you did not give me flowers,
but I smelled them anyway

bit their stems
and then I tossed them away
down, down, they reeked

into the valve that is my head
the body, capable

they are in the body that
you left –
quickly, too, you did not rot

you looked beautiful
when you left, jumped straight

out of my heart

in the projective sort of way
we are accustomed to

loving each other and leaving
too. you did not give me
flowers but you would have

if you stayed.

I don't know what has made me so
fluid, how I go from empty to full based on what everyone
wants to drink
or the amount of lovers I can drown just by
breathing.

I am so weak
that I am something
that cannot even be cut open (I am

so sorry that the only thing I am good for is soaking
your clothes so you
feel like you can never run away from me.

I own no broomstick, cannot afford a car,
and sometimes I walk in circles
or a couple miles too far,
but every step I take is another in your direction –
a realm I will eventually belong to,
the demesne of desperate affection.

Once I touch my arrival, we will speak of my walk,
seven hundredth time’s the charm
even when you talk,
and soon your lips won’t do all the telling,
as we meet our hardened hands now –
a mere, simple cause of hearts’ rebelling.

Will you look me in the eye and speak a lover’s psalm
or will I stand in a corridor with my head held long?
Do I risk this chance of falling out of tune
by pursuing trust in a vacated room?

Well, whatever it may be, we shall certainly see;
I’m willing to gamble everything
for the moment our eyes meet in eternity.

The weather tomorrow
will never reach above freezing
but my flannel sheets are still in the wash, still *****
because of you.

On Thursday, the temperature will be
fifty over freezing

and I won’t need you anymore I won’t have to miss
you anymore
you won’t have to hold my dress down in
the wind anymore. Nature

wants me
to pinprick my own goosebumps to death,

wants
to show me how fast things can get better or worse.

your forest’s architecture
verdant in spots, and then a stump
did the dead leaves ever have a heart beat
what made the ballad stop, was it sun?

little larva squirming towards a moon
and their mama maggots weep –
to lose a child, to lose a child

when death-creatures want to be
an astronaut, the green canopies are bars
prosper in the centipede teeth munch
fertilizer for a final seed

without vertebrae they climb over stars
& leave your forest’s architecture
crumbling for buzzards.

Dust and silk on your lips when you left my house –
murmurs, call me when you find your train
but you never did. Just existing in the last passenger seat
before the windows stopped, arching your neck to
see Christmas lights in towns you have never heard of,
pretending we own an apartment in every one
so we can be as far or as close to each other as we want.
When everyone else was outside
smoking cigarettes, you put your head in your suitcase
and smelled the tobacco air of my bedroom –
mouth full with particles of me, a sand-smooth tear sea.

I imagine I must talk to my dead seventh grade teacher
who told me to be better, who
told off the children when they brought me a butcher knife
because I cannot learn algebra if I am dead.

The deceased are more than likely with the sun
wherever it is right now. Tomorrow’s twilight, I will find
my dead seventh grade math teacher
stand on my tippy-toes,
try to be as tall as him and ask if he still thinks I should be
alive. Five years later and I cannot understand
why a person with his same name could
ruin my life when he, in turn, saved mine. I am a bad
person for wishing she were the one that the flu took then.

Unlike the others,
Mr. Kats did not mention the SATs or growing up. He
would not be there to see either happen
and I bet he believed God knew.

Then again, I knew the side of him that did not
know God well enough to remind me of a Mormon church
until I saw his youngest daughter alone on her knees
whilst the eldest sang about how
her father would never need to move with
a walker. I held my best friend’s hand
when we met his corpse, because he had saved her too.

I imagine we must talk, but not for me to tell him
that I do not care about algebra, I guess he already realizes.
We were never really special to each other
when I think about it,
he was too strict and I was too sad and now it’s too quiet:

I haven’t entered a classroom since, died some as well
but my only punishment
was a broken heart by his reincarnate. There was no lesson.

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).

I am glad that I can love you again,
take you from the attic and
remove the quivering death things –

we are alive! Not the ghost of
lovely beings loving, but ourselves.

And how we sin together, how we
have the courage to inhale each
wine-sweet cupboard’s wood chips:
upon bread, the wheat can breathe

a fawn shade your skin, the lamp
of which granted the only light
speckled for months in your eyes –

I gave you enough, but not truly a
love to life for. It was a brother

of dust sheaths or a sister of winter
leaves, their final lapse of green
having swam from her mother tree:
I am glad that I can love you again

and that you continue to love me –
independent of the attic packed
with our dark, decomposing things.

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.

When my birth canal becomes important, I want to create
nature. Unforgotten nature.

Her name will be of the moon or of the heavens –
my Luna, my Evangeline,
I even thought of giving her my stuffed pet’s title, my childhood
best friend. She was a cat with a bell around her neck
but I cut that off, I already knew of lone *******.

When more threads between my legs are loosened, as I only
would slit for beard or baby,
it is not a wound but nature unforgotten, fresh fruit.

I want to have a daughter
who someone will **** the morning breath out of and remember
that her freckles are midnight stars, that he or she
has a piece of heaven within them. Oxygen and eggs –
my daughter, a woman in the twelfth grade.

how many times do we have to do something
before it becomes familiar
to us?

familiar is a word
quite similar in tone to family

yet it can apply to getting stung by a bee
tasting the inside of another
person
making tea, baking a cake
in your underwear
breaking an eggshell like a bone.

it takes maybe two, maybe three times
until anything feels like home
but is it really home?
i will have lived for two decades

and have
only climbed to the top of a tree once.

I have my heart open like a winter morning, like his birthday gift
wrapped in brown paper bags
clutching at the shreds
as if loving me more will make me less sad. It has not:
see, my bones shatter like icicles,
I am weak. His affection melts like snowflakes on my tongue.

I want to taste him until the flesh pares
and someone can finally take me to the hospital where we kissed
have a glance of what’s intact,
better, what isn’t.

It has been December every day since I last visited you, Doc
but you have good eyes – can watch hell freeze in
my chest. The calendar says July, but my body doesn’t believe it
possessed from memories of a woman
retching in this very room here, behind a screen
you saw my boyfriend naked and behind your back I kissed him.

He will not say that sorrow is eating my heart out,
nor have my veins been cut by scissors –
that does not mean that he is not thinking it. See me cold and blue.

Her figure, a fruit salad: little corks and knobs
jellyroll thighs and a smooth muffin top
unripe blueberries decorated here and there –
I would wrap my arms around her like a basket
protected from bruising or peaches robbed:
the perfect sphere unpeeled, pink honey bared.

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?

Your shorts leave their handprints, not a bruise
but the color of a forest fire
where you fell asleep on your right side.

The pinks
as fine as through a fairy’s wing –
orange as when the sky is not a sunset but there is
some resemblance –
a sickly, burning, faded green
where you are not a tree

but you are not dead either, where the days
are ending
on you. The way someone gets when
he throws up, flames vomiting from somewhere
and your skin becomes the fumes.

Even inanimate objects
do not want you to forget them –
we rot other people just to leave our own mark.

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

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

I once wished
that we first met as friends, rather than
lovers,
that I knew your tongue

rolling against your teeth to
speak something honest before I felt it curling
around my skin.

Ever since,
I have tried to stay separate – I wanted

to paint portraits of the
earth, of luminaries and geodes,
but every picture looks like my body after ***
with you,
little crystals of you

cornering the emptiest parts of me.
I part as a flower blooms,
two years

and I realize I must believe in falling stars

now.

i am a home for ghosts. they
believe
they are something else, something better, disguised
as the moon or clean sheets or milk

cloudy saliva,
boys dripping down my spine.
they cling to me until my ghosts escape

and enter through their ears, i am busy emptying
them from my stomach.

sometimes swallowing
feels like downing wet concrete that should be used
to build a tombstone – sometimes
boys who
try to fill me up never get a chance to leave.

we try to hang ourselves from our hair
holding hands
imagining
them shatter to broken bones

knowing that
this is something we should not be doing, me &
boys.

we deserve to have
our guts slip out from unnatural holes,
throats that my ghosts made it seem like we touched
slashed but not aching

because he and i imagined the entire thing.

i see
his body still thin as a stem
that even a ghost could fracture

and paint lies in blood all about lost love. and still
no one asks
                             if
it is me that is doing the haunting.

It looks like a redcoat –
this bottle of pink fizz, and its cork
dug carefully from the peak.

I would drink to you some champagne
but you would tell me to have whiskey.

I am not ill, but
covered in moss and milkweeds:
green skin. blooming hair.

He called me his little good girl:
it was less of a compliment, more a command
that if I did not follow every order,
he would tell on us. I had to walk with his limp
so he would not derail my secrets, make

my boyfriend mad. It only worked because
I was acting like a bad, bad girl
with someone old enough to be my dad.

I remembered he could put a gun
down my throat if I misbehaved or wore a skirt
too long or too short, too pink or too black
or if I seemed too happy or too sad –
good girls have no emotions, just let men take

their breath away. I panted under my sheets
and I came to the thought once,
soon after, this man, he made me bleed.

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

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

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

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

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

When he left
I thought a lot about a leaf I once saw, who sobbed
while it fluttered away from its
tree –

it begged for a soft landing,
a good home
with a good view
staring straight up the trunk he fell from
remembering how much greater things can be.

no, I am supposed to be a snow globe
               this
                 emptiness

           is not
                        okay

I felt so big, my heart felt so hard
I did not understand
why
I was melting.

My skin said
different words than my mouth

there were
welts I called petals and
droplets of my blood
that stained like nectar on his sheets –
I used them as ghosts,
traced silhouettes
to haunt him with, but the loss

haunted me more. It
was
a dehydration.

He had me believing I was
becoming more
and more full, there was so much
affection I just had to
spill a little –

instead, I was being emptied.
Eaten, swallowed

fattened
for the slaughter.

the earth creates pearls
from cream

and

that is how i got to be beautiful
and round and

everything he wished i
would not

be able to accomplish without
curdling first.

(when I forget to take my pills)
everything round becomes a gunshot, a bullet

your freckles fall off
one by one
and shoot down the road towards me ( as fast as bullets go
still I never can catch them)
I can never paste your freckles to my face

of everything I want to put my mouth on,
kiss, then never touch again

pillows shrink to the size of gumdrops ( I will never
sleep again)
and I swallow them, cushion my heart

say it is okay
baby baby soul baby arteries
everyone hurts when the pupils still have to grow
it takes time to snow, to become

quiet.

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

She has been dead so long
that if you were to slice open her shoulder,
the flesh and blood would be purple.

She has the feel of curdled milk
but too cold –

to pour the pitcher out would merely look
as evaporation, and condensation
would return its stench.

I still feel her sister ghost

splitting infinities down the center to share
like matted hair in a side pony-tail.

I see now that you shared with me so much more
than what you hid,

beginning seventeen years
       eighth months ago, every day
has been our day. Even before we met we shared things
so well
if it were raining here,
I would send the storms down south to you.

The weather has so much more strength
than our anger, the earth
let me love you before my heart could catch up
and would take you away if you
ever stopped loving me

everything we share
I cannot lose when you still adore me.

When I presumed I had nothing,
I stopped living on earth. I did not want to share
anything with you
          with half a person
                  half a stranger
               a lover without lips.

Nothing was stolen from me, not exactly
rather I was a heart
that began to beat,
then stopped
midway, realizing an important piece was missing
some artery God forgot to connect.

Those days were hard work
of not running to you and asking you to
give me something
      share anything more with me than just the sun

   and I realized that even if you did not,
the sun would hurt now;
it would miss me and you could feel pain
I can't
because it was you who lost love
                (I just never had it).

I had ideas of it,
you had your favorite flakes of my skin and
thought of the inflection of my voice as a *** *****

how could I lie to you, you would say
with my hand down your pants
and it made sense. I could make
             sure you never have children,
     but I'd rather make sure you do.

The body parts we shared are not mine,
but were inside me so often
            they almost could be.

I had similes for
everything: becoming flaccid, the sun setting
scarlet cheeks like a burn
all larger than what I did not know.

I had the power to hurt you, I just didn't.
We both lied,
but I only would lie on my back
and once in a while, I pretend you did the same so
the sun does not lose us as stars
         a constellation.

          The Little Dipper
poured the same poison in our mouths
    and that has to count as
             something you did not keep from me
  (something that believed in us).

I should have known
arms can be like coffin doors, and when his opened
it was not safe to lay down inside.

draw pictures on my tongue with your fingertips
and they taste like salt,

you are from the ocean
I could drown myself behind your house
or I could imagine
where else your hands have been.

hand around my neck
you bruise my skin so that it looks like damp
cotton,

stained white *******,

and I bleed from your touch so often
it feels like I
am losing
my virginity every day

it feels like I
am a little girl again
and they’re still teaching us that our insides are
made of bubblegum.

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.

clothes worn too tight
so it feels like there are needles who need me, who bleed me
a million parasites ******* and taking me.

he is *** and surgery, he is far too in love with life
wants to be inside of everything

but i like the miles
i like being so far that he cannot take things out of me
or even know they’re there.

i am a parasite, i want everything to be inside of me and
that
is why we
fight with him in my mouth (having is feeling.

builds midnight with paper stars and dark attics
because then the sky can be ripped
into shreds, stuffed down my throat and suddenly i possess
the whole world without needing to live in it.

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

I am lying on the beach
sand is in my skirt
the waves break in my eyes
& I am loving you

headfirst.

The reason the sun burns
my skin is the same
reason why

I cannot hold your hand
without sobbing
anymore, you are beautiful
& could ruin everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am fat
and he wants to see my clavicles, my thick
white skin is bunched
up onto even paler bones. I
wish to hide them
as they are proof that I can be broken –

and he has a cigarette
between his teeth,
moving it like a **** before it enters me.

Dragging it into my deepest places,
the hollow
of my bruises, empty me
so he can see just what keeps my shoulders
from splintering under the weight

of my heavy
head. My heavy everything –
he sears away the flesh and it feels as if I
am evaporating like milk.

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.

Love is a series of lanterns being lit
where there was no need for lights to be hung, unraveling at the
ceiling's spine
I set a flame by means of our hybrid blood.

Already *******, just how infections are supposed to breed,
how love is supposed to be
I fear someone else has touched the vials.

She started a forest fire
that's traveled from grass to stars to hearts
and the meteors give false hope, seem all but perfectly like rain.
Calm, there
is a small peace in
having all your worst nightmares come true.

I understand these problems because
they first existed in my head, everything always begins as
cells in a body
now relief in seeing hurricanes split windows

                    because he would
                                     understand, too.

Hanging from these rooftops is what is left of just the two of us
it looks pathetic like dead cigarette butts. Our
nerves tied into rope.

She has contaminated us
I cannot hold his hand without touching hers too, I cannot
love him without watching our foundation
burn to the ground
but the whole world is bright when there are three lovers inside.

You are beating onto me like a wave
and sand shakes from my coast with each hit:
one day a man dived into me, now
he is a photograph honey-dewed with age.

I loved his language. It twirled as a song
forms dynamics, rhythm up high to a ceiling
a flood gathering from the floor –

I wanted him to make me buoyant like that
but he just spit in my mouth and made me
swallow, like I could swig a tongue
or gather hope from salty strings of saliva.
Did he know I felt the ocean crashing again?

It must have been a lucky guess unless
girls can appear as aquamarine as it,
starfish and seashells, their pale pinks desire
something brighter than Miami’s going air.

But I did not, only more than a portrait
that can be stolen away by high tide and sea –
how rough water gets, striking you and me.

he won't **** me when I'm sad
but god does,
god does so well I get down and never
come back up for air.

some kind of *****,
being passed around with invisible hands
making invisible marks on her back.

the least I want is the autograph
of every night I do not
sleep,
have my lover rest for me

on me.
anything, anything, I fear he wants me
to stay empty.  

I want to say,
if you don't want me to be so sad
want the heartache to
go away

get the **** inside of me, cause
an earthquake, create a better ache —

all god does is cup
his hands around my neck and expect me
to still be able to breathe.

Your two syllables
swirl upon each other like strawberries and cream,

I speak it. There is drool chasing my chin.
Talking to yourself is mostly talking to your
two separate halves, or the two girls you’ve loved.

In there, there is you
but mostly it is our two halves of you
and how your name’s the same but can be divided.

Oh my love, my sweetheart, my strawberry touch
the part of you that is mine is so beautiful
                              it has filled my whole heart.

I never dream of you, my sleeping mind does not need to
make up the sensation of your touch: I
already know. the only
moment I ever forgot was while

missing you in air. I am of the land –
the sky is too much,
it swallows me
it holds me and all is static, saturated and humid
I hesitate as rain that needs to fall.

I missed you so much
that gravity had to pretend it was missing me more

there are clouds that are too kind,
feigning love
as a distraction from my loss.

underwater,
your hair moves like shooting stars. I was reminded of
that then – how I had abandoned
you for astronomy,
pushed meteors a little closer to you
and they just seem to float. they lift in slow
motion, they curl
because there is no gap between
your bed and the wall up in space, is no shelter
to feel safe. water and loss and the galaxy

are so heavy
they have to cradle you until they bruise.
I think about you –

I think about you.

Babies in buckets, I would give them a penny
for every drop of blood that trickles
into the drain. An infant’s length is a wheelbarrow
standing on its tippy-toes to see into crawl spaces

and they barely squeeze between. Yesterday,
I touched inside the tawny dwellings of myself.  
I tell everyone that this is where the children grow.

Up and maturing like wine, like fine honey beads:
this is the foster home where they’re safe
not abused by bowels. I coil my intestines to
frail wrists, around the neck expanding
giraffe legs held straight through my esophagus. If

babies in buckets require kisses or cuddles,
these folds will mother them.

How the starlight will keep heat inside, I watch a
moon protracted at night and hold it to my
fingertips so the newborns can see
what eyes sacrifice for a ***-hole person & place.

I have felt no one since I loved you
any sensation
percolates my membrane like juice through a honeycomb
our final moments buoy in the bluebell’s cup –
then I forgot to bite the full moon,
Luna, your mistress for this sixteen hour journey
call her Luna, tell if her craters are similar to my *******.  

I sleep I sleep I sleep
but when I awake I will be forever aroused.
It was that ambivalent phone call, “I miss you and I will
hate you for several seconds if you don’t mind,”
that severed my nerve endings.

Piercing my ear the next week
there was the thought, a novel philosophy, just a tingle
that I was carving out a part of me that still
loved

you. I have felt nothing since, I have
been a statuette like Miss Liberty in the pond:
said she stands just like me, well, what if I got my bow
what if I shot an arrow through
every piece of astronomy you find more worth in than me.

Miss Luna, the Estrellas, even your sol
can feel
me break them but I will not feel any of that from you.

call me honeysuckle
and I know why (your ****
should have
stretch marks for every time I’ve made it grow.