –

to die from your emotions
is to
finally become god.

Braided our hair together
our minds touch, for two strands of curls
and a single smidge of mine –

let me read your thoughts and know
                    we’ll stay alive.

I love you like you have the only **** in the world
and I say “I want to die” as if I am not dissolving already,
crimson buds sprouting through my gown
stain your lips where they suckle the infection, my poison.

Secrets are in my liquid and you want to find them:
know the other voices I have listened to,
the slick girls I kissed, whose form fumbled with mine.  

But there is a prize under your garments I did not see
with women who stood on me like a veranda
gauging how many splinters they could detain in their toes
and not sample my blood after they slit my thighs apart.

I was once full of myself, now full of you
someway a vein with no sustenance is not limp when held.

The streetlamp colors us,
bleeding light, being on top of things
and all I can see are its circle-spots
drawn on like Communion wine.

I am its wife and its husband,
but every digit has waned to nothing,
must be related to the cold weather.

Only God has memories of such
paper flowers and stems, before real-
ness had happened somehow –
only God grew flora from pavement.

And now the best kind of wild,
the best, most dancing air above our
heads? Does it know the memories

implanted in ourselves, or in it?
I think I must be an android or love,
just a feeling for intoxication
beat the kind of color found 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:
i find space between us
even when you are inside of me

ii:
it would take me
two hours to fall to the bottom of the ocean
and two days to get to you

iii:
floorboards creak
i sing

you get so close
my ***** breaks like a guitar string

My bones are crying on you, my eyes are
suffering from the weight of the skin –
we are the wrong man and woman to be in love,
I think and ask why you cannot just want me
when her body is the closest thing to a
beach without waves, mine a Rainy Sunday.

Oh, everything drags and pulls –
I will long for you through every hole I have
until there is a funeral for my sexuality,
a snuffing rose petal cradled close to my soul.

She is asking why you cannot only love her
but I just ask why you cannot want me –
an answer ends in Macintosh red, the final bite.

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.

Your hands rap-tap-tapping on my thigh
the beat sounded like a rhyme –
I replay it in my head, it sounds again
like two bodies swaying across a city line
and wave the departing trains goodnight.

Neither moves to enter it. We just sit.
Your hair grazes a bone along my neck –
lays long enough to curl down my chest,
I count the seconds where we rest.

Everything has become a song to me
and the tune plays effervescent on repeat,
passing as buildings do from our seat in
this car strumming down December leaves –
seven days I had you from jaw to knees.

I never want to be touched again
not by you, not by maggots eating my corpse
but they do and you do. I am swallowed

like a jewel or the tiny voice that tells girls
to do bad things. Shimmering, my lilac eyelids
open and shut, separate and find each other again

but it will never be like the first time,
the best time. I can never feel death more than
once. I want everyone to **** me but I want

nobody to touch me again.

Speak low, or I will fall outside my body again.
Just last night I fell asleep while we were on the telephone
hair wet so I can recollect the memory in my ringlets

today
tangling out your love salt, perspiration sand, and touch
it to my tongue, remember how we made love.

How easy these are to forget when my heart does not fit in
between the ribcage you grew hard against.
Press yourself to me, and I still do not feel the throb.

Today,
I can only leave little notes on the skin
drop small baby hints of what I knew you felt at the time.

Several forms of art, I can sever the seas
or have as many “him”s
and “her”s as time will allow the couple of us –
all involving ******* one another
up, I can even cause oceans
to bleed in my mouth. It is okay to be bad
at painting landscapes and good at
destroying them – good at making people seem
as expansive as a country or continent
because freckles are stars and
we cry so much we’ll build a sodium factory.

i ****** on your breath
hoping it would bring the pink back onto my cheeks
but at some point, i stopped being
fresh-faced
and realized that i eventually will stop
loving my old loves. my smile
has expired, it grew too exhausted of needing
everyone and everything
to be happy, licking my lips until they chap and a
boy or girl wants to dissect them.

it is like
i open my mouth with the expectation of
something falling in
that won’t taste too bad. it is like i
want to keep everything and everyone warm, near
hot
for me.

then suddenly, i am the moon
and neither the sun nor the stars can align
with me. they lived too long without
keeping secrets,
needed more gravity to stay awake. living is hard
when your body
is always open for business.

pregnant bellies, love bellies, I love my round stomach
but wish there were an adorable parasite inside

I would never be lonely
if I had stretch marks and soccer practice in my gut
even if she keeps me awake at least
I feel something inside, love bellies or an empty belly

I need to be full, not just round

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.

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.

i want to perform an exorcism on myself
bite into candles so rough
wax’ll become sewn to my mouth

and i forget how to
flick my tongue to form your name.

i must be as close to you as my thighs
are when i sit down,
mature inward upon ourselves
like legs crossing, calves behind kneecap.

count the number of girls
who pretend to be someone else

during ***,
then count the number of girls who say
softer softer softer please

and i’m sorry, i promise the first will win
because chilly air can make us
light-headed and nauseous;
harder harder always just distracts.

i want to swallow guns and swords, then
tell my friends the bruises
came from you –    they kind of did.

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.

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.

there, the long eyelashes

dead in my hands,
oh god, they are dead in my hands
cannot even flutter anymore

but they are wet and they reek
of the bottle caps placed

between my bed and bed sheets
there, the long eyelashes
are weeping

only alive when I am happy
you left, something fled from me

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.

muddy lungs
death flickered a coal light inside you
this morning as I separated from

the moon, my crater
my coffin

stars eat from the palm of my hand
festering caterpillars
from the stomach’s boiling acid

only the freshest babe
I selected from within an evening sky

will I *****
to not swallow, but choke on
and become as noxious as my lungs

African poesies will not awaken there
kneel, wilt, flowerlike.

How is it that I can have you inside me
and it feels like everything, every wonder of the world
traveling from under my skirt through my throat

but you are nothing more than flesh and bones?
You are nothing more than me.

I feel you like I feel a pill dissolving into my stomach –
I feel you like I feel fluency in a second language,
we could develop our own, another romance tongue
using the reaction of pale skin being ******

by just-fallen snow. It has never once felt like you
were scratching my ribcage when looking for my heart:
no, just serenade my *******. Set your map inside.  

X marks the spot where I fell the hardest,
I felt it like an earthquake penetrating a beautiful place.

the black pavement met me with two toes
and I realized
it is hot because hell is underneath.

ribbons and your cologne
lead me to elevation, but that just gave
me farther to fall –

I learned
how the moon cannot take a full breath
so she donated her lungs
to the sun in a tiny glass bottle, glued them
on with twisty ties from bread.

that is how rays
were made.

mornings are made of night’s death –
a garland of stars
that just drop
or dissolve upon a devil’s pepper kiss.

you welded your teeth to my skin
and I felt the burn
so intensely, I knew you belonged in hell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think about you.

I 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 said that I was buried alive
in the flesh that carries me to death –
the filthy pounds of it, peach but stained
with moss and weeds and bird nests.

And that they enfold me in such
dim light that I barely even look alive,
nightingales knocking from side to side.

He said that I tell them to come in
they breathe my air and bite my limbs –
this carcass lay still for the pecking dribs
suffocated by flora that shall take it.

pieces of you do not feel like pieces of glass
or pieces of last night’s meal,

they are not shards they are not crumbs

they do not cut they do not disappoint

you are like velvet tipped roses
or green fuzz in the bed of a swimming pool
seeds planted, nearly peeking through
a new orchard has belched

where my impressions of others have been
sliced by thorns

I am not quicksilver but I am developing
two toes at the exterior of my cocoon
I am changing

up to my ankles in you
all these fragments, finally a family for them

remind me it is a non-invasive procedure
if only for a tongue in my belly button
or beanstalks in my mouth

soon, soon, soon I’ll bloom, bloom, bloom
fertilized from my pieces of you.

you left, and I kept your pillow naked in my bed
for me to kiss and hum on

its case
stuffed down my shirt like a training bra

wondered if
blankets and beds understand what a touch is

cement galaxy,
moments stuck in you today
will be lived later.

The moon is a door
to tick marks on our headboard –
act like a bachelor, it says. Pretend this is a new girl.

Your flat tongue on fresh fat
she quivers as if uncovered from a freeze.
My days, she must have. The candlelight keeps
being bit by lightning
then slowly dulls to the heartbeat of an aged hound.

You feel like sunscreen
melted, molding the color my skin –
first red and then black and then a healing blue.

This is what it feels like to be new.

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.

Your
        desperate Eve,
  so turquoise

sprout an inkling
        of sense

and give it a pouch
to sleep
      within

not this
    crowded place

  and perhaps
tomorrow will not
feel so  
     dark

    perhaps your
Luna lives

            she
is deflowered
   she will be okay

stretched
    like taffy

              for a man
The scarlet she has
  hidden

       everything else
will rot

   and perhaps
tomorrow will not
feel so
   dark

    Eve lasting.

As I have aged, my body’s become a full moon –
a thing to howl at
unable to hide in the dark (a dark so dark
it swims from beneath me, and I glow like light).

The years have had a refractive nature
and I cracked the eggshell, the first crescent and

the second
supposedly a silhouette holding hands. I am told
beauty is symmetry
so I must have two of everything to make a
                                  whole –

but by dawn, I seem dull
unawake (the thought that no one needs me
on my back anymore, there are

rounder things than me). Without needing to be
reminded, my peel wades to the next
month of sprouting
       pallid craters who match those before them.

there is a phrase – “sea of stars”
and I think
of it as the sort of oasis that could be above earth
or beneath the soles of our feet.

blue blue blue azul

where the air brushes my hair like snowfall,
where water pulls at my skin
like

a new lover. like him on our first night together,
still unsure of which
words were
too intimate to use – there came to be
no talking, so much less desperate than we
are now. I could grab flesh
and remain aloof, as the ocean is.

something
is always glistening in the sky or the sea

I wonder if I got closer, if it would look like your
hide
after twirling your fingers against
my tongue. the belly
of your fingerprints moving in my mouth.

I am not ill, but
covered in moss and milkweeds:
green skin. blooming hair.

***** girl, she has veins that are vines climbing
down her lungs to her spine
then it gets paisley
her swollen belly, she has a pocket to hide

questions and tree stumps where
you laid her on her ***.
Now, I must ask: why did you **** her?

Was it for a memory?
Sometimes ***** girls just want to appear poetic
with the clothes of another
sprawled, opened like legs on her floor.

I am glad that I can love you again,
take you from the attic and
remove the quivering death things –

we are alive! Not the ghost of
lovely beings loving, but ourselves.

And how we sin together, how we
have the courage to inhale each
wine-sweet cupboard’s wood chips:
upon bread, the wheat can breathe

a fawn shade your skin, the lamp
of which granted the only light
speckled for months in your eyes –

I gave you enough, but not truly a
love to life for. It was a brother

of dust sheaths or a sister of winter
leaves, their final lapse of green
having swam from her mother tree:
I am glad that I can love you again

and that you continue to love me –
independent of the attic packed
with our dark, decomposing things.

I had a summer love once, but my fingernails were too long
by autumn. I slit its throat with them and
have done the same to mine more than once over,
more than twice over, more than fifty or even sixty I assume.
My summer love sang songs to me in winter
that sounded like a harpsichord
although they were made by a computer or something. It
is not ruined as long as I feel like strawberries are
in season – I taste maple syrup on him,
coming from places too cold to stick on your fingers, I have
myself knee deep in the twelve months of a year.
The walk to orange groves will take
too long. I know I’ll be sick of calling him my summer love.

worms live from the decay of dead bodies
they are beautiful and soft,
and anyone could break one
but why would they want to when
their bodies seem as sunlight against glass?

you do not know that they want to get inside of you,
take from you,
and add your remains to their
empire of dirt. their soil, their sustenance.

he found his way into my soul,
he wants me to give all my insides away
to make him more beautiful.

worms think they are ugly
they have to fill themselves up up up
of other people, until everyone else is empty
and ugly too.

i am so sad
i want to die, want
to open up my wrists and show him my veins
because they look like worms

like him,
and i need them
but never wanted them.

Listen to your body
unless it is fat, fat is always wrong
fat is like flowers committing suicide by drinking too much fertilizer
fat is having too big a bloom
because petals are bad and skin is bad
and brown wilted leaves can't die if they are big and fat.

It is nice to see this apartment building from
the bottom, rather than your balcony
and swallow the again-stammer of jumping.

An elder still has her Christmas lights hung –
I wonder if I could get tangled in them.

There is also the question of garden lips
a daffodil and whether or not I could **** it.

Instead, I have a stutter of being so small
I could climb to your bedroom and not care
to swing loose, soft bones, to not need to fall.

Your bedroom, built of sugarcubes
glued together with honey
and lightbulbs powered by milk. I can electrocute
myself again and again
without consequence,
only feel full and slightly liquid
inside. The
child-like asylum, a promenade
he says, you shall be safe here even when
you would rather not be.
We made a test of who is big-***** and which is
small - ******* around my wrist
checking for a pulse.
Five times a day, most past eleven pm
you complete the rounds. You
make sure my bubblegum lungs don’t stick too well
but paste the foundation
to the house.
I know that you know about how much I
hate glue, feeling soft,
comfortable but never enough to hold me to anyone
for long. The flakes vaporize like
snow.
He says, you are safe where everything is warm
I say, but can I be happy if love
is not something that cements two people together.

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.

The first fourteen years of my life
were spent worrying that I would fall in love with the wrong type
of person –

a man
who splatters red paint on black and white photographs of
young girls

the young girl who
is brave on public transit, does not even hug the poles
when her train has very near collided with a second or third nearby,
not necessarily proud. I am just so

terrified that I can love a person who does not
care about anyone

or anything
because nothing or nobody, not even camera lights, has given her
a touch she did not ***** breakfast on.

Because that would be me – I am a girl, my age is that of
breakfast

and my belly once spun like scrambled eggs
when I thought of falling in love, needing what others called
a nameless sensation
but it could be calm boys

men who never care, until you run
the back of your hand across another’s beard when he can’t sleep.

I fear I use my five senses too frantically, like they
will leave and
the souls of people I adore can be shoved into my fingertips.