Petals of red, the newest bloom in a cycle of seasons I
wade through with my body
holding nothing else but the ghost of a child:

supposedly this is life
and life is a horror story, but it is no coincidence that
this did not happen until I grew
to be the length of the train on a wedding dress.

I will not apologize for finding gore so beautiful, I am
saying so because it is mine –
a slit of skin that is not from a cut
filling the whole
bathtub with blood. I dilute water and material to
make sure they stay mine, the same to men.

If this is a temple,
I want my heart to be in the basement

where everyone I love can run and hide when there is
an emergency, the safe haven
that will flood and dye his face my color because
I did not keep his child this month.

I can almost remember
the exact force you
used to kiss me when
no one was looking;
when on foot, they
nearly knocked me over,
and when in bed, I
sometimes savored breaks.

I can almost remember
the exact pattern of hair
behind your neck, escaping
below rumpled fabric and
near body parts I would
have used my mouth to
make love to, had folks
turned away more often.

I can almost remember
the exact volume you
spoke in when we
leaned in too close, your
lips fondling my earlobe
and verbalizing
just what I had hoped
you might do to me later.

I can almost remember
the exact length of your
eyelashes that extended to
catch tears you cried for me;
my thumbs were not always
swift enough to form half-moons
under the almond orbs through
which you watched me depart.

I was told not to love another woman
I was told not to **** any man
so I thought about books when I laid in my hammock with lemonade
how I wanted one with a spine as long as mine
to finger in the dark of a moonless night, rather than myself
or any mermaid-girl who dripped with water like loose gemstones.

Her stories were what I would read and her body
I would imagine swimming to the harpsichord of a fantasy film song
effervescent, but never touched by anyone
even a fellow without blowfish thorns for fingernails
as smooth as hardback covers, as permanent as paperback pages.

And I grew up, and I did love another woman
and I did **** a man
but I still remember the mermaid-girl who had paper fins
and an all-consuming love for splashing ink like an ocean’s brine.

humming buzzard

your
    self. and
  me me me me
being open
     this is living!

flying over people
     it does not matter
if you don’t breathe

as long
   as you
      are with
your wings & teeth

           masticate their
songlets.

your
   self. and
me.

humming buzzard
                fly
                    ing.

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.

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

I 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.

Bellyaches originate in a forest
of as many organs you can imagine, assaulting each other
tree bark hung like Christmas lanterns on the border
that fall and kiss the **** floor come January.
When you cry out, remember anyone can kiss and make up
and I will remember too. Even your most painful places.
Inflammation is clouds billowing on sunny days,
digestion is their migration to the next downtown over,
your body is just nature, and nature is always, always right.
All too often, we believe we are a cathedral
of glass that can be stained and hit by baseball seams:
bellyaches are hiccups that do not dance out of your mouth
earthquakes are from monkeys hopping
from vine to vine, realize hurt exists because you are alive.

how do you love someone who wants to be dead

how do I love someone
who didn’t
want to die when they made me want to

something breaks my heart every day
I’m sorry

Eyes, lethal
but a baby bird sort of mouth
tugging at sap for minutes
and frowning for seven more.

Tick, tick, tick:
the sky-clock haunts her hunt.

If one is not fast enough,
there will be plenty to eat for
those who survive

like aged gold
tarnished, useless, just the tip
of her cupping hands –
catch the glance of imps here.

You bought me spaghetti. That was nice of you,
we carried it to a bakery and bought cupcakes for dessert.

The rain hit us
and the plate of spaghetti warmed my knees
and you bought me a book of classic love poems
that said nothing about how you would break my heart later
and I cannot write this poem anymore.

We sat on two different benches,
one in front of my college and another by a long stoplight
holding your beautiful gifts in my arms.

It was the first time
you loved me where everyone could be jealous of us.

I forget that you can wake up with me on your mind, too.
I think of you as something that happened to me
as a prize for smiling plenty, baking a lovely chocolate cake,
whatever.

I forget that we happened to each other
and that specific corners of your brain are devoted to me,
that the texture of my hair is in there somewhere
that it is what commands your tongue to silken my lips.

I forget that we happened to each other
and that something so beautiful, or anything at all, is capable
of loving me back. Not one person made for another,
but two made for each other –
you breathe and you love me at the same time.
I breathe and love you at the same time that you love me.

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.

Does it not feel like rain today to you,
my delicate ghost?

That or the wind has lust,
blowing up my skirt, it must see the
white you left unattained by men
I say for you, these storms are
a chance to greet pureness again.

You have an O-mouth
the way your whispers ring like howls:
borrow the air, evaporate mud.

I hear such a sound and know that
virginity won’t be enough –
what tears do fall
from your great blue waterspout?

Do they know, my delicate ghost,
they are but pieces of you dropped in
my hands?

When a lace funnel carries your final
god-spits cleansing our land
you are so delicate, but I shall ask –
is it like rain for ghosts, is it sad?

I apologize in advance for slashing all your tires
and stealing all the condoms in your nightstand so you really
have to think about what you are doing
the next time you carve out the insides of another girl.

If she gets pregnant, I will pay for the abortion
just so she realizes that you could **** up her whole life .

You will wish you played guitar, you
will wish that you mailed me a manila envelope of love notes
you will wish you were dead like I did every day
I was with you, you will wish
you didn’t put pebbles in my luggage so I could leave town.

She can have the hairs you left in my bedroom
and the shirt my best friend bought that we shared for years.
She can have the train tickets I bought to get to you
and she can have the money I wanted to spend on new ones.
She can have the sound of your stomach growling
and the knife I cut your Xanax with when you were anxious.
She can even have the Valentine’s Day poems I wrote
with every graphic detail of you taking my ******* virginity.

I apologize in advance, I am sorry I am not sorry
about anything but being with you:
I am sick of giving myself bruises on every inch you touched.

I felt more pure after I lost my innocence:
your breath on mine, the scent of angels
chorused from our neck to spine to cheek
and drifted to a southern ridge of my body –
I knew, I knew it was the best I’d ever be,
merged with a man who found my purity.

It was light on the skin, a delicate blend
of morning’s hellos and an evening’s rest –
you you you grabbed a ******’s pale breast
and I I I let you ******, handle, change it.

Then no longer a girl, I laid on my side –
oh, how I felt when you were still there!
I was not chilled or lonely, I became alive
and kissed your coarse edges I had known
inside my frame, my pinkness apart so
he would find my purity going by, by, by.

We met in the sandbox, which felt kind of like a beach
but hardly forbidden – the Garden of Eden without any fruit.
I had small hands, his were smaller
and were likely to drown in any sea we touched,
a forest or a wave or teardrops when saying goodbye. Well,
I gave him a kiss on the cheek every few minutes
so he invited me to his house.
The selling point was a tire-swing, big enough for two:
he said, milady, I saved this seat here for you.
When no one was looking he would hug my stuffed kitten –
our daughter. I didn’t even get angry when he rubbed
chocolate onto her nose, split water on her tail. Our first kiss
was shared between the three of us,
her bell dipping between our chests as if we were pets too.
In some ways we were. I
pushed him off the bed at night and he bit my toes
then spit up, saying my skin still tasted like salt and sand.

The worst kind of man
is the one who saw you cry over me on the train back home.
You did not cry because of my broken heart,
not necessarily, you cried because my broken heart
exchanged your arteries for glass all clogged with peach pits.

You cried because your handprint was
on my bottom still, inflamed and saturated in the
seven deadly sins. You have committed every single one.

I hate the man
who did not realize what he was witnessing, even when he
heard my porcelain bones shatter from sobs
and allowed me to say you were the pathetic one.

He must have thought you were, too.
Or he could have believed we spoke another language by
the slurs, the utter nothingness to everyone but
you and I
who had our first fight eating the remnants of a 2AM touch.

But you are not pathetic, baby,
to have reversible organs under twelve acres of red skin
divided up in three parts. You thought it was
different. A man watched a chamber of your heart close up.

I hate him and I hate her,
I hate everyone who has stolen your oxygen from me.

you promised
to introduce me to hell, linked our arms together
like thread through a needle
and i never considered that hell would
be living without you.

our
hours of bloodlust,
heavy breathing for the blush on
my cheeks –
the reminder of all
i could stain with the red beneath.

you knew
the best way you could take care of me
is by destroying me

you knew
i had become addicted to being
cradled by my pain
and
loneliness, so

hell was not a fiery gate opening, a wound,
hell is a door slamming in my face.

As a warning, I may impulsively delete my account within a few days. I am at a loss with my writing, and the hate I feel for it is affecting my mental health. A lot of what is here is disgusting. I apologize to everyone.

Almost always, he falls asleep before me
and I get to listen to his breath slow and soften -
this does not happen during the day,
he hates his heartbeat in a different way than I hate mine.
He views it as a rhythm that may stop
while I often wish that my song had never begun.

In December, I got to feel him cling.
I got to feel how he must feel every day of the week -
when I am conscious, I barely let him think
now he has his hands glued to my cheek and I
realize that he can be strong though still needing me.

Almost always, he sees the morning before me
and I reach out my hands like a dead flower
but he says that I am fragrant yet.
He likes to listen to me breathe, he likes to kiss my neck
because he fears that someday I’ll be gone
not seeing that when I wake, I’ll make him breakfast.

All the bricks I have thrown at cars in the past week
seem to be transparent
and as weightless as an opal –

I wonder how it is that something so
beautiful and alive
can feel so light, hardly existing except to the eye

but
then again, I have known too much death to believe
anything good is meant to last.

the black pavement met me with two toes
and I realized
it is hot because hell is underneath.

ribbons and your cologne
lead me to elevation, but that just gave
me farther to fall –

I learned
how the moon cannot take a full breath
so she donated her lungs
to the sun in a tiny glass bottle, glued them
on with twisty ties from bread.

that is how rays
were made.

mornings are made of night’s death –
a garland of stars
that just drop
or dissolve upon a devil’s pepper kiss.

you welded your teeth to my skin
and I felt the burn
so intensely, I knew you belonged in hell.

There are no calories in coffee, there is nothing in my belly
except millipede fingers and toes trying to
impregnate me.

Little calorie ghosts and wandering pieces of meat,
what is left of what I eat eat eat
insects making me bleed bleed bleed,
one warms my hips
the other drags cool metal against my skin, catches on the
veins like loose strings. I am metallic
I taste it from inside my *****, down onto my feet.

Breaking bones, massaging wombs
coffee and centipede
shards carve out my ribcage when I do not like how I feel.

His illuminate
     head surfacing like a balloon
tied to a child’s wrist, mine
         bandage like gauze
               I pull him down and
      he brings me back up.

             Found a quiet space
   inside that no one has touched
so empty, can I fill you?
          Can I make it as bright as
                   your illuminate head?

   Wait within the gaps
until the blood pools around
        and drowns me.
             God, to be full finally –
      I wait and wait and wait,
I will give you this body
         the roundness you deserve.

Flushed
    and illuminate, my all,
the thorn I pluck into your hip
            exploding balloon
               now a rose expanding
    you are full in the center,
me, the hurricane eye.

made of tiny stars
the stranger held my hand and
         lit up the night sky

in the summer before
everything ended,
we went to an art museum
that had entire rooms showcasing death
and you pulled me away before I could admire the human composition
stains, melted into bronze silhouettes, because
what if I thought it looked ugly

what if I figured out
I didn’t actually want to **** myself
and instead just wanted to escape you –

stains of strawberry juice around my mouth I thought of
as blood and you thought of
as lipstick

I prettied myself for
suicide , I scratched maps into my thighs – little guides of where a
knife would go
little hopes that if I saw the death display
maybe I would have known.

for years
it was all experimental. I watched pieces of us
come and go like art exhibits, you watched me as if I was nothing but
a work in progress
that soaked up so much paint I could
not help but look like you when it was through. I was
a child,  was
impressionist (impressionable –

now your thoughts persist
as human composition stains – happily, I am alive
and you will never be dead enough.

I have
turned the moon into
your skin at

at least
ten
times by now

and

I have
pretended that I can
think for her

at least
fifty.

I changed her name
to something
kids

are not
supposed to say
and adults

pretend not to know
of.

It is
a whole lot of
wishing
I have things under

control.

Everything
beautiful can
get

cavities
but nobody expects

our teeth to
fall out,
we just stay empty.

In the name of
the

girlfriend
ex-love
and holy ghost,

amen.

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.

here I broke my heart,
no wonder I cannot sleep
at night anymore.

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.

Nobody knows how to say goodbye to anything, even the
sea has ruined edges
leaves its will to a muddy bayou. Our
phonecalls hang onto me after there rings a dial tone, a curly tail
of wires ribboned around my most important parts
thigh, artery, genital. The bed
is the whole bedroom, now. I am handcuffed from the ceiling
waiting for your voice box to quiver again
and am kicking and screaming –
I am heartbroken at nothing, not for no reason but for
nothing. Lovers are not versed in goodbyes
or else we would not be lovers. But I prefer the sensation of
suffocation to cold blankets,
rather heat them up with blood and guts than have a
mattress that has never smelled my ***. You do not know how to
ring my neck or drown me in sheets that’ll
just hide hide hide the word
goodbye. If this is your worst trait, not wanting to go,
I am happy to let you love and hurt me until I can float, too.

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 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.

I am thinking that maybe there is no such thing
as outer space,
there are even planets inside our
bodies
made of minerals and
water. I want to believe that nothing can be empty –
that inner space exists instead,
gravity exhales
so that the sun and stars will sag above us.

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.

I replaced her
by putting bruises on your skin

& let me rewrite your memories
in my voice
let me retrace your

fights with my fingernails
& make them ours.

Your wet eyes look like my gemstones
or my gemstones look like
your eyes
I am not sure which.

To those who say
will this matter in a year:
yes

I have heard of scars & I have
had them

& I want to make more
than she
did on you, in the name of love.

I do not want to be Sylvia Plath anymore.
Her skin cannot fertilize my daises in the oven
or make rosemary’s taste improve
because she has it swaddled in a grave –
the rest has wilted. She has burned and died.

I do not want to be Sylvia Plath anymore
though her words were eloquent
and her waist was very thin. Those insides were
polluted as soon as Hughes discovered them.

Does anyone personify depression?
I would, I think, if I let myself be her again.

Her pretty limbs dangling beyond her head, the
torso conjoined with crimson bars
once metal or iron, once acquainted to
little pollen flakes she swallowed I am sure.
Is anything as pure as a woman above the floor?

I do not want to be Sylvia Plath anymore
but I am sure she is still pure, too.
I bet flowers grow through her throat and exist
in the young body she so hotly removed.

Little beads, baby blooms, figs
writing poems from a nucleus’ dull flicker –
thyme ablaze in patterns of words she has said.  

I once wanted to be Sylvia,
because most of the time I want to be dead.

Daisy ***, patchwork dress, lalala
I baked you cherry pie while you chatted a wizard
hope it kept warm in the oven.
Dear, the contents partner our cheeks
a good-natured face, freckled of breadcrumbs at
each of six circadian meals to come by day.

Everything is rosy in this hobbit hole –
flowers, and mouths, and food laugh all in sync.

I reckon when you digest
we shall scamper off to our twin bed.
Lalala I sing, and lalala you sing, raccoons are so
close above the wooden beams
that I know their supper is dandelion stalks.

Tucked in, this is what is christened a perfect fit
your foot the extent of my head
and kissing at my toes, their lady stubble.

(You, the skilled shoemaker
who will not tolerate me hiding in pelt moccasins)

If the moon arises, we do not see:
lalala, mockingbirds sing the garden to sleep
but the vegetation dances
like a dwarf’s beard, though blonde somehow
saturating ginger for a reading nightlight
bellies full of sweet cakes and dinner number four.

You kiss me our Eskimo way, then as halflings
I whisper about the ariel orchard today
(Rosemary, red-cheeks, lalala) afore first breakfast.

I am not sure which is bloodier, more gruesome –
birth or death. It is like asking God if he prefers Eve to Adam
for demolishing that false sense of security,
specks of pride dissolved in snake venom apples.
There is mourning in creating monsters
as there is in killing them: I see starving children with
round, pregnant bellies and somehow they are more at peace than
I am on my best day. We will understand when we are dead,
not in the act of becoming a ghost, but once we are one.

When I was little, I saw the house on Camellia’s corner
crumble: attacked from behind, the same swamp I had in mine.
I had not noticed its yellow shingles before
and suddenly, this nine year old girl felt lonely for
bricks and plaster and the refrigerator hung on its balcony door.
On its side like a woman in labor –
midwives have her in a kiddy pool, the origin of its
name. Imagine being baptized before you take your first breath.

Ametrine is an amalgamation of two gemstones:
amethyst and citrine. I am that of my parents, one quarter grandma.
She who I never met but got my alcoholic mother from.
My clumsiness stemmed there, the constant
stumbling on invisible rocks and breeding ****** knees –
having two daughters who bleed monthly, but it’s never in sync.
Still, I cannot grasp being proud of ghostliness  
when there are millions of invisible children in clear blood.

open a stitch, in you go
find places others do not know
we are in a cardboard box or emergency room
but it does not matter, I want to *******

and so we will, we do
like two siblings figuring out body parts –
without meaning to be, you end up hard

something like this has to be okay
burying remnants of yourself inside me before
the rest withers away

and even when you’re old
I will let you have me on the floor

Here, I am interrupted by being the only woman in the room –
the seventeen year old woman in a lace gown
that strays from her kneecaps, untouched but by air
and launching in the breeze for twenty sets of interested eyes.

Give me their heads on a platter
so that no one will ever finish watching me waltz.
I am a bachelorette, but taken by all these mouths that tell me
who else I am or could be, supposed to be in this ether.

Heel, he says. I am a dog. Roll onto your back. I am his *****.
But we shed our skin like snakes in a corner no one sees.

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

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

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

is syrupy
stuck to your chest hair. I do not

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

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

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

and

why

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

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

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

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

which is why
I still
want
to touch you

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

After saying I want you inside of me,
you became everything – miles and music and breaths since we last
touched. It wasn’t that you possessed me in any way,
rather the other meanings left
however they could. I have had grocery store coordinates
falling from my eyes and removed gingerbread paths from my thigh
because everything is how far you are from me right now.
It isn’t that the earth belongs to you, rather
the earth no longer belongs to me. You fill me more than I fill
my bathtub and I love you
in that way no one understands, which is why I asked if you thought
our names sounded beautiful together: I want them
to mix, like every grave in a cemetery
like they are inside each other and sift everything/everyone else out.

He thanked me like a mother finding
her lost child, could not even kiss me back he felt so
relieved. I did not want to be
the one to ask if he remembered how it felt
for us to become distant and alone, even together
because I knew now
an idea he had about fidelity. He said he believed he
could be faithful to both of us in our special,
different ways. Neither existed in
writing as more than “she” or “her” or “mine”
but now he cannot kiss me. He liked it better when I
was a sculpture he was familiar with every
arch of, he liked it better when
I was in his left pocket and she was there in the right.
He thanked me because he is so happy he
still has something to empty out
of his jeans before the wash. This is a feeling of
release, not solid enough for me to let go of his hand.

I am so sad
that my eyelids have begun to take the
appearance of an apricot,
sickly,
bulging, too ripe, easily bruised.

Please accept my apology
for hurting
whether or not

you love her still, whether or not there is
a mention of her consistency
between your legs –

please
think about how sorry I am for
not being cold to you
when it could save us. I have fallen in
love with
pain

because it looks like a rose's hips
and I am reminded
that she is not a flower because flowers
always die –

nothing else could make me smile
like
knowing the truth will hurt.

he asks how lovers
sit still when one’s hand is not
holding the other’s.

I remember being told
that what I found with you, I will find again
and I did not know why but I
cried

cried
and cried
               until my body felt so heavy
            it could compare
       to how you would feel on top of it.

         your eyelids, then
    began to look like little halos
             whispering
          that they were still pure – your heart, then
            
             would beat
     every time I thought of you
   because I never
ever
ever
could stop
   (even when I was lying to myself,
           I only wanted to lie about you).

for weeks, then
I only knew how to speak
                      in organs and flesh
                      in fluids and ***

when all I needed was a way to explain
          that
  somehow, when we met

                     we found a corner of the earth
     no one had
ever
ever
ever seen before
              and we inhabited it together
         so no one else would find it again.

I am not a poet today, but a ghost.

These are nervous hands that open walls and
create cracks in their foundation:
I apologize, I will use the wood to build your child a treehouse
where he can create a reservoir of his girls’ perfumes
or the happy moments in your unhappy divorce.

If he jumps, I will catch him.
He thinks he is a friend of the wind but I am just a girl
who hates violet bruises but loves pink rogue
nevermind my translucent effigy, he is picked like an apple

saved from garments that bleed if dropped.
I will catch your little man and remember how you wanted to
catch me. A lessening song,
he comes rushing to you, “Father, father.”  
Just like you, a story-teller, “some kind of breeze saved me.”

I am not a poet, but a phantom.
But, no, there is nothing between you and I.
The dead are dead and you and yours are alive.