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

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

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

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

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

and I realize I must believe in falling stars

now.

You are beating onto me like a wave
and sand shakes from my coast with each hit:
one day a man dived into me, now
he is a photograph honey-dewed with age.

I loved his language. It twirled as a song
forms dynamics, rhythm up high to a ceiling
a flood gathering from the floor –

I wanted him to make me buoyant like that
but he just spit in my mouth and made me
swallow, like I could swig a tongue
or gather hope from salty strings of saliva.
Did he know I felt the ocean crashing again?

It must have been a lucky guess unless
girls can appear as aquamarine as it,
starfish and seashells, their pale pinks desire
something brighter than Miami’s going air.

But I did not, only more than a portrait
that can be stolen away by high tide and sea –
how rough water gets, striking you and me.

Adventurers travel
to places where they could shoot themselves and
have it mean something – wait for
steel-toe boots and whimpering floorboards to remove a gun

from the kitchen sink, the tile is as green as
moss statues in pool water
and the caulking is about to be dyed red.

I follow tracks, the pads of my feet. I want to be one
of them – steal a rusted van
with shotgun shells in the passenger seat, safety uncocked.
A home for the only things I care about
has no door. Squirrels

carried it away in a drought, bad men lit a wildfire,
birds stay safe in eggs that never hatched
hanging by spider webs in someone’s daughter’s room –
her hair remains in the velcro of a teddy bear.

She is the only ghost – everyone
else’s corpse had some reason or another to stay here.
I see ashes in a skull, I smell **** on the center of girl palms
old blood used to keep eyes glued open,
mine holds dolls to
my wounds, my emptiness fuses plastic hair to me.

Almost little pillows of ravioli
bloated bellies, frayed skin, so white that morning
cannot detect us – in death, pimples
might pop like balloons, and we get left to look beautiful for
for the next person who wanders along.

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.

Pilot your mind out of the graveyard
all of your friends are alive:
you slurp on hearthstones, you forget to make tea
every cocktail at your funeral shall seem like a broken-
hearted woman. “She was once lovely
wrote verses about riding trains and breakfast.
She had the arms of an aircraft shattering its engine
she was killed after too long of a kiss.”

I would rather you poke holes in doughnuts than yourself
but this control-center flurries like a moth
and then stalls like a blood clot.

I would rather steer the plane home for you.

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

So he would wake up and kiss me.

The desperate are animals under the moon
howling infrequently, ******-breeders. I, a part of
the thousand fragrances they simmer upon –
my mouth around a tree trunk that rots
in summer, boiling like eggs or water for tea.

God loves me, he loves me not.
I know I have broken my promises to Heaven –
disappointment lavishes me in aches so velvet
I swear I could make a coat from them.

We scream for womanly voices and pictures on a
wall of mothers kissing or showing a breast,
the ****** is pink. I melt inside my head.
Every morning we scavenge for the same sun –
bright under the glass, soon no one is loved.

Not even my brother hands me his tongue –
when he does, it parishes to black soil
and I pretend it is my child. She has hair just like
us, when she is happy, when she is well.

I rock her until the wolf-hollers halt,
my skin is her mansion. Her sprinkles on me are
as thick as grime doused the door for company
welcome here, she is warm as she is alive
though she didn’t come from inside me, my eggs.

my younger self
rains on me like dew – she has given me
a new dawn, and as I awake

I feel
her mist. I want to thank her for
her sacrifice, but she
is too young to understand
that it is a sacrifice. She believes in love

she believes in love
but she
does not believe she deserves it.

still,
she gives warmth,   holding me like lips
******* on a thumb
           – young young young

call me honeysuckle
and I know why (your ****
should have
stretch marks for every time I’ve made it grow.

I remember being told
that what I found with you, I will find again
and I did not know why but I
cried

cried
and cried
               until my body felt so heavy
            it could compare
       to how you would feel on top of it.

         your eyelids, then
    began to look like little halos
             whispering
          that they were still pure – your heart, then
            
             would beat
     every time I thought of you
   because I never
ever
ever
could stop
   (even when I was lying to myself,
           I only wanted to lie about you).

for weeks, then
I only knew how to speak
                      in organs and flesh
                      in fluids and ***

when all I needed was a way to explain
          that
  somehow, when we met

                     we found a corner of the earth
     no one had
ever
ever
ever seen before
              and we inhabited it together
         so no one else would find it again.

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.

I only
love my body when a man
is inside of it.

I blame you,
I ******* blame you.

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.

Tomorrow morning, I will be your
      ghost again
            breathing salt into the
    wounds God left you healing.

                    Refection of
a flame that gives mist
     and winglets paling, I have
        arms that give night to girls
I have saliva that rises any deadman.

    Solstice, when do
  the dawns stop chilling? When
                 does warmth grow?

    Winter has had enough,
checking into a glass motel room:
                                  break the floor
    and call on a waitress to pick
it back up.

             I watch you sterilized
   perceived the tip of the iceburg
                            like a gift –

you must be leaving, sir, and
           get better once again.
                 before God pulls you in
        white’s chilly, and the morning is.

I put on mascara today so you would find my corpse perfect
(all that existence is, looking beautiful for earthworms)
then realized that you could not open the tomb –
yes, the worst part of distance, the last person I see will not be you
(and the mortician will not know which dress is my favorite).

Only you, only you know about the burgundy lace
that we said makes me seem like a dwarf princess or psychic –
in it, I could call you from the past even when I am gone
you would be the king of every maggot delivering my messages.

I would eventually ask to be excavated (and if anyone says no,
please do not have mercy upon them, sweetheart –
wish that they catch the measles or chickenpox or insomnia)
so you could see the sallow skin I blanched even more just for you
the palace in my grave did not matter when you weren’t there.

******* 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.

The last time I was in the room with a ******
flowers speckled my hair,
pink as privates, cloud-white. I considered our honeymoon
and thought about how we loathe
sunshine, but would create our first bed on roses
after I have spent five or more years removing her thorns.

I did not know about clotheslines being used
for more than our damp second skins.

She once described it as a construction zone, being the
property of some government
who does not care if it ruins someone's habitat
to build a brand new home. But I do not know if I can say
the same; a house is your mountain above
all hurt, only you
can jump from the top and make yourself bleed.

There I sat and swung on wooden benches,
my most disturbing thought a wonder of how it could hold
me. The sky was supposedly blue,
just now I cannot remember, colorblind of any
possible plane forming smiling men above our heads.

Sometimes, things are not on the tip of my tongue
but still making their way through my
brain-cells. I wanted to lay down on my stomach for love
be a carpet of hair, unshaven legs, sweat beads
until the clouds showed me handcuffs. My
safe lover, agoraphobic, now I can understand why.

I did not think about blankets being used as
shields, or mattress springs made of barbed wire.

If I had known, I would have eaten
my own hair and thrown up every petal on your doorstep,
their broken flower souls, now warm-blooded.

(when I forget to take my pills)
everything round becomes a gunshot, a bullet

your freckles fall off
one by one
and shoot down the road towards me ( as fast as bullets go
still I never can catch them)
I can never paste your freckles to my face

of everything I want to put my mouth on,
kiss, then never touch again

pillows shrink to the size of gumdrops ( I will never
sleep again)
and I swallow them, cushion my heart

say it is okay
baby baby soul baby arteries
everyone hurts when the pupils still have to grow
it takes time to snow, to become

quiet.

Daylight in the castle,
there is the king and the queen.

She is of Europe, floats like a bee
upon clouds, these saltwater beacons
drenching for her hair to dampen black.

And he thinks she seems angelic,
each morning, opening umbrella limbs
stars & stripes he gave her last night.

Shine and prim kiss-kneads,
nobody can tell that he loves me.

The pond across the way,  I drown
in the flesh-earth, memory of our space
just ruffles swaddling where he tastes.

I am his handmaid as I am queen,
when light surfaces on my snowbank
ever ghosting the skin of knobby-knees.

Daylight in the castle,
beams for more than just a queen –
clumsy, odorless of the love she’s seen.

I would want to be a mermaid if it did not mean I would
be the reason why houses crumble,
saturated in salt, starving for plaster, unable to hold its bones together
as anything more than a butterfly cemetery.

In cages their baby wings can slip out of
but won’t,
coffins engraved like million year old fossils, rings on trees.

I would want to be a mermaid if it did not mean I would
drown any flower I touched or planted in a vase,
laid to eternal rest, unable to nurse sleeping butterflies back to health
and fill pea-sized bellies instead of locket-sized graves.

I wonder
would it help, could I fix us if I just turned the lights down
and we drown in our former selves
have *** with each other
and ourselves -

the
relationship worked better when there was more
than just the two of us.

You are a radar-buzz,
I feel the jitter when you are around.

It is stony, it is inescapable,
but I do not mind.
I might want it, even if it weren’t yours.

For your shake I have my own,
like a thousand peacocks, enhancing
themselves for their mates.
Already too bright.

And what they are, I cannot say,  
not much better than my midnight jolt
when I go dancing in you.

Dilate your clavicles, sweet:
I am diving inward.

I think you sound like suicide inside,
do not want to admit you hate life.

So your body speaks for you.

That, the drone, it travels me in,
Love you like a son, a brother, a husband,
and cannot decide which is moving.

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.)

I am ******* on a lemon,
he lost his sour decades ago –

the pulpy, lampshade grind gathers
in the rings of my throat,
and burning like an enemy-girl.

She, with her knives and languages
learned afresh, just for a pit:
there are none left in my lemon,
he has become so dry
in her memory too, a four year cave.

Fear that he may vanish,
and upon his last chance: nine.
The lives I let spill in my mouth &

deaths I take responsibility for,
****** the eight, his skin and bones.

She comes wielding pillow cases,
for the brain I have swallowed,
and soon he is a carcass,
better arid than shriveling in water,
my lemon rather than a prune.

I gave her a go, and now I must leave
or else I cannot save him by me,
no lemonade to drink.

I replaced her
by putting bruises on your skin

& let me rewrite your memories
in my voice
let me retrace your

fights with my fingernails
& make them ours.

Your wet eyes look like my gemstones
or my gemstones look like
your eyes
I am not sure which.

To those who say
will this matter in a year:
yes

I have heard of scars & I have
had them

& I want to make more
than she
did on you, in the name of love.

we talked about it at my place and yours
but mostly I mourned
seeing the socks pulled over your
ankles

while walking across streets during rain.
how warm
like a second skin, they rubbed

against my thighs and it chafed and you
kept cotton to shove down
our throats
when being broken felt like too much

for two people so in love
and so far apart.

You never told me your wish
so I do wonder
if I am making it come true

scavenge for your sweet hands
pin them, bite the freckles
off

I do not just want you
inside of me
I want to digest you and

be
what you want.

The blonde rain
little daisies from angels say
you love me, love me not

you love me like a stone
we did not skip
but sheltered in a wooden box

with
plastic holes as skylights.

I am so tired of not being able to
    to touch what keeps me
         alive.

Redhead, red-handed, I think
it is the devil.

   It poppies bloom on
          my dress, here it is
    the summer of the warm-blooded.

insects sleep in dead trees
the dead trees still stand because they
have small guests to entertain

bugs are beautiful
even when they sting me
take little nips from my neck and ***

ants crawl five feet below
but they still make my forehead hot

bugs are beautiful
they do not **** anyone, bugs remind
me that I am alive in little bites

for them, I will
take my fever and put it in a shrine

I have known, and I have cared for, those who think
rebuilding a person is love
which is quite nice
in theory
but then, I became destroyed. I was a project,
a house of cards that had fallen
and frustratingly needed put back together, elevated
the way the moon gets lifted from grass
or a friendship necklace
lurches from my lover’s body. His collarbone peak
separating the relationship from the heart.
When someone told me
love can be piecing each other back together,
I just thought of how it could be
crumbling together, too —
mixed up, mixed blood, if he were to die, my
necklace would disintegrate with his
tongue. We would cremate sterling silver
and even then, he would not be destroyed. We are not
scientists, we are two people who kiss
together like how two
wooden-sticks’ll use the same drum to create music.
There may be splinters, may peel but
can still make sound. No one
takes a drumstick to the repair shop, they just
buy a new one —
I want that to be love. Stop trying to
fix me and touch my everything, all my broken parts.

Daisy ***, patchwork dress, lalala
I baked you cherry pie while you chatted a wizard
hope it kept warm in the oven.
Dear, the contents partner our cheeks
a good-natured face, freckled of breadcrumbs at
each of six circadian meals to come by day.

Everything is rosy in this hobbit hole –
flowers, and mouths, and food laugh all in sync.

I reckon when you digest
we shall scamper off to our twin bed.
Lalala I sing, and lalala you sing, raccoons are so
close above the wooden beams
that I know their supper is dandelion stalks.

Tucked in, this is what is christened a perfect fit
your foot the extent of my head
and kissing at my toes, their lady stubble.

(You, the skilled shoemaker
who will not tolerate me hiding in pelt moccasins)

If the moon arises, we do not see:
lalala, mockingbirds sing the garden to sleep
but the vegetation dances
like a dwarf’s beard, though blonde somehow
saturating ginger for a reading nightlight
bellies full of sweet cakes and dinner number four.

You kiss me our Eskimo way, then as halflings
I whisper about the ariel orchard today
(Rosemary, red-cheeks, lalala) afore first breakfast.

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.

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

I have felt no one since I loved you
any sensation
percolates my membrane like juice through a honeycomb
our final moments buoy in the bluebell’s cup –
then I forgot to bite the full moon,
Luna, your mistress for this sixteen hour journey
call her Luna, tell if her craters are similar to my *******.  

I sleep I sleep I sleep
but when I awake I will be forever aroused.
It was that ambivalent phone call, “I miss you and I will
hate you for several seconds if you don’t mind,”
that severed my nerve endings.

Piercing my ear the next week
there was the thought, a novel philosophy, just a tingle
that I was carving out a part of me that still
loved

you. I have felt nothing since, I have
been a statuette like Miss Liberty in the pond:
said she stands just like me, well, what if I got my bow
what if I shot an arrow through
every piece of astronomy you find more worth in than me.

Miss Luna, the Estrellas, even your sol
can feel
me break them but I will not feel any of that from you.

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.

your first love is expecting
and I know it is not yours, because that one already
fell out of me.

I have problems differentiating
between what is something and what is nothing, but in my head,
it is a city now – there was no other place
large enough
to hold its beauty. like my empathy, my *******

conscience,
the guilt I take on of other people's sins

none of it ever leaked out from my skin. only dead cells,
I plead to do something for me –
if you must breathe
for another woman, as he did, become bigger
than a town
and make her feel everyone's pain too.

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.

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 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.

wicker seashells,
split needles and coral and ***** and ocean slugs
we have love the size of beetle shells

sometimes the sky looks like a rose
stir nectar against my teeth,

I am afraid I am not a good person when you sleep
my shy petals close up,
need to pluck everyone else’s off

get naked
I cannot kiss you between these bars

lines of streetcar dust on your face, is five o’clock
shadow five o’clock martini
an umbrella for ice that will melt

make your petals shy too
I don’t know what I want but to protect you
and cotton candy froth on your ***** hair as well

the sea loses what it does not keep
in wicker baskets or shells

and that is why
I try to keep you up all night, keep you in me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have on a pearl necklace, the beads like cabbage
stonewashed by sun

and sitting upon this veranda I
watch wind feather a hilltop where your sister
lost her virginity to a man while she was but a girl –
the sort that marries nothing besides memories.

She would wear what I do if I remember correctly.
Your sister had taped posters on her wall
of which she would stay up late to kiss goodnight –

I heard their rustle
through the plaster, through your hair covering my
neck when you hid me next door
pouring my secretions onto your mattress.

Somehow, she was younger and older than you:
chopsticks in her whiskers twice your age
**** a scalp whose hardly brushed one’s headboard.

You and I, on hiatus
and she and I were always clean –

skimming our knees together while you had another
girl in the shower-stall, who cried when
she ate a sandwich
or abbreviated the name I wished never would end.

In the valley, the willows cut a dress your sister would
wear with my pearl necklace, and
I think I will marry my memories, too, if not you.

He called me his little good girl:
it was less of a compliment, more a command
that if I did not follow every order,
he would tell on us. I had to walk with his limp
so he would not derail my secrets, make

my boyfriend mad. It only worked because
I was acting like a bad, bad girl
with someone old enough to be my dad.

I remembered he could put a gun
down my throat if I misbehaved or wore a skirt
too long or too short, too pink or too black
or if I seemed too happy or too sad –
good girls have no emotions, just let men take

their breath away. I panted under my sheets
and I came to the thought once,
soon after, this man, he made me bleed.

Here, I am interrupted by being the only woman in the room –
the seventeen year old woman in a lace gown
that strays from her kneecaps, untouched but by air
and launching in the breeze for twenty sets of interested eyes.

Give me their heads on a platter
so that no one will ever finish watching me waltz.
I am a bachelorette, but taken by all these mouths that tell me
who else I am or could be, supposed to be in this ether.

Heel, he says. I am a dog. Roll onto your back. I am his *****.
But we shed our skin like snakes in a corner no one sees.

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

This afternoon, I smell like a hungry gardener
a green thumb with a wart attached:
both perfumes of a rose are discernible. The soil, the falsetto sweet
reaching up onto your nostril fur as monkey bars
until it can scatter seeds, some wild and collected by fruit.

Mother asks why my knees are shaded.
I have been on them, I say, breathing life into green berries.

Free them from that cage, their wire straitjacket
and breed breed breed:
this afternoon, everything I touch will stay alive, including me.

There are little folds on your neck
as you sleep
that look like hair scrunchies, I am a little girl
again though in a big man’s embrace.

You were born in the eighties
I am a child of the nineties, had a neopets
sugar daddy at age ten

and I think it could have been you, you, you
that painted my acara rainbow
told me it is okay
to be gay and straight at the same time.

I have not looked at a girl since you
nor remembered how their skirts felt rubbing
unfolding against my thigh.

I had not even said “yes”
to anyone before your big man embrace
because I thought that being silent
was the same

and I think Peter Pan stunted your maturity
so you could help me grow up
too.

I did not know that I was starving
until I had you in my mouth.

The candlestick, waxy and red.
Now I burn my tongue with it and
pretend it is you.

And kiss the flames that scorch
my hair, my hands. I am still not

as warm as I was with you –
ruby outside, empty empty empty
in.

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 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.