I am getting tired of the sea
every morning, whispering, “duermete”
like we are lovers
who kept each other awake all night.

To wish her goodbye…
say, I am leaving Miami, him, not you.

Reminded it is not just love that can sweep
someone off their feet –
also thinking I left some of my food
in his refrigerator, two gallons of milk gift.

I believe I will return,
not for liquid, not for anything tangible
just a redo of our last embrace
without an ocean of salt lulling every

******* thing,
and I believe I exist in there somewhere –
sea-wide, seaside, we rest just us.

I think that candlesticks
grow from out of the ground and believe that

I can reach starvation by not going
out dancing
for two nights in a row. The sunlight makes me *****
and undeserving of his love
because now everyone can see why I am

not good enough.
I created this loneliness all on my own,
there is a gap between the ring and my finger
second farthest from the left –

men put so much weight on whether or
not my ring finger
is metal plated. I guess I do, too. My hands purge

after they have binged on him
and when I promised

all my lovers that
I would get lighter for them if they wanted,
he bought me a white dress
which lights me up like a match or shooting star.

two dimples, not perfectly round

teeth yellowed and
paws brown
from graves dug for small dead things
she wanted to hold, to keep

her nose
like a wet autumn
cool rain in the days before winter

(I will not remember it as
two nostrils
submerged in blood, taking her air)

she sung the way other
dogs would bark

her gifts
were always bigger than her

her toes still have their imprints
on my skin, sharp like
the needles
I hoped someone could save her with

but only she could do that.

she sleeps where she always did
barely underground

the earthworms
give her new whiskers, caterpillars
will share their fur

because hers is in a plastic bag
on my dresser and
her skin is where she
would want it, she dug her own grave

so I would know
she is always going to stay safe.

my hair is sticking up like weeds because of the static:
when god calls it sounds like white noise
but I feel my veins cramping
and a man shoves himself between my bones

sleep on the breast of dead shrubs
will they swallow me? I am
a lamb and my blood is holy to the ailments I have

will you destroy me?
just to see my bowels absorbed by foliage  

please know I am in a better place now I will be a tree.

It is August, but the rain has got us snowed-in
and when you expect everyone
to be upset to get loud to cry cry cry
they do not. It is quiet.
The quiet hurts me (is my sort of madness).

The air outside
resembles the moon, or my skin.

In the winter,
the sidewalks look as if I have been beaten and
died coolly, flatly, quietly
on them. I am so white, I glow.
I am so sickly, I poison the grass.

But it is all very soft and silent,
I am like a pillow
too cold to rest your head on.

At night, I fall, devouring anything that I can
love —
when there is nothing,
I create the big rain, the arsenic rain
I stick to myself and everyone is hush, hush.

My mind does not sleep through the night, the questions
have their before and after. This is the
after. I ask again if he was ever really here at all,
this is June
this is very nearly July
and I am colder now than I was last December on his
breath, that I could see wiggling
wanting to escape into me as a pillow would into a case.

My mind is full of his absence,
I think it grows every morning I wake up without
a moat of our bodies cut into my bed. We were only just
children playing house
without the need for plastic appliances and plates,
made linen from hair lockets, leave

seed marks on his skin. I ask again if it still remains
touched like an early ripened strawberry.
That was December,
was supposed to be, but I cannot trust a memory of my
head resting against the fabric of anyone’s jeans
because then it may be true
that he really loved me after all, and maybe he does still.

Sometimes we play boyfriend and girlfriend. You tell me it’s
thundered at your house right as it
thunders in mine, we share the same weather that
our lovers do not. Together, they are their 5000 miles away.
And together, we are still alone without them.

there are aliens who do not believe in me
and twice as many men.

there are opals
that get their color from blood droplets.

there are novels that never got composed
just spat onto paper.

there is a trunk full of
vintage clothes and their women.

there are
pieces of dust I have mistaken for rag dolls.

Tied your hair with my tongue
into a little knot, a twisty-curly braid
and your pores turn to flecks of
pink sand when I make you blush.

Raising your shirt, I see lace sheets
where the hair on your chest lies:
found an everglade of dark and light
transcribed on your body’s duvet.

The skin you pull over your head
every morning, hiding salt from your
dreams of me hidden in a blanket
and being leisurely ****** to sleep.

Looked like some creature ate
flesh from your shoulder, a bit of you
and dried the blood with their lips
when they were finished ingesting it.

1.
the walls are built of shapes
triangles and circles and hexagons that do not
fit together
like we once did

we are these mislaid figures now

2.
the moon comes out at dark
but when I feel dark
I will not come out of my room

3.
the oilcloth catches my tears now because
you are too busy
to notice that they fall

it is like I am trying to hide
the weather

give a big umbrella to clouds in the sky

4.
the veins are taunting me
again

5.
the password to my email
is the last syllable of your first name
how average of me to want to **** myself and
keep talking from underground

6.
can I still apologize for holding your
heart hostage
as a dead-girl walking

Gauze on your arm –
reddening, the skin a shadow you
call after and summon home.

Like sunrises, the big half-moon
has its purple flab melted.
I humanize everything.

I make it all warm
even death piercing a door hinge –
where children hide safely.

Ink is the blood of another being
not like us, but you write
with your own on a pillowy peel.

The first boy who saw me with my shirt off
did not like girls, not yet
not ever

and asked me if it was stretch marks or cuts
decorating where
other men would soon touch

as if he were wondering
the color of my eyes. (Blue or grey, maybe.)

Our first conversation went like this:
*Let’s have a picnic, I bring the food and you bring
your body. You will take me from behind
while your tresses caress my face
and your skirt mingles with the hair on my crotch
brunette fields on light pink gingham –
our skin embarrassingly red against a jade prairie.
I will be like a teenager again, make you into
an adult. You will teach me how to tie
your cherry into a knot with the tip of my tongue –
if anyone sees, I can tell them you are my girl
& starting today you never have to be lonely again.

I like to leave strands of my hair in the sink of anyone
I have ever loved or hated
because when they clean their bathroom,
I want them to remember how many times I
cleaned up blood and puke and ***
in their name –

I do not want to be a ghost that silently haunts on skin
but so tangible, even their
house will remember how I feel to touch.

I will show you the ***** parts of us,
and how unsafe their salt tastes,
mended, reckon bliss in this place –
no one kills what they never loved.

Because then it will not matter,
amputees are not fatal, but no one
has amputated their heart or head.  

Each person, each piece is opaque –
but there is something to be seen
inside, the ***** parts we leave
wrestling with us when they speak.

all these years of living outside the city
have turned my heart
rural –

outside of me – the only things
that i can acknowledge
exist separate from who i am and what i feel –

cicadas rub their arteries together, too small not to touch
intimate parts
when laying so close.

they found me
in the midst of my drowning life

and i listen,
they reenact my ***. it's okay, please don't disassociate
because of me

if it keeps you from feeling empty, get full –
swallow the details
even if
it means i'll forget them – i am

far away
from everyone. isolated, weeds like a noose, i ruin
myself first

because i remember far too much.  i
am alone too much

i have nowhere but myself to put the hurtful things.

now afraid –
my heartbeat is the rhythm of
bugs
running from the sole of a pretty shoe. i am

wanting to scream i'm sick i'm sick i'm sick
but only the trees
will hear me –  hold me. i'm sick

and for once
i can't ***** it out. can't bleed it out.

It is the place of dreaming,
you love me here without needing words.

Either one of us, you or I or you and I both
have lips on the other one’s toes
because the walk has
been far for this touch and I am weak.

You promise me here
that I am inside my body even when you
are, too -

I am not to live as some would suggest I do
breathing for the next person
to grab hold of me
and say that I gave them possession.

But welcome home,
it is you who visited two states to kiss me.

I cannot promise anything but
the kind of connection
that means I may dream about you forever

or write as if I will.
All the other nights where even my mind
had its lights off, they were just
practice for having to walk away from you.

It does not matter where it hurts
now that you are here
just that I can have you touch me there.

Sweet baby,
I dream of your love that flows like waves.

you slid your thumb into my pulse like a thimble
pressing hard enough to stain –
my body has always been a crime scene,
you
just make it visible.

death groomed me for many years; it
told me my blood was honey and honey deserves
to be suckled

it told me
I could never be a fantasy
until I fantasized of dirt and weeds filling me, worms ******* me
and using my empty womb as a carousel

taunting me – “I’ll make babies
fall out of you just often enough
you will start to believe you could love them
if only they’d stay”

and now
pearl strings of *** spiral down my abdomen like
small intestines,

sticking and staining and staying.

I lost my final baby tooth at age thirteen. A man came
along to pluck it out of me,
pried my chapped lips apart and said
it might hurt a lot. It might even feel like a worm, like my belly is
bloated with bottles of water or bags of blood.

But I was only reminded of
needles, the thinnest cylinder of an off-white substance
developed to cure me from my childhood.

He gave me acupuncture, he left the needles in my pocket after
so I would never forget what he gave me. Not what
he took, just what I needed
to remove the *****, size seven footprints from his floor.

I did not keep the paraphernalia,
just grew my adult molars, had dreams about crawling after him
feeling tentacles swim in my mouth again
and biting down so hard I could fill bags with blood.

I am almost eighteen and soon
he will know how it feels for someone to see what is inside your
body, then take it without your permission.

the first time I don't feel disappointment
it is when my thumb
leaves prints on my earlobe, caressing the metal back of
an earring – something is there
after all, just a stud but it is something beautiful
I had
forgotten.

in a bathtub, scent of my skin rising from the water
like jasmine against morning dew
         like fog

I relieve my legs of their hair
and the razor
peels the skin from my fingertip, it undresses into raw
flesh, losing my print –            sadness
returns like a resurrection.

is that my heartbeat
or thunder eating its way
through my bedroom walls?

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

blue blue blue azul

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

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

something
is always glistening in the sky or the sea

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

I count the number of women you’ve slept with
by how much lint I can pick from your shirt. Girls who staged
a camisado: by evening, a washing machine’s dream –
supposed to be in slumber but you come out
needing cleaned. I love you the way a mother does
her son, even after he has said, “I hate you,” ninety times.
If I cannot remove you from them,
at least their particles stay unattached to you and
I am a bobby pin broken in half because it tried to open a lock
sewed closed with a special heart-glue; other
girls are newspaper articles read with coffee at dawn
you forget until the story’s repeated on a nightly broadcast.
God, you look like opal when you come home –
curly-cue dents on the back of your knees,
the kind of handwriting only made by fingernails or teeth.
I wonder if it is because no one can find your birthmarks but me
if a woman can be self-righteous enough to want
to inscribe her own, and so, you have just become a gem
littered all over with worthless pearls.
Invisible, I am invisible. I can want you, but it cannot be seen
how your love is intangible and cannot be felt.
What he sees is so important that he does not realize
just as much is too bright for his eyes –
when I believed our breath was a single, everlasting force
and why would choruses sing a staccato song
is the same question as, why would I continue to flirt with you
knowing that every day I crawl further outside our
three-year bubble into something more like
a bunker. I sweep the floors behind every midnight attack.

intimacy,
his sweat sprinkling salt on my skin
so that I will never want
to open it.

Everything I do not know
is scribed in pages floating on street corners
of every city in the whole wide world.

Strangers know more about his love
than I do.

He cannot talk too loud or
I may hear, and I run after these verses like
live words can save my soul or
better yet, **** it.

It is the worst case scenario.
My knees hit the concrete, I am unloved.

I am a secret
one that cannot be articulated, written down
for my presence is like a funeral.

Not the birth of something, rather a death
a lack swimming internationally.

Everything I do not know is
everything that everyone else already does –
whispering more beautiful secrets.

glasses have no private view
like i could **** myself
when everyone could see,
though it was only meant for you
an image you have “for keeps”
everyone else defiles me

i want to be beautiful
and walk to the library at dawn
but they point, call me a ghost
they claim i do not belong

then, he with no teeth
will bite and snip my dress
until his gums begin to bleed

when they stain my shirt,
i will mourn, death of invisibility
once i scavenge i am caught
to the lens of your eye
climb the brim of your lids,
very tippy bit, you let me die.

I think I want to be with you everywhere
and not just somewhere

as though the moss is our carpet,
rain sculpts a feeling of growth in my bones
I am a tree. A meadow.  But you lie still –
wait for my breeze, you simmer away
a dandelion.

Your hundred florets spread like wings
and fly somewhere on me –
a promiscuous garden. Somewhere &
everywhere.

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

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

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

I deserve to take up space,
he said. (six by four feet in an underground
cage)

mama said I never stop crying,
that I'll still scream when I am dead. she
reserved me a plot.

I have loves who
would be mad I left a note.

I have loves who will keep me their ghost, tear
my white sheet skin
because I never said goodbye.

see my flesh
in a necklace,  hypnotize happy boys
you are getting very sleepy

very tired of
holding onto something half-dead.

you are the stain on my skin,
the “i’m sorry” cuts bandage

& pinker than a girl’s insides
we have the ballad of crying

my feet in front of yours: it is
a contagious fever, our sobs

built upon lapses of euphoria
you give me reasons to come

my senses, my fingers are on
strings to not wring my neck

northern pinnacle you have &
gallop around my heart-lines

this is just where you belong:
on & in me through my finale.

The last time she saw me naked
I was a child

who would plead for forgiveness by cutting it into her skin
and who you could tell still walked barefoot
through winter and snow near
her best friend’s boat
to light a joint they would put out on her wrist.  

(She said it was beautiful
but I was destroying myself and it was beautiful
like the blood left on a train-track after someone jumps.)

While you
had me check to
make sure you are still alive,

I noticed
the most beautiful
embroidery on your heart. (It did not say

her name
or my name)

The valves open and shut so
quickly
not because you are
dying, but because you have so

much love
you could overflow

you are too big of an ocean to just
up and leave me.
I am learning

to tie my veins to yours
so
breathing becomes a little easier for
you and the thump da thump

(I have a heart murmur)

will draw
a portrait of two lovers not abandoning

each other. Red as a rose’s
flesh, pink as ours:
together,
we can never become threadbare.

white hot morning,
deep enough I feel your heartbeat in my belly
and all will dry like cement

when I reached in and drew our initials
with
the bend of my fingers
stir up the dancing dust only visible
beneath sunlight,
you drug it into me with your tightrope your i’m sorry
i won’t be so rough this time

promise
your veins mumbling against the parts of my
body that are a sponge,
i am only going to bleed for good things
now and you should too
but every hole I have
wanted to say that they only ever bled for you

because I like feeling warm in winter
trick myself into thinking
I do not have to wear socks, you look like the moon
with shooting stars
of sweat pouring down your back
and

everything drips
like it is trying to make my ***** wetter.

I have watched mothers lose
their children, and children lose their mothers. I am tied
by my toes to a loop
which can be seen in cafes and morgues -
the breast-feeding, the burying, the everything is all
on a string. I have heard about
women and children thinking they are unlimited,
I am unlimited, too, if
the two ends of a circle never meet.
My lover once closed his heart off from everyone, and I
never understood until now
that you do not
have to open up in order to be full inside. I still can
water his flowers, even the weeds
and he never has to open his eyes to see and
he never has to open his heart
to feel. I understand that sometimes it is better to just be.

My mother gave me a locket that has, “love is patient,”
engraved on its hind, in English and in French. I wonder if that
is another excuse for her not being able to love me
the first fourteen years of my life.
The necklace has a cross, too – her saying He took care of me
when she could not. Second in importance, yet,
am I to an absent father too busy upstairs to say morning.
“Love is kind,” is a sort of finale, somehow fireworks
say that no one has ever loved me up to my mother’s standards.
She did not flinch when she gave me this. It
is understanding that she was not the only love I did not have.

it is exhausting to love something
too far to touch

& like their body is made of glass
when you see it
you are afraid it will crack

but they insist on making you sore
they know what
you want & what you like

even if it means risking their neck
breaking tonight

& like you are a house of worship
for a quiet man
he has no name but loves

how you make it sound
on the base of your throat, redness

when you know he has cut you &
gave you something only to
take it away

as soon as you see how exhausting
needing it is.

When were we first able to look at our organs, point out the
brown spots on a liver or cuts under your skin?
I want to know when man first
came to think of me as a piece of fruit. A watermelon
only good for her seeds,

an apple needing a good cleaning. I imagine
they first practiced stitching on those big banana leaves,
made a hole in the center
as if anyone cared whether the plant could breathe.
But really, what does earth science have to do with my body?

I mean to uproot your brain when I play with your hair
let it whisper on me like an acorn spinning in
the breeze and dribble gen from a puking child’s mouth.
His skull is a basket, his hands a corset on me now –
I can make you a man once I get the disgusting bits out.
We have different wrinkles outside but our veins sip
blood similarly, a vampire or cannibal or a passionate
fan of our hearts’ discography. I have come to
a fork in the road where your folds become almost pink:
as vivid as a guillotine, the brain is dispensed to me.
Finally, I call him mine! And in my hands is your mind.

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

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

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

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

Your pupils are tiny and starry,
lifting your eyes from that dark canyon
the dust sea

dying them brown, giving them
black skin that won't peel
under sunlight.

I understand moths surround you
but you are strong,
they only
fill your eyes like tears

attracted to the light
your nameless energy, where life touches

you
it just begins to trust.

Insomniac plants must squeeze
their eyelids at night
to build the crystal white structure of
you, hues shadows hold onto

saves, grows to, trusts
as a lullaby verse to become glued on.

We sprout from energy
bright and warm, float in a hot tea bath
chamomile up out of porcelain

rosemary and roses and honeydew
lit by candles,
we feel your energy and just believe.

I feel most like a ****** when I am cold
         the pale daughter of snowflakes
not to be touched with fingertips.

             But by tongue –
it is the skin that beats my laughter
and halting me through ice.

No man can separate my wings or he’ll
          freeze, become attached to me.
obstinate as a glacier who sleeps.

Two are there, one is like a rail
a forget-me-not stem –
I forgot him. The memories were
dug from my girlish head yet

there is a fever in his grave
weeds severed his head, he looks
more dead the
farther I back away and the
garden is more & more beautiful.

I begin to stick up for
the bristles, the maggots I hid –
at least someone tastes him.
At least his ghost can lead on one

more smaller thing, barely
nothing. Yes, I realize I was not
anything but a parasite inside

something who was already so
close to dying, someone bigger –
someone darker than me. I
chose the second.

He had a fever about him, too
but it just lit up his cheeks
and his eyes, though they were
always closed. At least
I can remember they are brown.

Two are there, I am impressed
with one flushed man
while the other became too dead.

I told a man that I did not know much about Pride & Prejudice
mostly because I had none,
he laughed and gave me packet of Earl Grey tea.

I wish all men did this,
all women too. I think there should be more free herbs
that you can add honey or sugar to,
I think that would make everyone’s day better and sweeter.

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

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

that the love will become
too important,

loving
at dusk

swollen lips, red like they are blushing

sunset dyeing the sky scarlet
like it is blushing

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


          small strawberry pores.

still, my head
stays above the water

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

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

he must feel
my eyelids flutter

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

     shared dampness
         shared passage across it

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

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

his remains on my stomach
like wax.

I wonder
what training bras train us for –
could it be smiles of blood between our thighs?

Or the Olympics, that special woman sort
where everyone loses and men
are given
our prettiest offering.

We need training bras like we need them –
nothing wrong with growing grapes.

I want to turn you into the cotton slip I wear
under my skirt, suffocate you in my tight spaces
and give yellow perspiration to your pink lips.

Limbs wrapped around you like a head, the frill
of a sunflower flaccid in autumn moonshine:
oh, feminine stars, you say. I am in a dark place.

I have become a river and I will eat you up –
admire the open field, the sore meadow and if
you can’t sleep, remember you are in my dream.

Where you still trot southeast without being
connected to my dress seam. You could go back
home but I would rather you stay warm in me.

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

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

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

I buried thorns in your bag so
you would know not to leave again

you played them like a harpsichord
breathed the rose-scent in

& watching the blooms, I knew
that you could not disappear at all

instead floated on for a little while
until as rain once more you fall.

girl, falling snow

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

blood braids
my hair

cheekbones break and collapse as craters
on the moon

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

to die from your emotions
is to
finally become god.