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.

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.

Jesus looks so ruby red, dead
and your purring
wracks some embryo to

life, gave it a foreign ring –
hand-tested gold or
diamond surfaced from oceans:

or not, no.
No, it is just a mirror
and you are what makes it

look so beautiful, breathing
sea-salt and gasoline –
one perfect drop found a well

and down, down, down
it fell. I caught ants, I smashed
in their hissing heads.

Yes, yes, so red.
God would be proud of the
mystery you and I have kept.

We drag him along like a light,
lantern bleaching flame,
but as soon as the sun hits,

he, too, drops into a haze –
and lands cross-legged, think?
There is a jeweler up there

that makes his ankles shine,
they are bolder than the moon
cousin of his best side,

as you are mine. Mine,
some sort of wordly delight –
bravery, diamond, and be alive.

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:
i find space between us
even when you are inside of me

ii:
it would take me
two hours to fall to the bottom of the ocean
and two days to get to you

iii:
floorboards creak
i sing

you get so close
my ***** breaks like a guitar string

i want to perform an exorcism on myself
bite into candles so rough
wax’ll become sewn to my mouth

and i forget how to
flick my tongue to form your name.

i must be as close to you as my thighs
are when i sit down,
mature inward upon ourselves
like legs crossing, calves behind kneecap.

count the number of girls
who pretend to be someone else

during ***,
then count the number of girls who say
softer softer softer please

and i’m sorry, i promise the first will win
because chilly air can make us
light-headed and nauseous;
harder harder always just distracts.

i want to swallow guns and swords, then
tell my friends the bruises
came from you –    they kind of did.

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.

Your hands rap-tap-tapping on my thigh
the beat sounded like a rhyme –
I replay it in my head, it sounds again
like two bodies swaying across a city line
and wave the departing trains goodnight.

Neither moves to enter it. We just sit.
Your hair grazes a bone along my neck –
lays long enough to curl down my chest,
I count the seconds where we rest.

Everything has become a song to me
and the tune plays effervescent on repeat,
passing as buildings do from our seat in
this car strumming down December leaves –
seven days I had you from jaw to knees.

The last time
all 206 bones of yours were
against me, I memorized your pupils

(the size of a dot on an
i, coffee and cream
doughnut holes
letters I write you at breakfast)

so I would not forget
the next time
you had to leave my side. I just did

not think the memory
would have to last my whole life.

Every time I go outside, I smell something burning and
hope that no birds have died in the past hour –
some probably have my name or something close, serene creatures
we are connected by a sea of letters first made for greek gods
I worry that I suicidal-think them, play broken wing harps.

A sum of our adjoined parts, a sum of my heart –
I love and I realized everything that has breath can be shattered
that glass is not ever-translucent, it can have feathers or skin.

Let us go to that market on Broad Street, the one by Little Theater
where I got mad at you and refused to scale your wrist like it were a skyline –
I did not even knot your knuckle-hair with my sweat.
I was so angry, but I want to go by there again. We can search for some
nectarines and decide which share of our bodies they appear, feel most like.
One will have to be rotting, because your cheeks are an old peach,
black fuzz on the ends of something round, enflaming –
another can be as young-looking as I was when you first touched me.
Then, you will hold the door open while we prance into the House of Pizza,
find that corner bench where painted lighthouses dawn the walls:
I have kissed you here before, once when I was sad and another with a grin.
Sometimes, I wonder how many places I have loved you
but that would be as impossible as counting every way I have known you –
sometimes you are a moon off the axis, sometimes you are a plum
sometimes you are bobby pins in my curl, sometimes not
sometimes I rest on the bench where you licked frosting from my cheek
and sometimes just going to the grocery makes me miss you enough.

there are anthills in your backyard
that I placed into existence. I gathered pieces of life from mine
and the moon
and knew you were sad
so I brought them home to you. each bug holds
crumbs atop their back
until they drip to the ground like a runny nose, meanwhile
a child
brings dead things
to the person they love
because they trust only them to bring it back to life. I do that with you –
recycling spider legs and folding moth wings
onto each other,
add twenty fly-lashes for good measure
as if anything I can find
will take the tears from your eyes. you taught me how to
caress carrot flowers
at such an angle, they can heal. my mother will drink until she dies
and I am that child holding
petals out, their extracts and oils spilling into
the last hope I'll ever have.

me and you, we communicate via ants across statelines –
today I am sending a message
that shares more like a plague than language – of sisters needing
different things the same ways. and you
tell me it can reach you
in one insect's insomniac night
if I douse the compass in primrose and my honey.

I used to be afraid of my saliva
the soapy buds on my tongue and gums,
afraid that at night, they would drown me:
and I would spiral into the clutches of
my throat, fleshy & claustrophobic.

Now, I dream of such tight places
and how water may wash me to a place
where I will be contained for just seconds
too long. Asleep, the doctors look like
comets bursting above my eyelids.

Drool, the culprit dripping down
my chin gives them the satisfaction of a
final goodbye, if not to cleanse my
life just before she ends.

I was not the first woman to grow fluorescent upon heartbreak
nor was he the first man to grab my hair
expecting me to go along with it, but all I really wanted
was someone to ask me if I remembered to take my meds that day
when there was probably
a meadow of them sprouting all up the length of my esophagus.
Everything had to be inside me
from the day I found out he wanted to be inside her. It was better
when it hurt, I shone like a bruise in remembrance of him.

There is a city that only I inhabit, and there is one in you, too
but that must mean houses are there
or a hotel one may stay during a visit. I guess it depends
on who you ask, if they believe in an everlasting love big enough
to fill the whole metropolis inside a person.
I did not know until I met you that cavities within me
could welcome a second resident and he would stay staring at
these organs without
thinking they look unnatural, like paintings x-rays EKG screens.
I am sorry for explaining this to everyone but I am just
so happy that my heartbeat  sounds like
a ticking clock to you – we hold bodies that tell their own time.

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.

Under the tires,
concrete penetrates me

like seeds, my blood a fertilizer

is this how pine trees are
grown? forests on the side of the road?
every particle of earth is taken

from a sad girl’s soul
and I donate mine to the highest bidder

may it be the 18 wheeler
may it be a rifle
may it be the noose, its chainlinks

or all three.
I am to be part of  the atmosphere

condensation, an angry girl’s
rain.

Several forms of art, I can sever the seas
or have as many “him”s
and “her”s as time will allow the couple of us –
all involving ******* one another
up, I can even cause oceans
to bleed in my mouth. It is okay to be bad
at painting landscapes and good at
destroying them – good at making people seem
as expansive as a country or continent
because freckles are stars and
we cry so much we’ll build a sodium factory.

The moon is a door
to tick marks on our headboard –
act like a bachelor, it says. Pretend this is a new girl.

Your flat tongue on fresh fat
she quivers as if uncovered from a freeze.
My days, she must have. The candlelight keeps
being bit by lightning
then slowly dulls to the heartbeat of an aged hound.

You feel like sunscreen
melted, molding the color my skin –
first red and then black and then a healing blue.

This is what it feels like to be new.

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.

Someone should explain to my parents that I have
very good reasons for liking other girls – for example, fields of flowers.
My mother, the gardener, must see the way our long hair
meets and forms an orchard
when I sleep beside a beautiful woman. Translucent
wrists, veins folded into a glasshouse –
if she wants to know how I can hold another girl’s hand, tell her that.
Farthest thing from unnatural, tell my mom
about how she and I build whole habitats when we touch – earth’s
parents, this is our offspring
trailing up everyone’s spine, curling around raspberries
as a toddler would climb onto furniture. Tell my parents that
I am not a lesbian to spite anyone, but
because I loved Mother Nature so much I thought there should be two.

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

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

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

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

There are loves that can create a new universe, there are
loves that would fill outer space
where stars are just drops of mango juice
and every person you wish wrote poems about you, does.

A macrocosm so vast that
tragedy is only powder and cold coffee does not break
my heart anymore, sadness does not fit in

an oven but float, phantom-esque, in black air
no longer pollution
that slowly asphyxiates, hardly discernible in our palms of
tangible love. You will not have to tell anyone that you
love me because the whole world is our bedroom.

I felt I was dangerous the first time
you tried to **** me, like I would be too tight
and shatter every last porcelain bone under your skin.

Like my body was a vacuum ******* you in
unable to escape, inland something other than a stranger.
Instead, we became the cosmos
pouring fruit-juice-stars on the unlucky and the unloved.

Never were you made of Earth
you live alone inside me

and somewhere the December still exists
and the moments in which we kissed
and felt each other melt into liquid pouring down

our throats
my heart is a rocking chair it sleeps in

a child, too, your name whispered
the language of foreign
countries
and these women have no word for goodbye

or terrain or sunrises or seasons
so babes do not age  

until streets wind to the mound of mine
you changed, loosened
our two halves make a hole

Where
I eat the breeze

that your lean lips propel
and it flows from my clavicles to toes so
you exist everywhere
but everything’s as solid as gold or teeth marks.

He once said that he did not feel anything until it had a name.
It was invalid, inexistent. I decided that the worst thing about me is not
that I want to **** myself but that I cannot ****
everyone who has ever ruined a piece of me. Their numbers
are still in my phone in case I need to call and apologize for nothing,
in case they still want me and I can cry when I turn them down.

I let people hate me more than I let people love me,
I need men more than I want them. My sexuality is fictional, he’d say
because there is not a name for what I do to everyone I touch.
There are only their names polluting my heart.
I let people hate me, I let them keep me dying more than living.

My heart spills with everything I have learned in the past six months,
this is my anthropology homework and how to mix paint
the exact amount of seeds (two and two fifths) to grow a proper squash
how many raindrops have evaporated on your tongue as well as
how much of your saliva that has been on mine
sugar from three hundred cups of coffee, that image on CNN of a bus
filling with gasoline then flames on the way to school
an elderly gentleman who called me sunshine at a restaurant
and that somehow you know the perfect way to break my heart so
it shatters, overflows, thunders, a bird bath of these experiences I keep.

I wanted nothing of this, but you poured warm water
to scrub your dishes with and I decided to wash my veins of you instead;
I did not erase the memory of you but the feeling of you
severed my arteries like the levee that broke in New Orleans when I
was nine, it flooded the whole neighborhood.
We regret different things every day, but they both mean the same thing.

A band-aid, ace bandage for my heart so it can swell like a basket
hoarding chicken eggs and pennies and feelings inside,
we both want the nerves repaired
so I feel your touch again, so I can risk being broken again, so sweet.

Your
        desperate Eve,
  so turquoise

sprout an inkling
        of sense

and give it a pouch
to sleep
      within

not this
    crowded place

  and perhaps
tomorrow will not
feel so  
     dark

    perhaps your
Luna lives

            she
is deflowered
   she will be okay

stretched
    like taffy

              for a man
The scarlet she has
  hidden

       everything else
will rot

   and perhaps
tomorrow will not
feel so
   dark

    Eve lasting.

these photographs stole your soul for a moment
when I could have clutched it in hand,
I opted to observe you under glass
and right now you are in bed, I am in bed too
but there is another realm where you are
captured by pixels & we are sitting side by side.

Your infinity ring turned my finger green.
The figure of something
eternal
there, on my skin, and it is not beautiful –
  we are imperfect and lasting forever.

Thank the ground for holding you up
and birds
for sharing their air molecules. I am the universe
because it gave me
its kindness, a tree because we
share the sun: I am a wall because my
skin is shelter from wind
rain sleet hail. Each *** of tea
has morning dust particles, from a day we both
awoke. It simmers
and we are
boiled into the everything sky once more.

I have an open heart, closed sleeve

it is enough
to feel so much
without
having to show anything.

His eyes yawned
from watching me suffer too often

and
I learned to

be less exhausting.

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.

The pores on your face
are enflamed, like a valuable red ruby:
I realize for the first time that I could shatter you
put my sadness in your heart
stuffed up like fortune cookies, misfortune.

When you cry,
I realize for the second time that love is not just
a chemical like dopamine, serotonin.

I do not love you just so I can fall asleep
at night but I only play with
puzzles when I realize you are missing from me:
that is the difference
between science and feeling, your beauty.

I taste the placebo affect
when you smile like quartz in the rough,
I realize for the first time that I want you to hang
from my neck on a diamond cut chain
and discover, and know that I can be happy.

The calendar reminds me I have not kissed you
in too many days
I am dissolving I am sugar in warm tea
or the herbal flecks drowning in a floral mug

dying in a pretty place.
Even when it doesn’t rain, you are
shelter

and I am a rack for you to rest your sweater
when it is too warm to wear it

or when you want to press our stomachs
together and
pretend I am carrying your baby inside mine for
a laugh, for some kind of wish.

I want you to touch me like less of a child
recognize I am fading
into an unkempt lawn where insects

will find me before you know I am gone.
I love bugs for letting me wilt into the scenery –
I love you for not
and will remember the last second we touched.

He plays on me like I were a fairground,
I am sun-stained
he is hard.

To me,
there is being dead
and there is being alive twice --
give me your pulse, give me your alive --

I am either empty
or full as a ferris wheel at night.

I don't say that sometimes I cannot fit in
the carousel rides
or that sometimes the carousel rides

won't fit in me. He
takes my heart and puts it on the swings.

Once, all I saw were train-tracks the way falling dust
looks like tiny sprites pirouetting in midair.

That is what I recreated every time
he could not walk from the loading port into me,
sparkles in a cardboard box for Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries
crowding like fairies and lightning bugs during summer.

Just like it.
Three years ago, my hair was shorter and it could not
get knotted in razorblade patterns:

your hair was longer then, we added all of our strands together
and decided it is all very equal now.
You can rope me to train-tracks and wait to pick me up,
until then, I am an insect fossilized in amber
my body is the shape of a soapbar, my consistency hot wax.  

Sometimes the train comes by
without me even realizing the time is 12:53am.

Sometimes it is 4:08am, so I ask why you have not arrived.

You have had two hundred cups of tea since I
last tasted you, and every single one was a gift from me in
one of those containers packed with glittering beads.
The bottom of your mug holds herbs floating like sprites in midair.

Just like them.
Sometimes at 1:44am I think I am the same
flying by wing to you.

wet thighs, wet eyes
gems from each orifice
paid money to open
them wide

but I have an embryo
rose petals inside

attracting maggots so
when someone
loves me it
feels as if I have died.

please, baby,
let us buy a jar of honey
and attach ourselves
together.

borrow my organs
please,
get better soon.

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.

Mother Earth has birthed billions of nymphets
knees that flirted with their socks so much it left prints
coquettes gyrating Bubble Yum
         on digits, her sunglasses’ stems,  a split end.

Mother Earth gave us nymphs so
bodies would not be loamless either, so we can be as
fertile as gorges far from any lofted stone wall.

Mother Earth, that she was never nubile
labored faunlets with pink gumwads upon their genitals

and frothed when one creation alit inside another.

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.

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.

***** girl, she has veins that are vines climbing
down her lungs to her spine
then it gets paisley
her swollen belly, she has a pocket to hide

questions and tree stumps where
you laid her on her ***.
Now, I must ask: why did you **** her?

Was it for a memory?
Sometimes ***** girls just want to appear poetic
with the clothes of another
sprawled, opened like legs on her floor.

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.

I am ready to put
two feet out the door,
kiss winters goodbye,
and leave behind cash
on the kitchen table.

My family will use it
better than I could –
funerals are expensive.

God made girls full of sap
so we chew on our hair when we get nervous
and blood falls
from us like butterflies from cocoons.

Suppose we were lunar,
ventriloquists and sisters and bed-sharers still:
your mouth would open so mine
did not possess that dry cement quality.

If my toenails were painted,
those fingers would be a shade as pastel.
You sophisticate. We would dangle
our limbs on each other like they hung over a

bridge and could not betray us,
the fall would be interrupted by delicate lace
or that photograph of us in twin hairdos.

And when you hurt me,
I had to scrub your stench from my bones.

Patchwork, these lightning strike scars
thundering and unkissed
as though in some sort of burlesque swing –
attractive enough to be fondled, still throbbing.
I do not have bandages,
I do have a gun, I do have a tongue
to slick each wound like an envelope I close
shipped cross-country and not to my postal code:
gave foreigners the tornado –
now, we have the flood. Their lungs must
be strong enough or I’ll need to patch them too.

Moths are born from spider webs,
creatures who make love with seven legs bent over their heads
and that is how I feel for you.

Almost invisible upon the back of plush blacks
merely caught up in a game of Twister, twisted, tied,
birthing beautiful flies -
I want to feel my saliva crawling out from your ****** hair.

This hotel serves green tea on golden platters
I bite into it like liquid has a spine,
circular piston cradling a ladder to my tongue
the giant beanstalk, I sleep here and awake
somewhere else with morning meals
already stomached in a stasis –

just how ****** lucidly bled the rugged hand
he forcefully bled under her summer dress:
I am here, I am her with you
as I hike teapots and escape each new room.

For the next, it has squeaky cots –
you heave me to the breakfast bar prior to sun
so I do not whine when heat hits my face,
there is not tea here, bottles of Coke are okay:
a slow content because they’ll hear if we churn.

And unlocking the stall from an exterior view,
it is the wall that looks attractive for one
lollylike little girl, the old man warm & ugly,
insomnia only goes when he wants to fly south.