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.

You were as small as a seed –
     a package I had opened and life
                    jumped out at me,

blank, but ready to grow.
                No, I said. No no.

       I do not love the things that
are not already alive –
    that way, they face no death.

And so I aborted you that day,
     Goodbye, seed, I said.

A package won’t let you breathe,
             may you jump out from a
        more deserving belly.

An army of little girls
poke dandelions through the skin of
every man who could hurt them.

Blades in a briefcase, hide several
between their legs
until the wetness chafes her

right where the dark funnels
stop. The big people and his crosses –
armpits made of porcelain then dug

into little girl gardens,
a meadow of dandelions scrawled:
we do not give you ourselves

but we will give you our blood.
Their masculine fingers could not win,
too harsh for bald skinned little girls.

There is thunder in my ******
from my ******, falls her monthly rain –

I like being a girl, but I hate being a woman.  
This is what all of us say:
give me estrogen but not too much.
give me the babies but don’t make it hurt.

And all their milk is store-bought.

                                       April 25th, 2006.
             Judgment day, in white pants
I give orange pulp to everyone –
the Sixteenth Century has me by the ovaries.

I knew I was in the burning building with her –
and it was like Limburg,  maggoty
but obliged its fortress of a rowboat life.
Without its ice, I am in pine-high, to dull selves
which will later stiff upon these floors.

He was hell. He did this to us.
Not even a masked ******: shown needles
for his dog expression, and I am prodded
rather with teeth than a nose drill.

But she did dissolve before I could have,
must have had thin bones,
of maturity, an osteoporosis ache.

It saved her, perhaps, although she passed:
a kidney stone philosophy book,
these death-doctors will read numb.
I do wonder if it were their hips in fire,
why could they not sit in a mausoleum place.
Just how we did so many instances –
practicing a routine in the bathtub, like knowing.

Had the correct arrangement, too,
I pretended I was in a womb with you.
And mother’s was like that claw-tub so
we, fetus, sensed like castle buffs, carrying
the rings of gold and lockets of princess blood.

Then, she became papier-mâché statues
before a meadow of hell’s dust: I had to kiss
each curve because one ash was not enough.

I knew I was in the burning building with her
when I could not recognize her stumps.
She was an emblem of past upon fair carpet,
or the haze I inhale to shadow –
knowing that he sees our wallpaths and
catches the hum of infernos taking bodies,
then say that he is a monster even more than I.

I wanted more than anything
to wash your mouth out with soap and rot
your teeth so no girl
would ever want to kiss you but me.

Told her things in ***** words you thought
you taught me,
but you weren't my first

tongue,
blood, use for a bandage.

-

I wanted to say I had swallowed pills
that hurt more than you.

-

I wanted to adopt lilies
as my little sisters to help them grow with
my tears -

something has
to get fertilized (has to be real).

-

I wanted to believe in fairness, that I'd
done something wrong

wrapped my lips
around the base too hard
you are what I needed so much, perhaps
it put an ache in more than just
my heart.

-

I wanted it to have been loneliness
not desire

(that is why I let someone's father put his
fingers in my mouth
and napped in lingerie his wife
never wore, and his daughter, aged

one year farther along
than me, heard us

me being his good girl, and
her understanding why she never was.)

yet you were not lonely
just painting a still life of two girls
with rubenesque thighs
you had hoped would last forever.

-

I did not want to be saved.

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.

you are a stoneman, and the new year
wrapped in a confetti shawl

january will dye your eyes white
and december as patient as fertility

as always, the april bomb –
flowers detonate into the may-days

but you are too frozen to touch them,
will crack the stems for milk

mouth our womanly eggnog
bleeding butter into the next thirteen.

Wotton Hill, you are a cage
for my wife’s deceased body and
my mind, blushing furiously as
I recall our times –

twenty spokes for those who
climb ladders backwards, the trees
leaves spilling into a driveway

and I would bundle the biggest
under my jacket, or my hat,
even a tulip for her bonnet’s tip.

She looked like a Redcoat,
and I, midnight’s dove,
lingering on some lane far from
our home, golden even for us,

fell back on a landscape of
solstice, each pine has a lady
inside waiting to be released for
God’s unheeding eyes:

when he weeps for his children,
I do not remember mine, but
my wife along dusty ways

and singing her seasonless song,
with every color flora against
her scalp, her retinas, her breast.

She looked her best when
she was guarding a sad head –
Wotton Hill bringing her face to
one heart-shaped windowpane

swaying in forest unhappiness
and now along this circlet,
my wife lays dead.

Visual interest –
he is twiddling his thumbs,
has marinated his split ends
with a brew of saliva, tears,
and sweat from his temples;

I see, then watch in ****** concern,
I must recognize the person who
could act with such gawkiness,
while appearing so poised:
he is like a performer on stage,
and I am his captivated audience.

Between two index fingers a
mug is situated, vapor fabricating
from its contents – presumably
coffee, with its caffeinated veins
pulsing as a phased mine of energy.

I wish I could be the pin on his vest
or the leather strap bearing his luggage;
his home must be calloused and draped,
its wealth in a single fireplace where
my poetries burn quick, quick, quick.

The clouds are shy when you are around,
they stop peeking around the shoulder of the sun and simply
dissolve
into particles smaller than pores, pills
that I can swallow – I am their mother, the bulk of
their weapon
pass all the greyness through word of mouth. I hurt when
everyone else is scared to,
I water everything so that the sky does not have to.
You said I should be gentle with you
so the clouds are afraid
to be awake when
you are. You do not take up too much space
but those stars in your eyes had to get there somehow, fog’s
only here in the morning because our
souls are making love –
all of the rest of the day it is up my skirt. I
am the mother to mist, but you get along better with sun.

Now alone in February,
little ghosts roam in your nuclei
as warm honey swelling from down to up
and shaped into circles just as so.

They wear you like a coat –
they make babies on the linen.

When you talk to other red-faced girls,
phantoms spread their legs
and replicate the words
into antennae that thaw your lone chest.

I apologize for having supposedly left,
but see, it is me you’re feeling
when you cannot breathe.

humming buzzard

your
    self. and
  me me me me
being open
     this is living!

flying over people
     it does not matter
if you don’t breathe

as long
   as you
      are with
your wings & teeth

           masticate their
songlets.

your
   self. and
me.

humming buzzard
                fly
                    ing.

Said, I can show you around the blackberry bush –
I planted it last summer, you know, that June you coasted
to university and stopped having crushes on cousins.

Said, you grew your hair long.

I toss it out the window many mornings:
dewdrops as a conditioner and tease strollers with
a crease by my armpit you like(d), my flab on the side –
I impress others now, men cling to the bottom of my skirt
and suckle on the hem to make each thread fray.

Said, but your knees feel dusty up against mine.
There is no big wide world, no plum summit skies below
the cuff of another person’s dress shirt –

just a watch. Remind me how much time I have left
until extinction, no hand held or hug goodbye:
this is a kingdom where nothing can die
and when it does, seeds are sown in the pelt of your heart.

Said, no, I bred this world for the fireflies.

Said, there are berry-droppings on your chin.
You look as if you’ve eaten licorice or caught lung cancer;
I wish you had, I wish I had never called you sugar.

Our date in the bathroom was the best
you, in the tub, and me bending over to staple my hair in a bun.
We were both naked but neither of us looked good
just beautiful and imperfect, soggy like flowers after rain
until I used the dryer that works in a crescendo
belly up, then down, cool sprays
hot as chocolate under a pair of wintertime mittens.
Now I can laugh, remembering the best part: as soon as I finished
and seemed as unspoiled as a girl with fresh afterglow can,
my locks slicked back by your sweat and sink-water,
you asked me to take a shower with you. Wet again and
feeling so romantic as I step on the fur you shed
then the stomach of where your bare bottom had rested.
Remembering our best date
how your ***** looked like a cat’s tail wagging against my skin
how you picked out what ******* I should wear next
how I dropped your belongings in my underwear drawer
(for me to find a month later, Valentine’s Day)
and still pure, I mopped the puddles with our towel afterward.

mania is everyone you have ever met hiding in your bones
and depression is feeling them break, this
is supposedly the beginning and
end of life but I heard that those you love are
not even as large as the sky (I just don’t know for sure).

the thing is
everyone is a body of water, but nobody is an ocean
we can drown inside ourselves and

most importantly, we can drown inside another person too
(I just don’t want to believe that the man
I love could hurt me anymore than he already has).
somewhere there must be an island.

I wanted my taste-buds
to feel like sequins on the tip of his tongue, to be
something that
could attach to him and decorate
his insides. Maybe he would not hurt anymore
if everything looked beautiful
from his throat
to his intestines – like water washes
blood
away, dyes itself red to save someone’s wound,
I wanted us to trade saliva. Trade
mouths, he could have
my strong stomach. I could take the mud
out of his esophagus for keeps –
trade bodies like school lunches between friends.
To be as young as me again,
to build it all again
so he has veins of lace and vines connecting from
his heart to his lips, to my lips in case
I ever have to **** out
the flowers that never got to grow
inside him again,
taking up space he could use to just feel 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.

His naked hands, so cold
I become lavender

sticks poking from lace sheaths, wanting to
be a wedding dress
or just a piece of someone in love

the powder, aroma of a man
who forsook his lover last spring.

Her tomb is just a box filled with earth
that opens to the pearly
gate of heaven

and each of her legs have grown
stiff because god so desperately needed to

shape a marble mold of the most
perfect being he
ever created and killed way, way too soon.

(the road has ended as
many stories as it has begun)

Hot concrete pried her mouth open
and I will be the one to
sing through it until she gets her voice back

like using sugarcane
to lure clouds into leaving the sky.

Now, she is a ghost
as your grandfather would be
had he lived in such a time one exists,
the Air Force veteran sort of pilot
and green blankets for feet,
looking ready to lie, mermaid fin.

Ghosts are such glassy things,
fragile. They are almost always
shattering for some reason.

Or another, picking roses upon
sheaths and tufts of a garden home,
these thorns appear more complicated
than the ones down south,
more intricate or something so.

As she floats upon the wormbeds,
a daisy blossoms like teacups
sat in a line of a dozen knives, to ****
her once more: the foul columns.

This can be a myth,
had it not been an empty ivy vine
choking her heart and making her a
sheet, she glitters near invisible
and must be upstairs with
your grandfather’s veteran friends:

and know, yes, the crystal is real
but ghosts do not exist
until far beyond their death.

My uncle insists that he accepted God into his heart
when he was six years old.

His daddy was a preacher too,
his momma stickthin red-headed submissive
and lovely
he remembers them as lovely folk, but he was lonely.

Art did not exist back in those days
neither did color television, sometimes the sunshine
raised too much hell for babes to go outside.

He was lonely, he insists,
he knew that he did not belong on Planet Earth
if the universe was a legitimate thing (nobody knew
for sure in those days).

He decided to believe in God like his daddy
at the promise that Jesus would ride him on a rocket
ship to Mars or Heaven or something
after his body staled,
but I argued that he must have wanted to be dead

sooner than his time
because space and Heaven are really great things,
he must have wanted to **** myself for them.

I did not believe him until he told me that
mental hospitals did not exist back in those days
else they would have put him in one.
Somehow he turned seventy last week, still breathing.

There are no calories in coffee, there is nothing in my belly
except millipede fingers and toes trying to
impregnate me.

Little calorie ghosts and wandering pieces of meat,
what is left of what I eat eat eat
insects making me bleed bleed bleed,
one warms my hips
the other drags cool metal against my skin, catches on the
veins like loose strings. I am metallic
I taste it from inside my *****, down onto my feet.

Breaking bones, massaging wombs
coffee and centipede
shards carve out my ribcage when I do not like how I feel.

he said
girls like me should come with yellow tape
police property, do not cross

and if that is because I am *******

I guess now
my skin should say: crime scene, do not

touch

because I am crying over men like they’re
still just boys.

I apologize in advance for slashing all your tires
and stealing all the condoms in your nightstand so you really
have to think about what you are doing
the next time you carve out the insides of another girl.

If she gets pregnant, I will pay for the abortion
just so she realizes that you could **** up her whole life .

You will wish you played guitar, you
will wish that you mailed me a manila envelope of love notes
you will wish you were dead like I did every day
I was with you, you will wish
you didn’t put pebbles in my luggage so I could leave town.

She can have the hairs you left in my bedroom
and the shirt my best friend bought that we shared for years.
She can have the train tickets I bought to get to you
and she can have the money I wanted to spend on new ones.
She can have the sound of your stomach growling
and the knife I cut your Xanax with when you were anxious.
She can even have the Valentine’s Day poems I wrote
with every graphic detail of you taking my ******* virginity.

I apologize in advance, I am sorry I am not sorry
about anything but being with you:
I am sick of giving myself bruises on every inch you touched.

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.

Think of the lightning bug you smashed
when you drove me across town
and rolled your window up and down
to blow the skirt above my knees.

You said, “that is the only part I missed
when you quit smoking cigarettes.”

Me, I have nostalgia for the drag –
a cylinder riding my tongue.
I’ll never get to **** your **** enough.

Tobacco and *** once swam in me
in layers like those Russian nesting dolls.

In my heart, there is the littlest:
someone of a different gender than I
who cuts their hair and papier-mâchés it
where your teeth discolored my thighs.

This runt takes the size of a firefly
but he has no freckles: he must be adult.

Sputter, “I think you’ll smash something
again I think it may be me you wreck
because I am not an insect behind glass.”

and I know you enough to hear you say
you can unravel me like cloth anyway.

for weeks, I believed
there were field mice scurrying under my skin
and dust from their toenails gave
me a cutting cough
as if they had been walking
on hateful words written in chalk

but it was you,
my body treated you like *****.

after I lost you, I grew a second layer of flesh
that covered your face,
a white towel, the white flag of peace
although
I already saw you in pieces.

nobody could have given you
a better funeral
than my swiss army knife and I

its blade wrote your would-be name where
you never got to touch
so maybe
bacteria would crawl inside
and I could still believe in the mice.

a mouth full of words that squirm like earthworms
dug from a drizzly weather place in April –
that month is for scraped knees & children’s toys
not the name of a widow I once knew, she killed herself
trying to remember the adolescent she was
kicking dirt from below a fence she couldn’t climb
and I was too large to follow her descent so I still
spit my larvae onto her back lawn & become a raincloud
make more to cradle her bulbs left lynched by roots.

little lune,
my delicate moon

I wonder
how comfortable
you are inside my womb

I hate myself too much to ******* tonight.
I will not hide my hands down my pants, caress my inner thigh
but observe prettier girls with ******* like peaches
and wish mine were as dainty, fruits in a lined basket –
when you unclasp any of my hooks all you get is sadness.

The last girl I kissed told me I have a heart like a colander,
it is 2007 and I have not met you yet
there was no reason for my feelings to be wet grounds in coffee filter
I had yet to need the caffeine, but with you,
it lays there soaking
more than five years of boiling into unattractive brown sequins.

I am still kind of the same: still hear
pinecones hitting the roof and think that rain is falling
still dream about ******* in front of my biggest infatuation.

My heart still strains a bunch of gunk, I think it could be a kidney too
but now it simmers for a while first and stores
images in locket cases, now sometimes I believe in love,
it is 2013 and my name means serene
yours is “wealth” for every bit of love you can collect, are keeping.

The last girl I kissed would not believe I gave any at all
I even rejected the sea
because inside every conch, I heard creatures who could touch me
if I would just climb into their shell-walled places.

When I was thirteen, I attempted to cook pasta without water,
this was also when I was obsessed with
cutting every photograph in my mother’s reserve
either to display it on my white plaster door or to **** those pictured.
I murdered eight different family members and myself
nine times without even sending them through a paper shredder.

I am still kind of the same:
though I soak everything up before I can throw it away.

A ritual, I shape an acacia from your flesh and blood –
the fluff rather concealed. So are we, though your insides decorate
a globe just shy of blonde cornfields.

Tomorrow, you can be the columbine’s milk,
split drops deserting her center: now a park of petals on the edge.

But I examine every exposed hipbone, your clavicles rosy by me –
there is something around a jonquil about this image
you spread so I can embrace you, answer coils like a telephone
and want as much far away as I would close up to flaxen.

Hand me a celandine capsule or periwinkle bow –
all of this tied in a knot, originated from a bend of your hair.
I have recollections and joy from imminent meadows, girl and boy.

Sometime in the future, I am
expected to have a blood clot and call it my son
my embryo
my fetus
a comet shooting from between my thighs.

I am female. Parts of me will
move on to form an extra set of toes for eighteen
years,
he may hear how unlike me he looks
why his freckles are in the wrong place:

he will learn of adoption
then become convinced that we purchased him
came gift-wrapped
in a blanket, a placenta.

My husband, another set of toes,
will bring out the belly photographs and realize
there has been a whole field of corn
metal poles threatened by
a lightning storm right on my skin ever since.

The child
   my embryo
         my fetus

the handful of cells
will ask if there are any brothers and sisters in
there, inside me.
No, son, just glowing orbs of gas
only stars:

I can hold a whole galaxy under my ribcage
but not another
nine-month long thought.

Your body took mine on a slow dance, slow motion
four days milliseconds stopped to whistle.
You, in my ear too, with your songs of the weather:
we meet the hurricane with camellia headbands
to water from left to right. Some of your
vessel had fell into mine – it buoyed, that naked sea.

I only knew about your skin and bones
how it bubbled when burned, a bacteria bathtub
and that your eyes became less than caramel
rather a stern grey. I gathered sand.
It made you a beach devastated by summer squalls.  

Next morning, a fog was caught in my throat –
thieved from those red-veined orbs.
The sheets said you tossed and turned while I dreamt
but I still awoke to your lips coupling my neck.

Lovers do not walk or limp, you maintained
and so there was a waltz beneath rain – time paused
as we sped up but the tide did not stop crashing.

When this building stopped existing as a merry-go-round
and the patients came to and from another abode,
someone planted daisies in the hallways
where, in slumber, brothers thought of their sisters or
shared their blanket with the more sad person next door.

Some of the daisies have their axis half-picked
like mooncrests and all appear like brides in a snow white
too pure for this place where no love was made –
rather a home for bad loves to be pulled out, taken away.

But before the doors were locked and sealed
some alumni snuck in to lace between a blooming layer:
I dipped in a toe, you dove headfirst, she used hands
to strain uncontaminated soil upon a paisley pattern
and said a novena for where we became blank slates, too.

I do not know the name of your colors,
they all mate with each other
and come out curiously, like priests
heaving Bibles in that basketball façade
your whites and pinks fit their sort of face.

Yet it stirs some type of discomfort,
also unidentifiable and costly –
these hours, we are not.

You cannot be when I cannot breathe
another shade of blueberries, so fat and
birthing their seeds. Resigned to
their train-track coloring but dreamy,

moonlike, thinking about nothing
and being everything  as tall as a steeple
then as short as Communion glasses.

Say these must be the violets,
in the golden stems and grape heads
found by a grass pit: just like your eyes!
as if artificially placed inside, before you
could only see in black and white.

I do not know the name of your colors
except by the weight of things,
paper & plastic, bows & bird wings,
these heavens I discover on your seams.

Lulling conversations
about ceiling fans and washing machines –
appliances I’d never think
to purchase as an idealistic youth,
because they’re included
in the best homes, a lifetime warranty.

Such as the time I learned
vinegar dissolves sweat from t-shirts,
or that nail polish remover cleans carpets.

There were occasions I
unplugged lamps during storms,
as knowledge crept upon my aging spirit,
while on others, teenage
dramatics fell solid victim to the
irate beast of lethargy, a sandman.  

Can responsibility be measured
by the care I offer electrical sockets
and moments devoted to preventing sparks?

Quality versus quantity –
there’s a hearty debate, countering
kitchen tips exchanged from
housewives to sisters and the infrequent son
that I base my initial worth on,
of all arbitrary numbers.

I used to fall asleep at night
thinking about your hair
how it looked like
trees, chestnuts, branches
allocated enough so that I
could loop them into braids

wide enough to drape
like a curtain for eyelids as
eyelids are for sockets
when thin skin does not hide
sun from my pupil’s range.

I used to believe I could kiss
the very lip of it, smooth
and forgiving when I
palm some locks out of place:

I used to believe no one
would bury it with you when
you follow your grandfather
onto the meniscus of
afterlife

and I used to believe I’d
receive a phone call
then a paper bag on our
balcony with a note that says:

she loved you
keep her hair in a vase by the
bed so you can sleep again.

I used to believe that your
roots and leaves could never
discover death, rather
would twirl and twirl and twirl
around tear-ducts like a hedge

to disappear the darkness
and sponge midsummer’s rain
with a honey-colored braid.

The exterior is thick with humidity,
damp with rain,
and I’ll never experience fever like this again.

My body is being taken
(through the wind of a thousand hurricanes)
to a building with no climate;
I will be my own meteorologist,
forecasting eroded rocks and failures,
and seldom I might discover a window to peer out of.

Squinting,
I could catch the stories –
those of capability, disability, and susceptibility –
my willowed reflection screams.

And, though I will always have my wrinkled palms,
they will never hold the weather.

A woman crying has the same smell of cherry blossom buds,
leaping from small thing to small thing
everything is raked, unleafed the summer cobblestone.

Of her ex-season she may ask –
oh, autumn, did you wear a taffeta wedding dress? With pearls?
Because her husband left when she did too,
that silk is such bad luck, frilling slightly as a broken rib
so now the days have slits last winter’s snow was meant to fill.

A clock of seasons and the last time they slept together,
spring sprung an ******* any time she wept, fertilized by salt
these crystals, the pits on a strawberry
and folded a laundry load of wedding season clothes.

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

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

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

When I write down your “nanananas” and “lalalas”
I cannot make it sound like a melody:
you have a voice
and I only have fingers that cannot play the harpsichord
feet that stumble over themselves, while yours
stumble over strings and vowels and pretty breaths.

I prayed to God just so he would tell me
how to explain the way you lace symphonies together
white drugs laced with a more dangerous one
you exhale vanilla and formaldehyde
and your hiccups win first prize.

You remind me that we are all healing but we cannot all
throw our bodies in Lynches River
or Lake Pontchartrain
because there are not enough black garbage bags.

You remind me
not to swallow cement
so I get filled up with ***** instead.

I hope that you do not drink too much water
to make room for pink milkshakes and doughnut holes
so honored to be inside you they
reach up and hold your voicebox like a shooting star,
I hope that you are selfish sometimes
like when I read my words just as you would sing them.

I want you to hurt me

I want to be reminded that I am never alone,
that hundreds of bacteria are following
that plants are alive except when they brown

I want you to ****
every little thing that is wrong with me

I want the wallpaper to peel & drape over us
while we touch I want to
reveal the ugly parts of everything else

I want you to unzip my dress
and tongue where my spine ends

I want these moments to be enough for fairies
to permeate my intestines with glitter
so I can look pretty when you break my heart.

When I met you, I stopped smoking
and began to paint my nails every weekend evening. I thought
you could ******* sadness as if it were your own
because I did not drink alcohol,
nothing could dilute it. It was always there on my tongue.
You had never smoked or drank or tried
to **** yourself, though, so you did not recognize
the acid and that hurt my feelings more than razors or erasers.

I was the first girl you slept beside,
you the first to kiss my eyelashes like smelling daisy stems
before I became conscious in morning sunglow.
Even December air had the inside of a lemon’s color.

And that was better than smoking or drinking or killing myself
or painting my nails mint green,
picking off the excess from my cuticles, without you.

the boy I am sitting cross-legged in front of
shares the same bruises as me
and we create new ones
on each other,
swelling like sweet gumdrops

or ripe fruit. his hands mold me
into a mulberry –
I bleed

sugar and water and sap. I close my eyes so that
it can be a surprise,
the stains I will wear for weeks.

we have loved so hard since we met,
we created puncture wounds
into each other
****** the salt out
then bandaged each other up and smiled at

the soreness.
the togetherness of it all,

opening ourselves up so that the other
can love our insides, too. his
is the burn of incense with the silk of warm
milk,

and I am laying down
in the happiest ache from him
knowing we wear our skin down until it is so
thin that
we can't help but feel all of one another.

thank the humid place between my legs
for being the only ***** of mine not to take it personally
perhaps because we are so safe and secure
you would have to unfold me, trim the weeds around
                                        this secret, secret house  

somewhat abandoned
and no longer the host of such hopscotch games
because once your round thumbprint made me so sore

I do not forget the care you took to separate petals
like eyelashes caught on a dangerous rim
but now it is for defense, such a mechanism
something to prevent intruders, beggars, from barging in
                                  these lips, an alarm system

oh, I do hate to make you leave
but my ****** is the only ***** I have that does not take
everything personally

The shadows make swans
out of our necks when you sleep in my bed, the
only hour I do not feel so heavy
as after reciting poetry to a fallen star
or finishing a conversation without some goodbye word

leaving spider webs
in my mouth while my lips wait
for the cue to close, a signal to move on from whatever
happened and left without departing.

Saliva strings out from your cheek like spider legs
and I like this so much more.

We condemn bugs,
those icky things, for daring to sleep where no one else
does – but does that not mean that bugs
never want anyone to be lonely?

when morning no longer opens our eye sockets
snails will use their glue

when the sun stops loving the moon
I want to take your hand, and be light, and fly from the
bottom of earth’s oceans
all the way to the astronomies, we can
be the insects keeping the moon and stars not lonely.

I am your opal,
the bipolar dot tied tight around your neck
pretend pure gold can keep me close
when my pigments flash every which way.

I am no diamond,
not even one still warped in the rough
because despite the number of times I burn
no one can make me seem clear, just melt.

Gave me a locket with your name inscribed
there are little rubies on the side, a white gem in the center
and it lays right across the ******* you ****** slow
in my bedroom’s night.

The moon came through the lace
curtains, you came inside me. Both looked like a shadow
against the walls of something smooth,

untouched, virginal. It was Christmastime but I was
not cold when you slipped my ******* off:
felt like I had warm eggnog swimming around in my belly
and your handprints on my bottom was holly wrapped
around the tree, your ****** hair mistletoe hanging.

This locket says your name,
it says that I kissed you and you kissed me. It says before
winter could end, I knew you tasted like cinnamon
and you knew I come like vanilla gumdrops.