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

If only ripping out a heart was like
removing the pit from a peach, I would have hundreds
in a police lineup
and could point to hers —
officer, she is the one that ruined me.

Those black spots on my lungs
was not because I smoke, rather, they came from
the time she put a cigarette lighter
to my chest and set all my love on fire.

And that kidney I am missing, it would not be the
first ***** she took
to be able to **** right onto my soul.

He wants to kiss my eyelids while I sleep
but I have none,
I have not closed my eyes for almost a year,        yet
the whole time I have been
having nightmares of burn-holes.

I will rub your back until you forget what she did to you –
she was your first love, you were mine. I want to explain in words what
beauty looks like, but I have learned that the
fireworks when we cup our fingers together or sit too close are
even better than a kaleidoscope
unfolding holidays back into normal days. The 5th of July, January 2nd.

Well, in two days, they will have you under anesthesia
and I keep hoping you might say some
nonsense about my eyes. I keep worrying you’ll dream of her tongue.
You are on the side of catching any morning light –
but there is no comparison to a spark that has already burned out.

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

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

I would rather steer the plane home for you.

Summer was
******* on sugarcane and cinnamon peels
handed from your grandparents, occasionally mine
when our roller-skates made love to cracks in
                             the sidewalk
          our knees were drunk on its feathers
so many specks of moss get caught in there, too

    you taught me not to cry
or have that formaldehyde-chugging look
until I hit the bunkbed; your sheets made my sweat
look so much worse
                          we got anything we could want.

I wanted to kiss you when your wore your
Popsicle lipstick, a freeze cracking the crib of your
       mouth and circling buzzards around.

But how does a girl say
   she would rather have someone than a cigarette  
      stick of candy from the ice cream man –
the ones she would twirl like cherry stems
    and feign middle school maturity?

  We would whisper about things at night
with the lamp off, our pants down
                                                   but never ever love:
love is for adults. Love is Mardi Gras in the city
           not powdered sugar from beignets
   or the kind of beads you settle around your neck.

I wanted to be the bayou you swam in,
cast your fishing pole at the underbelly of and
  counted how many seconds it took to lift back up.
I wanted to be a chest you put
         your personal belongings in, a treasure box.
Most of all, I wanted
                          to be your personal belonging
              the treasure you immediately thought of –
        but that is not what Summer was.

I could never help him hide a dead body
in a forest, where creatures have whiskers as thick as vines
blood’s green from chlorophyll falling from trees
dried leaves shield wounds,
because it would be mine. One day
when he is stabbing my heart, it will have to **** me.

I use weeds as bandages. I have had three broken hearts
but never experienced heart failure.

A little sight, him sauntering over to my side of the bed
pantless and looking eager as a child to see me:
he had her ******* in mind. I know now,
I only feel sympathetic about it, I know it pained him
when he touched mine.
He said her name so few times I just thought of her as the
animal homophone, and if I were anyone else,
I would not have worried when he said
she thought of him on occasion, because morning came
as morning still and he still had a big heart for a liar.
The thing is that our rapport was honesty –
if I laid on him too heavy, he would request I scoot over
if he did not want to sing me a song
in that baritone fluid, I would seek another shoreline.
Submissive, yet, I would ask him what I wanted without
asking if he could simply love being loved,
I could not understand. Only a scruffy teddy bear could.
But we do not talk about it, maybe I mention
a bunny an ex gave me, one I cut the ears off of when
the apocalypse came, but he has not a syllable.
Nobody wants their lovers to exist
with other loves, and sometimes we do not want ourselves
to exist with other loves even more so.
I only feel sympathetic about it, because I first felt I had
a sibling when we connected, became all carnal,
sweet nature handed me a body.
I only just understood that I was not given the right one.

fragile earth
tarnish its pulp
in my molars, adult

and a sheen that
lays paper

kites flying inside
gum nerves &

the brass touches
porcelain

you give me
cavities, my love
our life is so sweet

i feel your words
before they
are said

the homeostasis
as you speak

strength.

I’d like to think that I touch something
in the people who I am not in love with but have names for me
like sweetheart, honey, or doll,
perhaps in some way I am their daughter or lover

and I hate thinking that somehow I could be both to every one
I have ever wanted inside me.

The child in their hotel room, too tired for breakfast
or the body of bruises
born in motel mattresses, creating stories
from the popcorn ceilings. She sees stars and bugs but gets lost
in counting sheep because no one has ever been able to

hop over a fence as long as she has lived.
I wanted to ***** out the contents of my life with the bile in
my stomach

and all I got was a few years missing so I am too big
to touch things in people
but too small to touch their outsides. I know people who can be
called honey but not be sweet,
I know girls who get ****** and never are full.

People who touch me are scary
but people who don’t touch me are worse:
if I am a pocket they turn inside out,
at least I am not suffocating
in someone’s emptiness.

cement galaxy,
moments stuck in you today
will be lived later.

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.

I could not imagine
not knowing who you are until I realized
I never did
anyway,
it felt so much like being a lonely child
in a small house. I swear
I can touch the walls of your heart
but there is no foundation, blood anywhere.
Who did I break my skin for
if not
a man who has eyes like new stars. Who
walked into me
then made the fireplace curdle.

I have to stop saying your name when I wake up
and start saying it
before I lay myself to rest.

it is not immortal,

I imagine braiding our veins together
then using them as a noose,
feeling our pulses
compete
until they are too exhausted to continue and
              one of us loses

but what
is winning except dying young
anyway. I want to die

to the sensation
of someone tying and untying my veins,
thin bleeding strings, like
cherry stems.

I want someone to mourn me for my *****, I
want to seem as mountainous
as a knitted sweater
where my lovers would have gotten

        stuck in the seams and
everyone will know I am still pure.

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.

The last time we had *** it caused something of a
deforestation, I realized that I love men so much that I could not
possibly do their work for them. Double the amount of
calluses on my fingers and toes than there should have been:
two for every inch of hair cascading my back
when fifty-year olds would grab me and make an ocean of trees.
I cannot count how many times we have left someone
ourselves or others for ourselves, there is no difference because I
feel goodbyes in the same way that I do when I think about
missing my subway train or having hot tea
burn my esophagus on the way down. We leave people as often
as I fall in love with my thirty-six inches of hair cascading.  

Moments that did not matter, forgetting I was the one who
could have a second heartbeat in my belly
even stronger than the pulse felt in any man’s ****.

I do not want to remember you as the man who broke my heart
not long after breaking my *****, so I emptied everything
for you and pretended it was only the phone bill
I racked up that we had a problem with.
Every call amounted to a page worth of reasons why we did not
break up when maybe we should have, there were fifty
year olds making my hair cascade like rain down my back.
A precious later reminded me that I am a woman
and so I do not have to be empty:
as full as a god, there could be two lives inside of me from you.

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.

I am writing notes to ghosts
and realizing
that there are some bad habits I will always go
back to.

The morning has opened its eyes
through sea salt
from
the Sandman in
an abandoned bedroom

tides
swim through our curtains
wrinkles
its white skin

I am
next to the ocean.

I do not belong to myself, nor
the shadows –
I have donated all of my years to men
until they are old enough
to be gods

and how I have fallen on my knees
as they grew to be
too old for me

the earth never is. I don't love
it enough, still

nothing aches more like trying to be better
when dirt forms crescents
like a moon
beneath your fingernails.

It is the morning after the morning after
and he has left cinnamon sticks beneath my pillows, I
inhale and exhale when I sleep
until all their dust has been swallowed –

dissolving into me
like water from wet linens onto skin, to be a naked
root love has taken everything from.

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.

You saved me, you saved me
but I am still dying –

my head is too humid and
its walls are expanding, rising
found its cot in a mausoleum
gave me air as warm as the

bottom of the sea
deep blue in revival,
and deep you inside of me

have the hedges of your skull
white picket fence turned

red, white picket fence
bleeding and I am welling as
a tear would between flesh
seep to a bruise in the center,
heart purple and ripening

it is obsessive in the way it
drinks me. You
saved me, you saved me
but I am still in the plum sort

of dying –
please get deeper inside or
I will stay empty.

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

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

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

get naked
I cannot kiss you between these bars

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

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

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

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

I have searched for a year, who gave you two hearts
and did not bother to
cross-stitch, knit them together to touch –

more and more
you have become the day that my clock broke
and the ticks sounded like my lips
reaching out for yours, and how you never kissed me
so the tocks never happened.

I am still breathing
and parts of you are so black –

looking asleep on a pile of cigarettes
the tobacco tied into rings
kept wrapped around your finger,
I’ve kept you tied close to me

so that every particle
you ingest, everything you can think
lets me know you are living.

my beautiful charred
angel, do not break your stings.

What man would buy me a ticket,
and into a cocoon where moss bites?

I would sting like bees on buds,
or ***** rushing to fertilize, create
an angel no other gentlemen touches
with white hair, eyes like sesame seeds:
she seems more attractive than the
woman he made love with, for certain.

Looks unnatural to swim in a pool
when a waterfall can pour ice onto his
head: just as viney-things drape me.

I am but a fair girl, have no color.
He could not love me beneath green,
there is no comparison, me and trees,
but he does, and I feel April will return
sooner and ruddier than anticipated.

May will bark like a dog: on my knees,
cradling children who hold vanities up to
my forehead, I boast a bellyful of bugs,
brick-hued and even with red stripes;
I think they must wear sweaters to bed.

How noble in our thirty-six months!
We cuddle baby slugs, not counting sap,
then burp their brothers, spout-mouths.

He is, in fact, the man that would do
the unthinkable grey-lipped love,
authors gather inspiration from and
snakes slip, spiders webbing shapes of:
cocoon with our metamorphosis in mind.

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.

muddy lungs
death flickered a coal light inside you
this morning as I separated from

the moon, my crater
my coffin

stars eat from the palm of my hand
festering caterpillars
from the stomach’s boiling acid

only the freshest babe
I selected from within an evening sky

will I *****
to not swallow, but choke on
and become as noxious as my lungs

African poesies will not awaken there
kneel, wilt, flowerlike.

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

That is my favorite shade of red
how your eyes go when you roll them back,
tilt your head back, a little to the left –
hurting the leather and yolk of a chair abandoned
in the backseat of an alley, right of downtown
numbers impressed into the branches,
must code every time I spread your legs there.

Enough hours to decompose a body bag,
but I was alive the entire time
and you had enough blood in your face to supply
sisters in an orphanage, glittering privately.

We sipped coffee some evenings,
it became black sand slithering up your dress:
I did not add enough cream.

The mugs were left organized in an aisle
to be gathered later, overcrowded in the glovebox
maroon droplets fall onto my toes as I brake –
imagine a mouse having cut himself
and drowned in the miniature pools you left
of my not being good enough for you, but there
it is nearly my favorite color again
stained between my feet so you cannot fade.

Through fissured blinds,
sunlight cuts
my toenails in half –
rosy polish
and pastel skin.

I recall a blade
once used against
my thigh,
until I left pale
hues for scarlet.

If possible,
my veins quiver,
and I recognize
a familiar yearning
from days past.

These thoughts are
sour grapes
that I must wince at,
even when the
flavor isn’t so bad.

My mind is a weapon
that wrestles itself;
I am on a seesaw,
teeter-tottering as
a toddler might.

Hair dye is on my bathroom wall -
now everyone knows
I put myself together like papier-mâché.

Stars are drawn in the exact shape I love you –
to the moon and back, going a distance like Santa’s sleigh
making the rounds every black sequence,
the Earth does not cease rotation, so stars do not blink
or forget to twinkle when God does not shovel dark clouds:
pillows of snow that have been urinated in,
still fresh beyond the membrane of something grey.

I do not mind if you call that ugly.
I understand if my rural nights are frightening to you –
they were to me at first, they did not feel like
a time, rather the absence of
and I do not mind if my poems feel that way sometimes.

I write this because the evening never stops –
five o’clock somewhere and midnights too, which we pale
by blonde stars, the hair color of mine you despised
resurrected. Never stopping as you and I do not.

My ex-girlfriend bought me a star once,
though I did not know you then, it was still our shape
the contour of your hair clogged in my bathtub
the blue moods of mine dyed purple, almost lilac by you –
I think of how her ******* got in the way when
I tried to listen to her heartbeat
but yours is always there, never stopping like stars
never blinking in the exact shape I will always love you.

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.

There is a face at the very bottom of this sea
coral, shells cupping her cheeks
loved the beach
so much she wanted to put waves in her hair, wanted
to be part of the universe that
                                   requires no legs.

For all we know, the oceanfloor
could be the sky
of some other universe
and swimming fish make up the cosmos.

                                                   Saltwater burns


                       the sea
                               so you can see.

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

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

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

for two people so in love
and so far apart.

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

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

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

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

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

I am one of your tastebuds
                know when you like
   something more than I

         crumbling
    crumbling
         we are food

                            we
she has a spice that you like
   and I am too sweet

          I will tear myself out
so you can be free
  to taste better things

I hate how you become crystalline
losing that stiffness laid upon your arms,
as if daisies grew where your nerves
once were, they had trembled up –
wet climate, trembling down your face.

And the little army of tears builds
a mountain between us, lava seeps red:
I am unarmed compared to sadness.

You, bright and so clearly agonized,
the tortoise shell is clever in its respite –
shields green from gentlemen until
they hardly believe that they are alive.

I despise what the dampness can do
sometimes slipping you rigid while I am
concrete asleep in a nearby bedroom,
under linen and hardly a human –
your shine so pure it overwhelms mine.

It made scallops on my shirt, dried like salt
in seashells —
the final appearance of our love.
I
could have mourned it
as if it were more than the possibility of life
disguised by a million tadpoles. A whole

day, it took him to get home
it may be even more
miles than my body fluids travel in a week.
His, still on my shirt. Hits my knees

(always the knees, have built oceans on them)

He thinks he left, but it was I
who cleaned sand castles from all my crevices

he thinks he left, he
the snail
I have
caught up in years of needing to be ******.

He thought he left, but white beaches
are still in my dresser —
it is what remains.
I am so tempted to say, "your *** outlived you"
but it would not be the
first time his **** did the work for him.

The Bible says
“I loved you at your darkest”
but I loved you
even when you were not mine.

(I am asking strangers if she is prettier than me
and feel the guilt of a burglar. I
am taking your property,
I can do what you
did even with my hands behind my back.)

You wrote in
your childhood notebooks
about feeling a love so great that
it puts you in handcuffs.

(You do not write about being in love)
you write about
being loved.

You have been loved twice
and took the
membrane from between my legs too.

I loved you when you were in the darkest part
of my body, when you were
under my skin.
(I make strangers remove pieces of you.)

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

Oh daffodil, you are not what I had hoped for
but you are alright now. Do not weep,
and please, do not wilt on me,
this fertilizer is a necessary evil, to devour
your bad things

in a basin, or howling at the moon –
dogs you left empty-bowelled,
sunken as a level cloth in the rain, still fat
but darker than smoke haze at dusk
not better of what mothers feed the precious

stuck, and stinking sons. I love men, I do,
just not the boys I have been handed
in their snotty noses, copepod backpacks &
bandanas for the laboratory. Promise, though
to make chloroform for your head

as if the sun could slap your eardrums,
what wonder would it be! A yellow plague,
bit the toenails of your baby’s feet,
said to injure petals among tall, lusting slopes,
hope you will die as a blonde woman,
and dye, daffodil, goodbye.

I scraped my knee
and asked my lover if he thought
the blood is brown because I am all dried out and
rotten inside,
or if I am just full of dirt. As children, we
drew lines in cemetery soil

pretended to snort them – I must have inhaled
the cry of someone’s bones
their whimpers
of exhaustion

(my angel in a cloud
who I cry for each day
keeps asking me to just let her die, she is every
unidentified flying object and
she is tired
of needing to stay afloat, even with wings).

I wish I didn’t need so much sleep
but it is probably my fault.

I lifted
a bookcase of pretty things, doilies beneath
porcelain faces and bottoms
mildew
smoke-stained letters

and blocked the windowpane. Light reminds me
too much of
how I became a mistress
thinking I would not take anything away,
thought I was adding more love
into the world – it is
too full.

Darkness is absence, darkness is my
own creation.

I spent my allowance on it
to pretend I am still young enough for bad men to
want to play dolls
with me, twist their heads around backwards
so they will never know of their
private parts

never be like me.

I loved him
when his words reflected a shadow, he was nothing more
than a cloud separating Earth from the moon

told me that no one’s heart  has ever been too big for
their head
but he never held me up to the light

(and he broke mine).

This morning
I remembered I am just small pieces of my mother’s body
yet I fear falling asleep beside her
in case she knows
that I want to **** myself, cells that came from her.

It is selfish, now I wish I could be
as opaque as him.

I wondered if it is okay to break your mother’s heart in
some ways, though not others
and remembered that he wanted to paste
another girl’s hair onto me so that I would be happy.

Up against fog
I wondered if it is better to be the moon
or to imitate the sun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never want to be touched again
not by you, not by maggots eating my corpse
but they do and you do. I am swallowed

like a jewel or the tiny voice that tells girls
to do bad things. Shimmering, my lilac eyelids
open and shut, separate and find each other again

but it will never be like the first time,
the best time. I can never feel death more than
once. I want everyone to **** me but I want

nobody to touch me again.

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

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

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.