Your morning breath drips as honeysuckle into tea –
I drink it, refreshing. There are days
where I can nearly see the heart in your chest like a Valentine’s Day
card and you are not just flesh and bones when we touch.
You are full the same way my scalp is a street of
gold streaks. Our love was once not more
than a **** planted in a coffee can, now there are roses
whose thorns lead a trail back to the day we first met under umbrellas
and dewdrops slightly sweeter than rain. I catch all humidity
as if I were a cloud – stormcloud, suncloud, so rich
with your every season I could boil it in kettles and make steam.

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

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

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

I wish I had the time to research
biology and chemistry and physics to relate our bodies
to electricity, come up
with a simile for *** and science.

But I doubt there would be any translation
of how your breath
raises polka dots on my skin.

I do not know what else that could mean
except there are insects
with as many legs as I have minutes spent on thinking
about well you learned to whistle.

he said
girls like me should come with yellow tape
police property, do not cross

and if that is because I am *******

I guess now
my skin should say: crime scene, do not

touch

because I am crying over men like they’re
still just boys.

I have a friend who says he cannot be my friend anymore
in case I want to kiss him one day.
He is the type who makes me guess what language his favorite singer
speaks, and if I guess the right answer, he will present a

shark tooth that I can make into a pendant. Yet
he does not want evidence
that females exist at all, all the way in Denmark or just downtown,
driving forty miles to get to a movie theater so no one will
recognize in case I want to kiss him one day. I will not

yet he worries my parents will throw him in jail as if it is our
culture, the way the girl he is in love with
wears capes every day, even in summertime. She is the type to
sweep dust petals from the floor in a shape of hearts.

My friend in love with her, is still more worried that he may kiss me
and what it might do to their thousand miles apart
if we get caught. He forgets it would be like sliding my tongue
into a shark’s mouth to whisper some sweet goodbyes.

Your back looks like a brick wall
after climbing out from bed,
my fingernails give less scars than what
a blanket or two can do.

Do you
wrap them around your neck
while you sleep, do
you love them more than me?

I would give you my arms if you didn’t
already have them.

I never wonder if he misses me
when my tongue still stings from the last time I bit it
pretending I could
bleed him out.

A better question is if he does not miss me, I
whose name is not attached to him
forever
and yet I took his like it were a vessel in his heart, like
when I added us together
it was only supposed to change me. I have

the remnants
of having him and I have the broken
shards of my heart burying glass in my palms: he has
absolutely nothing, I may ask
if he misses me but
mostly I just want to know if he is still empty.

There are some people who fill
other people when they cannot fill themselves, but I
have to wonder
where he bought all the rusted nails
that pinned me down so he could get inside.

It is nice to see this apartment building from
the bottom, rather than your balcony
and swallow the again-stammer of jumping.

An elder still has her Christmas lights hung –
I wonder if I could get tangled in them.

There is also the question of garden lips
a daffodil and whether or not I could **** it.

Instead, I have a stutter of being so small
I could climb to your bedroom and not care
to swing loose, soft bones, to not need to fall.

piling dead skin up like ******* lines,

they say
to close your eyes count to ten breathe in breathe out
anxiety will not ache you anymore

and he is in bed
with a girl he loves
who isn't me but has the same hair color

so it is a little okay.

I imagine my friends as walking holidays, days that roll off souvenirs like sweat
and become keepsakes in a suitcase that breathes sunscreen
onto my white, hopeless skin.

Green grass is Rachel. When I want to invent
cloud animals, I think of her old backyard, five miles down the road
because it was good for such things
the kind of things that open your pores and your mind and your chest all at once.

She would draw on my eyes
while we sat knee to knee, or knee to something else soft.

I would try to become a model for the world as she understood it, wanted it
and hoped she saw the sky on my eyes,
tinged with magma when I got sad and could no longer take sleep.

Then, there was a day in the alley. A murky place
with brown weeds between concrete, and she was there, too, but she was not a
part of the memory I have somehow –
she only fits against the sunshine and clear air. I remember her most

when I want to lay down
on a blanket without needing to rest and grow a garden without using my tears as
a fertilizer for the only beautiful things I have ever created.

If you love me you will touch yourself and fill my holes
with your smile, step inside me like
you are juvenile skipping through a rain puddle.
Pretend you believe it is tears from the stars that form
****** shapes and still are not full, if you love me
know that I need you to touch me or I will ask an army to.
Those lonely soldiers grasping sand dunes
in their sleeping bags, dreaming of ******* for vitamins:
sometimes your silhouette appears in sweat beads
of my showerhead and I am just like a veteran,
fill as much as I can of myself with my two hands,
I think that if you don’t love me I would rather be dead.

among them, the lilies
you **** their froglegs and lavender
shades smelling of roses or
pond water

and you are teething again,

a child
sometimes with a pain so swelling
it shoots colored rockets
through your vein

the last that you could have,
snapped & floating

you do not feel anymore
hence the sinking of ships before
the draining of a lake before
killing lilies

that threaten you
more than arrows into your face

Thumb, thumb in this earth –
I could fit my entire soul in there instead of apple-fetuses!
Perhaps purée the soil down like a lockbox
and give it to my love to unpack
for when I age, it gets too big, I must rise again from dust.

I met you, and you kissed me
with your words but not your body

you said I made your pulse speed
up and your heart explode
but I never could feel it

so we simmered down
slow until

we met again and you kissed me
with your words
but also your kinetic lips.

Please, I want to know everything about her
and why what happened
was not about me. I never did ask, but I never learned
how a person can not love someone and still
break someone else’s heart about it.
All I see is the pillow you abandoned at my house,
the warm patch of **** on its case
I put there in case she could ever lay on it and drown.
If we are marking territory, I do not know who
would win you. She had your “I love you”
before me, adolescent and as rocky as a mountain top.
But I ****** your ****. Held it up with my right
hand as if reciting some vow.
Mostly, I need to know which you preferred
whose mouth was more comfortable –
one spilling lies or one with drool, dripping ***. I
have a memory of you telling me what
her voice sounded like, but I cannot remember now.
I think that is a good sign. I think
it is beautiful that she hasn’t come chasing after you
and I hope you are not hurting for it. But
I think, too, that I have finally fallen in love with all of
what you are and not just all that I know you are.
No part of you is a phantom anymore.
I know how you sound when you want to lick another
girl’s ****, now I need to understand why.

So many girls have that waterslide nose
the one you had, the shape that tethers on the end
a curly-cue your teardrops pool in sometimes:

so many girls could look just like you
and I might actually acknowledge their blue eyes
not assume they are as brunette as the wool
below their clothes

but none of those girls would know my secrets or
obsession with Build-a-Bear bunnies
because they were never open on our birthday.

When I write down your “nanananas” and “lalalas”
I cannot make it sound like a melody:
you have a voice
and I only have fingers that cannot play the harpsichord
feet that stumble over themselves, while yours
stumble over strings and vowels and pretty breaths.

I prayed to God just so he would tell me
how to explain the way you lace symphonies together
white drugs laced with a more dangerous one
you exhale vanilla and formaldehyde
and your hiccups win first prize.

You remind me that we are all healing but we cannot all
throw our bodies in Lynches River
or Lake Pontchartrain
because there are not enough black garbage bags.

You remind me
not to swallow cement
so I get filled up with ***** instead.

I hope that you do not drink too much water
to make room for pink milkshakes and doughnut holes
so honored to be inside you they
reach up and hold your voicebox like a shooting star,
I hope that you are selfish sometimes
like when I read my words just as you would sing them.

When the sky is moonless,
many of us fret.

But I want you to know that it is for
something beautiful, even a
fairy of sorts - she
ties her hair
up around our solar system like a
lasso.

She tickles the stars
until each gives way, and creates a
burst so big
I finally get you on your knees.

Whispering,
hold me hold me.

When your future daughter cries, I'll
have you promise
that you
will tell her that the sun

knows where she sleeps, and when she
says, tell me,
daddy,
about the big bang,
please read this poem to her.

One day
she may understand that
she can attach herself to every
other person
in the world, too.

This power that cottage-sized
girls hold
holds all of us together.

When the sky is moonless,
remember that it is not at all lonely
but how we stay
in love with the whole universe.

I am ******* on a lemon,
he lost his sour decades ago –

the pulpy, lampshade grind gathers
in the rings of my throat,
and burning like an enemy-girl.

She, with her knives and languages
learned afresh, just for a pit:
there are none left in my lemon,
he has become so dry
in her memory too, a four year cave.

Fear that he may vanish,
and upon his last chance: nine.
The lives I let spill in my mouth &

deaths I take responsibility for,
****** the eight, his skin and bones.

She comes wielding pillow cases,
for the brain I have swallowed,
and soon he is a carcass,
better arid than shriveling in water,
my lemon rather than a prune.

I gave her a go, and now I must leave
or else I cannot save him by me,
no lemonade to drink.

It is occult, maybe, that we are twins
          but not of Gemini

how you know
which streets to turn left at
while I have the names and no context

how you still smell like cinnamon
although I never saw you
rub powder against your skin.

We are in the same city now
we have the same radio stations.

I see you the way I see the outline of
a boot when I can’t touch slumber
          not ethereal
    but almost reduced to such a shape

a barbershop’s swirling bulb
stretched and sunnier when no one has
entered in some time.  

           Everything is magic
in desperation, everything is similar.

Your parents snuck over on a boat,
taught you two languages
and I think about that a lot, that something
without wheels brought me the love
of my life. When it feels as
if I am drowning, I remember what rushing
water brought to the United States,
everything can save you
everything can **** you
everything has two sides
two languages. I want to buy your mother a
chocolate milkshake and toast to
that, I want to thank her for
giving me the directions on how to float.

Pretend you do not put opals in tiny glass jars
and **** their color,
they form their own town of
cracked stones
looking like lightning. I saw you boil and
bleed the air to create thunder
I heard
my thighs slap together
when you were inside me, the humidity between them
created storms –
nothing is ever fine around you.

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

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

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

Little plant, you cannot grow inside of me.
I am much too cold. Soon, you will be wilting.

Hook your claws in me like a kitten
and you promise to be good
not to strangle any organs, say a single word.
But I just cannot let you die in a place you

should not even sleep inside. Little plant,
you would not any rest even if you were dead.

1.   I am trying not to be the kind of girl
who is wrapped up in
initials and baby names when
all that matters is
if when we
touch, our fingerprints feel the same

2.   I have seen you
in too many hospital gowns
for you to have to see me in one

(I am trying
so hard not to **** myself

for you, every day).

3.   The day we fell in love, my heart realized
it is okay to be black if your
hair is, too.

4.   I am trying to hear your heart live
but sometimes
the empty parts of you
speak louder (and not just your belly)

5.   I am trying to think
of you
as something as bright as the sun, not
just something that burns
when we get
close enough to touch.

6.   You are more than just skin on top
of my wounds.

I would want to be a mermaid if it did not mean I would
be the reason why houses crumble,
saturated in salt, starving for plaster, unable to hold its bones together
as anything more than a butterfly cemetery.

In cages their baby wings can slip out of
but won’t,
coffins engraved like million year old fossils, rings on trees.

I would want to be a mermaid if it did not mean I would
drown any flower I touched or planted in a vase,
laid to eternal rest, unable to nurse sleeping butterflies back to health
and fill pea-sized bellies instead of locket-sized graves.

Lonely girl, I know you wear songs on your lips
but when you smoke those cigarettes,
you sound as if you are in a cloud of  fog –

it makes me think, makes me wonder.
Could we live in one of those bouncy airplanes?
So natural, lonely girl, you would fit perfect
floating and crying every drop of rain
onto the heads of people who won’t talk to you.  

I would drown them with mine, too –
unaccompanied in our river, not able to sing
while you’re ever in the company of my shadow.

Now alone in February,
little ghosts roam in your nuclei
as warm honey swelling from down to up
and shaped into circles just as so.

They wear you like a coat –
they make babies on the linen.

When you talk to other red-faced girls,
phantoms spread their legs
and replicate the words
into antennae that thaw your lone chest.

I apologize for having supposedly left,
but see, it is me you’re feeling
when you cannot breathe.

I understand
why some girls call their lover “Daddy”
or at least why I would.

Bare feet, rubbing against jeans

free
for yesterday’s
moon to pour itself into today

the craters like petals,
he loves me, he loves me not. It doesn’t
matter because he will protect me
anyway.

Wrap me in his veins
and we

‘ll blow as cold air swims past my lips.

I paint my nails from that feeling
in two strokes,
small, flat umbrellas for dirt.

Baby, baby,
I hear that calling now,
your hands are chilly, let me touch you

well, I guess that’s okay.
Put me on your lap and I’ll behave.

Now, she is a ghost
as your grandfather would be
had he lived in such a time one exists,
the Air Force veteran sort of pilot
and green blankets for feet,
looking ready to lie, mermaid fin.

Ghosts are such glassy things,
fragile. They are almost always
shattering for some reason.

Or another, picking roses upon
sheaths and tufts of a garden home,
these thorns appear more complicated
than the ones down south,
more intricate or something so.

As she floats upon the wormbeds,
a daisy blossoms like teacups
sat in a line of a dozen knives, to ****
her once more: the foul columns.

This can be a myth,
had it not been an empty ivy vine
choking her heart and making her a
sheet, she glitters near invisible
and must be upstairs with
your grandfather’s veteran friends:

and know, yes, the crystal is real
but ghosts do not exist
until far beyond their death.

My biggest fear has been
that one day, you will get so deep within me
that you will realize
I am just
a child stuck inside someone she hates.

I think I have figured out where all those bobby pins went –
of the hundreds that appear in my school’s
lost and found, at least double
could be discovered a little bit under my chest. Where
I breathe, where men touch me, there
are sharp things a beautiful girl could pin her hair up with.

let me hold you, he said.
he wants to help me open up my lungs
but another man has his fingers
clamped around them.

and I don’t want him to let go
I don’t want to breathe
if it means being
alone.

You are the first person
whose **** left me with a mouthful of flowers,
flowers of flesh and blood, our shell
a garden I nurture

reap, sow, *** and I know I can recover
as long there are babycurls on the back of your neck
riding piggy back
they are a peacock tail between my thighs.

You are the first person
that made me believe I could climb in a geode,
maybe meadows are not magic after all
just maybe things grow beautifully when fostered

as I am now,
touched by the thought that I may not be safer
alone and that drinking up an ocean
will not help me discover what I am missing.

You are the first person
to read books about plants falling in love,
just as long as butterflies kiss their babycurl vines.

this is a love poem
for the parts of yourself you despise.

how I believe you are a man
more so than any other man I have seen

because you do not bribe wasps
into not giving you a sting:
because you do not touch fragile things
rather lend little strengths and
because your sweat smells like incense
or raspberries on trees who breathe.

god, nature opens the
whole wide world but keeps me from
you

but you did not complain when
I appeared,
this red-shouldered placenta globe girl.

I love your inward feet
because you can walk faster to me
I love your pleated hips
because they have handlebars for me
I love your thunder laugh
because it means summer to me.

me, me, me

I love how you love me
and do not care when I cannot seem to
remember or believe.

this is a love poem I will never
finish writing.

my arms outstretched, I give your oxygen back to you
and cannot stop the anger when your lips
are too far from me to kiss

break these bones to touch me, do not let me hate you
or I will really want to.

June 23rd was the day of the super moon, the day before
was super moon’s eve. Well,
someone must have had too much to drink last night
because the street gutters are full
of something that comes from craters – so I am thinking about
how you said you see my face in the sky
when the dark clouds open up and begin to cry,
how you explained that we can make flowers out of this
watering can of tears or else I will just let them
evaporate. I never know if I am in
a boat or in your bed, if every black coil is a spider in its
web or my hair: you would tell me that I have enough
loose strands to knit the moon a sweater,
plus one for each planet and sun.
It is me, and it is you, we are what make the sky –
other people is how these oceans have gotten in our eyes.

I have begun to
pluck my eyelashes just so
I can make a wish.

This afternoon, I smell like a hungry gardener
a green thumb with a wart attached:
both perfumes of a rose are discernible. The soil, the falsetto sweet
reaching up onto your nostril fur as monkey bars
until it can scatter seeds, some wild and collected by fruit.

Mother asks why my knees are shaded.
I have been on them, I say, breathing life into green berries.

Free them from that cage, their wire straitjacket
and breed breed breed:
this afternoon, everything I touch will stay alive, including me.

Volcanoes in your eyes
when you cry

that erupt
and burn my mean words into magma.

You weep so dully

I wonder if that says something
about your pain
because

it reminds me
of the way people laugh on sitcoms.

Still,
I am sorry
for your eyes red as my anger.

Twisting like fingers,
caught around these curtains –
a pattern, two colors and
more dimensions than the sea.

One wave shivers upon
our house’s shoulders, neck.
It looks so aged and wrinkled.

The rash makes rafts
of its skin, purpled from burn
and the nerves become tin
cans or rooms without guests:
she napped on the bone.

Jealous that there is not
flowerpots in less, not color –
death’s but a mirror of black.

And giving pearls to
maids: I watched them pick
the suede from clamshells
and become a mother flood.

Nature was here with
dovetailing white linen sheets
soiled by flame, cancer birth.

I want to fall asleep with you
inside a flower or a peach, with pits and seeds
cushioning our necks
they shall love us through their organs
like man

the difference is
that nature asks, may I love you
before they begin to.

I still taste like April in the month of May
and he crossed December as a state-line
long before I knew that time could be a place
but it is beautiful being ahead of the game:
catch the curls of autumn, snowdrop waves
make me prefer honeysuckle eyes anyway
they make me want to become his May babe.

baby makes flowers
grow in my brain and my heart
all of my sad parts

Girls have beautiful legs and men have beautiful hearts,
both I love to squeeze, both I love to open
hide my gold locket inside like a ticking bomb:
I use the chain to lasso arteries and muscles for me to chew on
but the necklace unbolts for a souvenir collected inside.

It could be the curly hair of his shin, one wisp from her neck
I previously tugged on with my teeth. I performed
open-heart surgery on a man and open-leg surgery on a woman
both called me back to say a second goodbye
and I wonder, I wonder which farewell will be the final.

When will the mementos be massacred
glued to a comatose form, deceased into an emotionless resin?
I could amputate their limbs and turn off the pacemaker.

I heard falling stars twice tonight
and am pretty sure they both were full of milk.

My heart is too heavy
for me to bring it everywhere I go, sometimes it just wants
to sleep under the blankets and sheets all day
where no one can ******* it but me.

When it opens, the treetops are covered in the
color of buttercream
and its branches split like eyelashes from their lids.

Moons can get tired, too,
let go of her brothers and sisters and just burst.

I was a touch-me-not before you broke my heart
living in a child’s playhouse

now I say, “touch me please”
it is the demons that make angels exist

some girls say that sadness makes you feel dead
you made me become alive

you cried when my hair covered my eyes
so my sadness carried it away, it

uncoiled
a heartbeat per ounce I love your ****

but still we have conversations about where you
want to be buried

                              when you die.

My own body is abandoning me,
the flesh and blood falling out like clumps of hair.
I never wanted a second heartbeat –
already have one too many

but it came with
a full moon; my cycle in its final stage,
to purge and be young again

purge and be hollow.
He or she has whispered, vital things can leave
too, stain your thighs
red like footprints down a path. He or she found the
door easily. I whisper back, you were

a light
too bright for my house
so you set the whole thing on fire.

Ashes, singed skin
float from my crevices like a cloud –

I did not know that
some things can take up too much air before they
even need it
or that I can mourn what
I would have wanted dead anyway. It is

like everything I could
never love
just wants to remain a pink bloom on my *******
until I wish they would have stayed.

I don’t like cauliflower so I will feed all mine to friends
moving black specks, fruit flies on vegetables
confused
killing their dinner with cyanide
like sticks of cinnamon or garlic cubes

I hand it to bugs with my long second toe
that is supposed to mean I am a genius, but I don’t eat
cauliflower broccoli anything leafy and I am missing fish oil
from my diet

confused
I whisper into the fruit flies’ elf ears
perked up as dog eyes escape their sockets sometimes

Dogs do not eat cauliflower either or hummus
they are not even confused

Morning, we all see the same shape of the moon’s goneness
but others will eat bread despite mold
I wonder if I am one
and what have I done to the economy by disliking
cauliflower broccoli anything leafy and fish oil, as well.