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.

you exhale softness, and
I have cold hands
the moths have to gather under my nails.

it was once supposed that
swallowing gum would make your intestines
stick together, that
is why I shared my piece with you
one day.  you said you had an idea, soon
we both smelled of cinnamon.

wet, sticky cinnamon
please glue your insides to me, I thought.

I threw up in July, exhaled
you.

I needed to, so I could write about how I get
so sad sometimes
so empty
my hands are cold but my
heart almost always has a fever.

I used to cry when he put things inside
but now I
think about it as having
my cobwebs cleared out and replaced
with what might
make me warm-blooded again.

The dark sky has constellations –
it reminds me of you against my body,
forlorn indents of other men’s teeth

now you lick and heal, they left me to
bleed.

Your white washes grain between
my toes: once infected by the smallest
corner of fungus from his mind.

Precede to the moments I am made of,
each second with you I am also
stuck with me,

needing to be healed and revived.
With you, I cannot be hollow anymore.

But I can hollow you, constellations
against a dark sky. I worry that
the sun will burn you like it did me
hiding behind those other men’s teeth.

Put your ear to the concrete, now.
It has the same rhythm as watercolor,
            our souls have the same consistency as dirt.

La la la. Everything is plowed in the ground eventually –
      every ticktock shows Atlantis a friend.

This balcony smells like violins, like a comet, like waifs
                          & has the sound of crowded prose.

    A man will spit, spit, spit on you:
  a girl will crawl from a bottle of effervescence –
      both carry their flask
one is so red, do worry about communism.

                                We will all have our canteen
microwave like a thermos & aerate into
                    our crowded spit bubble, big finale la la la.

I lived for twenty-five months, have been dead for five
still obsessed with how dirt in my cuticles
collides with a blood-stream like the train that took me –
my baby was on board and hid in a cubby
because he knew why, why, why I threw off my
conductor hat right then even before I could have guessed
he knew, knew, knew. Choo choo choo
I lived for a week and have been dead for twenty two.

Twenty-two, twenty-two,
twenty-two weeks and pounds in a giraffes’ big heart,
collections of key chains in my baby’s room
I will never see, and wild animals would adore me better
than any man could reach at just under six feet –
choo choo trains keep me dead better than I ever could.

He lived in the perfect place
for a trailer park,
but his had the only wheels for miles. It
was a cemetery with just one

dead body,
a morgue with a single
black garbage bag.

We had a funeral for my hair
when he held
scissors to my skull, and swallowed my
motor cortex so I would never

run away – a promise
that he needed to check for silkworms
in case that is why my hair

stayed so soft.
My braids went into the plastic bag

and his tongue danced down my throat
daring me to move
saying he would love to
see me bend all my bones for him.

All his blankets were green
like the forest,
all his walls made of wood paneling –

me, the last young thing
and he buried me alive in his bad breath.

The first thing you
and I had in common was not having chicken pox scars.

If you are searching for where perpetual love is not
look at the last bed I will sleep in
where your father died
and moss built his corpse a second beard, wide as
a noose. Nature gave me two hands -

one for holding my head underwater, another for pulling
myself back up.
I can only replace those who are not dead.

The skin between my thighs
smells the way that yours used to, the scent I worshiped
like expensive perfume. I now realize it is
just sweat.

That is the second thing we had in common
after the 500 times I acted as someone you once loved.

I know about reciting love verses when you are supposed to be
writing your grocery list – fruits and vegetables
become a metaphor for why I hold my hand to your face
and I realize you told me not to fall in love with you, so I fell in
love with how we exist together instead.

Like salt in the ocean,
wires from a wall, I know I breathe for you a little too much –
matching the exhales to yours. I have a language that
only accepts the two of us, sounds lovely only because you live.

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

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

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

whatever else
I may find.

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

your atoms
were broader than
a whole universe

and I stung them
like a jellyfish

mine –
I said, you are
only mine but you
expanded anyhow

perched a white-
bright star

gave me a crater
to sleep in, I swear
there was another

place I needed
to visit while here

perhaps
a velvet bowel –
to remove me

from your system,
or the safe hooked
arteries, a pool of
   blood bleeding

I am cement
and you are a sail

drowning to catch
your fallen threads,
we combust.

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

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

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

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

he ingests sand
like rice and
finds its grains
in his hair a
day later

his sneezes
are tornadoes,
his coughs
earthquakes

when he eats,
chocolate forms
crust in the
corners of his
parted lips

giggles slaughter
whatever age
he's acquired
in the past
twenty-five years

still, he
is young.

an evening facing the tangerine seafloor
where mermaids mate and breed some more

each child looks like a cypress tree, hanging
on the peak of twists, crafts wider than brains

but some forget their belly buttons’ bow
and underwater a search arises, sea-babies go

couples who watch from their hotel room
when he asks why you cry, say you’re amused

she is lavender, she remembers the month
spent scavenging for her own swimming dove

The last night we were officially in love, the evening the carousel
was out of order

I watched it spin again and again
without any lights or sound, pleading with god to
make me one of the great pegasus forms illuminated by moon
and fake snow.

It would not have mattered,
my feet would have still been bolted to the December floor
a hundred miles, then another, then another

from you. I realize now that it would not have mattered if I had a
pair of wings, I still would have
never made it to you
(but I believed it then). Ungloved to dabble in hot cocoa,
my ten fingers dialed you:
I pretended to have seen real snow, you pretended to love me.

Yesterday, I felt like you
for the first time since I wanted anything to do with you,
remembering the final time you said you loved me. I was there
in the same body that phoned you in winter

watching a broken carousel circle again and again, I was
approximately two inches from
where I stood when you told me goodnight

(and you meant it, where I said goodbye, and I meant it more)
but I had forgotten the moment. Yesterday

I learned I can forget you as easily as you
had me. Remembering us mattered so little that I climbed on the
carousel, tasted the bubblegum lights
hummed to an ice cream truck song, and
declared it the last day I would ever officially think of you,
the morning the merry-go-round did not need the sun anymore.

After the bleeding ceased,
I was supposed
to be

okay. There would be no more sharp things
inside me,
and even better,
nothing left for them to slaughter.

(My dead baby, pelted with thorns,
knows why roses
are red.)

Yet
I am still hurting. I
am not empty like I should be.

When the dry ache turns sharp, I still
think
that someone
is kicking their way to my heart.

my arms have begun to feel like
the rails on a staircase
that have been painted over one too many times, swollen
and begging to chip – you sunk your teeth

into my flesh
like dull pocket knife blades, but it
was not a love bite. you never loved me enough.
I was

still a child, sprawled on a sofa, spread open,
when you asked if you could
paint me – a rubeneqsue
silhouette that knew too few years,
an anomaly, damning every man with my figure or
something. (*******,
lifebait, ******* until it ruins you)

it sounded as if it hurt you
to see me, I believed you were going to coat my skin in
*** and blood
instead of pouring it on the paper.

you said everything reminded you of my
shape. you
rolled your car window down one day, and it was
rounded at the top – you

imagined it as my *** grinding
down onto your ****.

you cried as you thought this, your daughter
in the backseat,
and fantasized about
cutting all the beauty out of me. you small man, you
coward

I knew
I had to do the bleeding for you
but eventually grew tired
of patching my open wrists with your dried spit.

Satan is a bird at the end of a twig
I picked up from a peach-colored lane just last year.
A dry morn, though the day was April or May
like he knew he would be fanning cherry flames soon.

The men are always in power: God and Satan.
I made a pact that I would be both –
goddess and femme fatale, bite the ears of egg shells.

He broke from one a ghost and had a beautiful voice –
high in the tide of treetops waving goodnight,
opened like an abscess on pores
and gave the terrain a kick. I mothered him,
over time Satan became my library pianist, my kid.

Girls taught him everything there is about
astronomy, little did we know he was a citizen of the
moon and pushed everyone else off the side
or into a yellowing crater. He looked so small.

No one believed his voice could be
so thunderous even when he created storms himself –
including the one that drew me to his feather
glued to moss and maggots in an attractive place,
froze and lone, Satan’s existence is my fate.

Music pulls me into its arms,
made a bed for me in this sea of white noise

and for some reason,
it makes sense to sing about crying too
loud or unpacking suitcases or
open windows or
a spider’s web when you are as sad as I am.

It comes and it goes
as saltine waves or a heartbeat or drumming.

I wait for the day when I will become
a mermaid, able to breathe
underwater everything I have ever felt.

Tonight my body does not want to sleep, but
drown in a song of existence.

She floods my ears
through removing lesser known parts of me.

to ****** someone by
crying for them.

why don’t you open me up & sip from my heart
then glance towards your landscape
and pull it towards you with an umbilical cord
stolen from one of my countless holes, gaps in me

why don’t you open the sun up & let it breathe
just the way my pancreas pumps, sinking in
                      and spitting up
little shards of glass you wedged inside

gathered from tree-babies, lifted from the sky
the world’s so green but you would rather separate  
                                           my thighs
         see the realm that grows in my body

give the fauna a wet kiss & sip the gore stringing
from the core of it, pure poreless skin
i tell you what to do but i really just want you
to want me the way naïve terrain curls around life

why
is it that I
have a feeling soul

cloudbursts
sunbursts, of you

a ghost
so thin I did
not know

you had eyes
and could feel me

even as I feel
alone

man
           speaking
   you are
the weather

in my
bones

like snowbursts
     livid air,
so(ul).

The sea has many ports, while I have two eyes
but a better thought is how I am
similar to a wave —
I am his, a part of his, despite
having my own composition I move for him.

Do the waves give
their water a massage, I know
I caress his heart as often as I can.

There are crystals in there
where his organs hang like chandeliers, and I
rock them even from
above his skin, above his water —
feel me as something that can be captured.

I carved you from sand
each grain pressed together by tears
and your blossoms fall like petals

onto my breast, the man you are
love you harder than a shape:

alive, I will make you square
though you have become muffled
surround the surfacing bits with
a voice that is not yours,

if it is in the ocean, if we are,
not much farther to fall,
you will heave as the gravel does

I can build us higher than a castle
and use a stronger material.

The ivory flower
in stone, she cannot move
and breathe as petals do

separate
and separate

I see the centerpiece,
the head reaching from a
black hole

it says if you do not
move, I will want to be

inside of you –

an ivory flower fell from
the stem from which
it bloomed

and became as hard as
stone

separate
and separate
the flushed folds of June.

stars spilled out from the night sky
into morning, mourning,
and
so did your skin.

please know, your
voice is
louder than any gunshot now
even as new bullets echo against
your gravestone.

He has a mouth like morning
and picked me up
from the ground by the ten second rule,
the time it takes for one hundred thirty million
babies to open their mothers,
four hundred times he could have been
on the train to come back.

He says I say I’m sorry in circles
but Earth does it,
her new cycle every day,
why can’t I.

He should say
he is sorry in circles: there have
been nearly three hundred sixty five trains
since
we knew how to **** each others’
sadness through a straw
and not puke, he would try to swallow it all.

He must see me as
moss now, frizzy-haired, meant to be
laid to rest
on the floor for everyone to
trip over
because I am the reason that leap years exist -
the skipping stone, spread water
on the ones I love
so they’ll be heavy and sink with me.

He must taste recycled beauty on me,
the way new light
turns the beds of his lips pink.

(I could not be her)
he needs to say sorry until our hearts are
the same shade of blue
from suffocating below everyone,
the bottom of
the ocean waiting to resurface as a wave.

Your back looks like a brick wall
after climbing out from bed,
my fingernails give less scars than what
a blanket or two can do.

Do you
wrap them around your neck
while you sleep, do
you love them more than me?

I would give you my arms if you didn’t
already have them.

Your parents snuck over on a boat,
taught you two languages
and I think about that a lot, that something
without wheels brought me the love
of my life. When it feels as
if I am drowning, I remember what rushing
water brought to the United States,
everything can save you
everything can **** you
everything has two sides
two languages. I want to buy your mother a
chocolate milkshake and toast to
that, I want to thank her for
giving me the directions on how to float.

I am just god’s excuse to make a ****** nose
and bruises surrounding
eyelids, even when I get the perfect amount of rest

and when autumn comes
barreling leaves from god’s big sky
I am what catches the sand, blonde grains changing
the color of my eyes.

It is just as true that he cuts the tails
from mermaids and tells me that I can find girls
who would rather be a worm instead, my

flesh is already rippled
pale and translucent pink, the best of beige between

my thighs. Because one morning god called
and I said I would not wake up
and he said that if I did not, he would wring mud
from his terrible angels’ wings and I

still never woke from my sleep.
I am his gross girl, pleased to be the queen of slugs
as long as this is the worst my sins can do.

all I want for christmas
is a jealous lover who will wrap me up
in bows and paper
for no one else to touch (i mean
                                          hurt)

He fills my mouth with bumblebees, they fill my
heart with honey:

part of the criteria that I have met includes desperate attempts
not to be alone, to lose abandonment
before I lose someone to it.
Antennae are between my molars – I have found
he will kiss me more when my breath
tastes the worst. He fell in love with me because
I love so hard that he will become a poem and live forever.

I may not be the saddest girl in the world,
but I sure have come close, thinking about how easy it would
be for him to leave me
if I simply kept a smile on my face for too long.

He may not be the most fearful man, but I heard him
cry about dying and now I know about
the two types of leaving
and
that there is one he would never do on purpose.

My stomach is empty. My heart is too full for me
to eat anything
tonight,

tonight is about biting someone's hand
because they are ******* me hard and because they did something wrong
seven months ago. Then,
licking the blood from his knuckles whispering, I am sorry
but you are just too much for me to take.

I open his skin for all the times I
needed to open mine. For every sore morning-after.
God gave me the gift of sweet revenge and the curse of loving
so much my body is a storage unit without a lock.

I am sorry
but my teeth chatter whenever I get overwhelmed. His
blood is so much warmer than mine.

Your tongue used to sneak in my mouth
like the old days, girls climbing trees to sneak in an older boy's bedroom:
he had a single bed and plaid sheets she would think of
in the same way she thought of wrinkled bubblegum wrappers
but neither tried to taste good for the other. The
boy and the girl just were what they were, just hidden in each other.

My hands could be the bedposts, my hair the headboard,
my skin the blanket she will dig her fingers into, thinking what is home
what is home - somehow it has become a
tap on the window, a whispered I am here, hello.

You helped me to get over my fear of silence,
my chirophobia. When everything was meant to be quiet, when we have
nothing to say, you would pour honey down my throat
and hold hold hold me tight
so tight that it would seem everyone knew. I imagined turning on
the television, there would be an image of us lighting up Times Square:
you would calm the whole wide world. It took us years
to realize that we have the kind of love that is always, always okay.

The girl shimmies down the tree, an old oak
so tall she feels like she has dropped fifty stories before she finds grass,
she feels like she has lost fifty feet worth of body and flesh.

His window is open, her lips separate, it silent and
it is okay. She mouths, I miss you
then climbs up again almost desperately, completely dependent on her
legs to pump air into her lungs and breathe through the pores -
blackbirds see up vines up her skirt, and twigs
bruises like wide bushes and then his hands like a nest. What is home.

Your saliva grew like moss against my cheeks,
I once bit and bled in my sleep, had nightmares so I could hear something
but you gave my teeth a garden to pick vegetables from
and I stopped needing traffic to rock me
to bed: your tongue used to sneak in my mouth, now I have its words.

The shelter sleeps like a ghost at night
and I walk with him during the
day, his one shoe on my right foot –

I barely look like a woman,
or if anything, a ******* waiting for
someone to provide her a second
glass slipper & slip off her ball gown.

She will lay on her back in a motel –
beautiful as a tulip’s head
nursing on fertilizer for sustenance
but largely agreeable with champagne.

Even lying on pillows like a pubescent
chest, perky and barely touched,
she is a **** alone with leather boots.

No one knows his name but
he comes and goes and feels like home,
the fuzz still in her eyes from sleep
still collected from a previous divorce.

I visit the shadow with my tongue
and only mothballs when the sun sets –
an uncomfortable rat in the soles too.

you are fuller than a baby’s feet,
the nubs that struggle to move and carry
mushrooms to his skull

explode, nuclear
& bleached as white as a diaper

you are that house that lives within
so many children’s arms,
separating for tree-trunks and satellites

but not to hug their father until
bedtime

if he has treated them alright –
you are the heart that swells of blood
green-love on the moon.

he is never human. always more
      sometimes less

  and whenever someone asks me how i
am doing, i want to mention
                that i am
                      in love with a demon

(fire under my clothes,
       my *****).
    it has nothing to do with much

                       but i always want to say
that i am married to god

        and never owned a bible. he
melts heaven
                    so the sky will rain angels.

I believe that I can change you, or revive
what marrow was carved from my bones
the night that train swept you away. It will grow
like plaque on teeth,
widen my hips so I look more or less how I
did the first time - our first.
In my year of oceans and sunburns and purging,
polygraphs were not yet invented and
bodies still responded
only to those who kept eye contact during ***.
You curl my hair with your fingers
but I say you cannot break my heart again. I have
written enough letters to power
an airport, you have killed enough cells for
us to have made a child - only lonely
because none of this can be
said aloud. If your hands secreted invisible ink,
you'd just quietly piece me back together
without realizing
it could help us feel better. If
mistakes were like sunburns, I hope you'd hand
me aloe vera and make the wounds go numb.
Listen, I have seen you love
more than I have heard your ghost haunt my bedroom:
whispering that lie, the one that got away.

I have begun to
pluck my eyelashes just so
I can make a wish.

Beds moaning in a give and take
some sort of car crash outside, morning’s roadkill
people choking on their breath during sleep.
I exhale words I do not mean to say then swallow them up again
          just battered croaking –

all these sounds spattered like a Victorian print.
I feel the air of another person whistling on my backside:
he will climb vines to get in my bed and eat me.

I hear night-noises, and that is what I think,
there are cannibals at the sill
big green tree-looking men who fit me whole in their stomach.
                My bedroom, like a cupboard
                         and me the same, we open without a key.

Across the street
there has to be a factory of some sort

where women are put into jars for jam and their skin’s the toast –
they get pregnant by ear. One hundred decibels
given by my father’s snoring moustache
and fifty for an ****** that causes leopard print sheets.

               Then, I am in a dream in which
   someone large holds me
closer than a criminal, but we just ballroom dance.

Then, I open those eyes again
                 and dogs bark in southern accents
                 and my house sweats from a nightmare
                 and the hour hands me sandbags
                 and wives finally get to pawn the rifle for thousands
                               but not before I hear a shot.

I would want you to have these machines
breathe for me if I forgot your name
and spill memories back into the blank spaces
from which you ebb and flow, going home –
because it could not have been I who
destroyed the person that I require so close.

In every language, I love you
and te amo
and je t’aime and
ich liebe dich and jag älskar dig and miluji tě:
let your city flood my insides, then bleed.

If I could, I would shout from the moon
to make sure the other men know I love you
and though they are beautiful,
their names do not matter nearly as much
to my brain, nor bring goosebumps to
the small of my back and top of my bottom.

My ******* fill your shirts just right –
they do, they do.
I am meant to be inside them
and you are meant to be within me, like air
******* from a windpipe to areolas’ pink.

I would throw my head forward like I do
when I am sad and settle in your lap
entombing my five senses in an aroma of love
we just made. I would lay myself in that
coffin again and again until I recalled
the exact elocution I used to form your name.

I will read Stag’s Leap again and again until
it stops making sense to my heart, is not my problem anymore.
My mother never told me the story of how she lost
her first husband, much less the second
but I have all these ideas in my head of how she could leave
dad from poetry books like yours,
Sharon Olds. It is what I picked up when my
sunrise split into two blades of grass the wind would carry across
the states, thinking a man I loved could disappear
any time – forget how I picked barbed wire from his chest and
not in the way an ocean forgets it has waves.
Not comfortably. I read your
poems when the world looked like it was made of granola,
eroding from the inside out, I read
Stag’s Leap again and again when he said, no, we do not talk
about her, but it was too quiet not to. I wanted to
talk about things that there are not terms for.
Only so many words one
can say of their memories and feelings because to no one else
are they real – he does not know that the last time I felt
okay with him it was when I fled
his boarding station, smoothing my skirt down
so the train’s breeze wouldn’t touch me. On that day, I wanted
nothing but him to touch me ever again
and there he went, south, leaving with mockingbirds. I
would have waved had I known we were on
a countdown, in the final silent moment of our relationship.
I always knew the hour we last had ***, since Stag’s Leap I now
ask why it is that way. No, we don’t talk about her
but I wonder if ******* a married person still counts as
premarital *** and if I can mourn a man even when he’s right here.

The buttocks of a round building,
here we sleep, in the cheeks

each penny groans
and a door with the inlet

like lemonade mist, egotistical
where I mouth waterholes

they are without genitals
I can travel by candles to amend

my bed-sins –
such a chaos, still look silk

folly, belly-aching mistakes
not enough apologies to escape

I bet you would, had you no cribs,
you could tuck me in

staple comets to our ceiling
darling, I have the sleigh bells

and I think you made the pearls
hot, our mattress’ internal springs

while businessmen clothe
we will make love again

beyond astronomy, college didn’t
teach what is beneath the stars

but now I am learning
it is your tongue and chest-plate

glow you consider me delectable
though this office has more bottom.

Touch me sweet, God, you gave me nine lives and
I would waste one to say something to
someone from three and a half years ago when
I still humored my pastor
and got guys hard past midnight, at every midnight.

Could meet them again, two by two
and forget he would love some part of me in the future.

She called me a loving *******,
I wasted three of my lives
loving him in silence. I could have shouted
that I deserved better than someone who never did

call me baby just because I am young.
I deserved to have God caress my shoulders like angel
wings, pick my feet off the floor, glide on tile
like soap bars on skin
I will use to wash his slow escape away from me.

Would you mind terribly if I painted our bedroom
the color of the sky the day we first met?

I still see it clearly in my head –
Crayola calls it “cesious” or “wild blue yonder”
but there is something missing from that, something more sad
given grey of an infirmary above for angels.

I want to savor  that emotion, remember
that we can be one together and imperfect at the same time:
let us paint the bedroom like a hurricane sky –

I will have insomnia, yet love you in the morning.

Eight years my senior,
I wonder what I would have thought of him as a child
if I would really think of him at all. I could
have become quite obsessed, worry about his whereabouts past
my bedtime, when I should be asleep and he is anywhere
being almost a man. It could be frantic
or peaceful – like what is called the wise mind.
I had it as a child more than I do today, an inner confidence
that he might put his hand to my face
and give me the time of day,
have the deep attachment of two friends who cannot
break trust. Then again, it is much more difficult to hurt a kid’s
heart and not want to piece it back together again.

Moth-babies rock the window’s pane
but I see through their translucent bodies at night,
wearing a handful of dirt. It is the pattern

of paisley and unsorted laundry in a basket –
or ice having shattered azure.
Maybe these are butterflies so traumatized by the

Earth, its lackluster cocoon.
I whisper for them to worm inside my bedroom –
jump off the wooden Alps, get in bed

and munch on the hair from my husband’s head
for he is holding still. He is asleep.
They will touch like fairies scraping stars for

their dust, married for three years to a dull glow.
We cannot have opaque babes, oh my life stamped
freckles where lungs are intended to breathe.

You are the first person
whose **** left me with a mouthful of flowers,
flowers of flesh and blood, our shell
a garden I nurture

reap, sow, *** and I know I can recover
as long there are babycurls on the back of your neck
riding piggy back
they are a peacock tail between my thighs.

You are the first person
that made me believe I could climb in a geode,
maybe meadows are not magic after all
just maybe things grow beautifully when fostered

as I am now,
touched by the thought that I may not be safer
alone and that drinking up an ocean
will not help me discover what I am missing.

You are the first person
to read books about plants falling in love,
just as long as butterflies kiss their babycurl vines.

you don’t face me when we sleep
and I lie awake, composing couplets of it
then you palm at my lips and mumble
secrets                   I wish I would have kissed you
that night in the rain I wish you would have
  
kissed my toes when I pulled them
from their dripping socks and laid in your bed.

we come up with a hundred excuses not
to touch but I see lost love everywhere and resent
not bringing it to my breast  
     the lonely hate the fulfilled because they

  are kind of dead          we pile our emotions into
the bathtub until water dilutes them to fine
powder                      we build concoctions of

not knowing what the opposite ***
feels like even they’ve purpled my heart with
a bruise and cannot sleep in bed with you
       he whispers        I wish we would have kissed
so you were not lonely I wish you were my toes.

I became so scared of hurting you
that I stopped
wanting to touch you,

and now
I just wait for other things to do it for me. A
sapling has reached puberty
greening its leaves

while an old oak dies, limbs
creating air
around your face
almost like wind but more like breath:
it

is syrupy
stuck to your chest hair. I do not

need anything more than the knowledge of
how my cotton slip
would pull
against you, or how your skin

reacts when it is
about to rain – how the clouds react
for you.

Without me
you can feel how promises begin
to feel like sea foam

and

why

when you wake up
in my bed every morning, it is because
I whispered
an apology too loudly
and little vibrations touched

something
in your ear. I am sorry for that, too –

sorry for the times we
forgot to take our glasses off
before
you were on top of me

sorry that it takes less than a month for a
habit to form
but years to break them

which is why
I still
want
to touch you

before someone else can show you
how walking barefoot
boosts your immunity system.