Six feet away, a gun sleeps
              on the sidewalk

pulsing

and I swear vows break
every minute,
     why should this one concern
                 me? Feels like

arsenic
       dripping through my
     body, the veins.

              and I turn white
                                     for it,
   but the trigger is black
midnight

   is always speaking to me,
break this vow,
        or  the vow will break me.

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.

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.

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.

said “I have to feel you I have to feel you”
and so you touched my nudeness
and you touched me again

until you found my heart whispering lullabies
to the other men
who found themselves under my dress.

He captured me
before I could become wild
and now
I am a crawl space
for the beasts I cannot be

myself.

I should have known
arms can be like coffin doors, and when his opened
it was not safe to lay down inside.

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

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

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

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

you look like a rock
and your walk is slow as one
but your claws snap – ahh!

Silence should not even have a word,
silence should be at most
a glance
or as the process of
growing baby teeth and wisdom teeth

spells from nothing to something
with just a morsel of red, wine-y blood.

There are more letters
in “silence” than there are in my name
and there are more letters
in “silence” than in your name, too

silence is more valid than you,
than me, than us
but silence does not exist

silence should not even have a word
because it cannot be touched.

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

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

you did not give me flowers,
but I smelled them anyway

bit their stems
and then I tossed them away
down, down, they reeked

into the valve that is my head
the body, capable

they are in the body that
you left –
quickly, too, you did not rot

you looked beautiful
when you left, jumped straight

out of my heart

in the projective sort of way
we are accustomed to

loving each other and leaving
too. you did not give me
flowers but you would have

if you stayed.

When I am sad,
the only thing I can think is that
I never gave you permission
to pulse inside her and
you clock 90 beats per minute anyway.

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

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

if you cheat on your
girlfriend of three ******* years,
buy her twelve roses.

Everyone draws me as a different girl –
one in a white sheet, or as pale as one
but only you make me out to be
something carnal, alive under blankets.

The first to view me as a thick piece of
stationary, written on and dirtied.

And I say the same words, but only
you consider them something to drink –
a voice broadcasting for my open body.

your hair is on my desk
it must have fallen out when I
found your comb and caressed it

with my nose, my fingertips
I gathered one last whiff
of your scent

your hair is on my desk
follicles of it are kind of dead
but I think I can feel your breath

thank you for leaving me this
small present.

The plants began to wilt the day you met her,
got sick and shriveled up
without wounds. Much like how people
age, how people die
every leaf of ours browned. The veins split.

Lonely girl, I know you wear songs on your lips
but when you smoke those cigarettes,
you sound as if you are in a cloud of  fog –

it makes me think, makes me wonder.
Could we live in one of those bouncy airplanes?
So natural, lonely girl, you would fit perfect
floating and crying every drop of rain
onto the heads of people who won’t talk to you.  

I would drown them with mine, too –
unaccompanied in our river, not able to sing
while you’re ever in the company of my shadow.

here I broke my heart,
no wonder I cannot sleep
at night anymore.

I have
come out from my lonely compartment
to talk to my best friend
who holds a girl
with each of his four hands —

please, best friend,

I beg
do not break any girl's heart
(she uses it to breathe
uses it to sing)

(see how whole it is, how warm it
is, how it is just yours)

having the best intentions
can't stop you from ******* ripping
a person apart.

no, I am supposed to be a snow globe
               this
                 emptiness

           is not
                        okay

DELETE

I think a fairy sprinkled sad dust on my face
to make dead things grow in the
wrong place, and now I walk around with
a belly full of tired leaves
thinking that I would rather not live, not be.

I tell my family that I am sorry but
no one understands what has possessed me –
just the sad fairy, I say.
She cast her sad spell and it won’t go away.

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

At age sixty-four,
he bought his first suit to see
his mother buried.

Everyone I love
is mostly water, but I
am made of fire.

you put something (someone)
inside of me

and it left.

does that mean
that you are leaving me too?

haikus are about
nature - here is one about
his haematite hair.

a billion hearts,
their circle
   & linking

      they look
   so much like
a star

i once tasted
          lingering

notice how I have no
photographs of peroxide on my skin
but kept
three hundred of you.

death is not more important than
how much
we love each other

it just feels better sometimes.

sorry, honey, but
she is not invited to
your birthday party.

You are the soul of wine,
grapes on a vine:

I sip you with my mouth
and lap at you with my tongue,
fork the illusion of bits down
my throat, hopping & hope

this will not be my last glass,
tonight is a celebration:
you bubble inward, far within

my simple mind delved
into the bottle’s head & heart,

but the spirit has not a pulse,
just a rhythm of what
I put inside, the soul of wine.

oh god, touching you
kissing you, ******* with you
please **** me oh god.

these photographs stole your soul for a moment
when I could have clutched it in hand,
I opted to observe you under glass
and right now you are in bed, I am in bed too
but there is another realm where you are
captured by pixels & we are sitting side by side.

I have not even been able to
touch his ghost.

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

he asks how lovers
sit still when one’s hand is not
holding the other’s.