I wonder
would it help, could I fix us if I just turned the lights down
and we drown in our former selves
have *** with each other
and ourselves -

the
relationship worked better when there was more
than just the two of us.

I am pretty sure my love will be leaving me soon
for a woman whose skirt does not lift in the zephyr of her sadness:
we kiss and we tie
maraschino cherry stems with our tongues. The
same labyrinth puts rosy skin in our teeth, here is his ***** hair
knotted with saliva. When I think I have everything,
it just means that we are stuck together –
I realize it does not mean that we are happy together. I think
someone poisoned the water
with glue, and it is I who dispenses more to let my love escape me.
He is as happy as a child who has finished a puzzle
except for a single missing piece, repeating the movements
again and again. That has got to bring it back.
For seven months, we have been handed the gift of pretending I
can feel the inner-workings of who he is and why he is
and I am pretty sure he knows he never has
to pretend again. It is there in the silences: across the room,
across the ocean where hundreds of babies have died,
babes with mothers and fathers and parents who weren’t divorced.
All I hear is my love toying with a Rubik’s cube
he never learned to complete. I have a Magic 8 ball saying
I should let him go. I mostly worry about telling my mom, who will
tell my therapist and then we will have to
close too many doors. As long as I am sad, they are locked. A
key is stuck in the mud or in someone’s molars –
my room is empty, the air is quiet, and he has not even left me yet.

Our first kiss tasted like bad days, and so did our last:
we are moon flowers. We bloom when the sky becomes a
big tentacle, my lips strawberry pillows speckled
by dead flakes red skin you chapped with your tongue.

Everyone is in bed and we are in each other,
everyone is awake and we are swallowing more pills.

We walk, we blink, but we just think, think, think
of whatever dream we had last night when it all wore off
our lovely bones sounding like mouths bleeding love
                    or your train arriving at a station of sunflowers.

As I have aged, my body’s become a full moon –
a thing to howl at
unable to hide in the dark (a dark so dark
it swims from beneath me, and I glow like light).

The years have had a refractive nature
and I cracked the eggshell, the first crescent and

the second
supposedly a silhouette holding hands. I am told
beauty is symmetry
so I must have two of everything to make a
                                  whole –

but by dawn, I seem dull
unawake (the thought that no one needs me
on my back anymore, there are

rounder things than me). Without needing to be
reminded, my peel wades to the next
month of sprouting
       pallid craters who match those before them.

most girls are simply
peacocks
and cliffs, a pair of mountains

house their dangling
hips

but the snow
is kind of blue at midnight
most girls look sick

when eternal is just it

she she she
has a dislocated shoulder

she she she
is as empty inside

most girls are bright
but jump off from cliffs
sometimes

Moth-babies rock the window’s pane
but I see through their translucent bodies at night,
wearing a handful of dirt. It is the pattern

of paisley and unsorted laundry in a basket –
or ice having shattered azure.
Maybe these are butterflies so traumatized by the

Earth, its lackluster cocoon.
I whisper for them to worm inside my bedroom –
jump off the wooden Alps, get in bed

and munch on the hair from my husband’s head
for he is holding still. He is asleep.
They will touch like fairies scraping stars for

their dust, married for three years to a dull glow.
We cannot have opaque babes, oh my life stamped
freckles where lungs are intended to breathe.

the boy I am sitting cross-legged in front of
shares the same bruises as me
and we create new ones
on each other,
swelling like sweet gumdrops

or ripe fruit. his hands mold me
into a mulberry –
I bleed

sugar and water and sap. I close my eyes so that
it can be a surprise,
the stains I will wear for weeks.

we have loved so hard since we met,
we created puncture wounds
into each other
****** the salt out
then bandaged each other up and smiled at

the soreness.
the togetherness of it all,

opening ourselves up so that the other
can love our insides, too. his
is the burn of incense with the silk of warm
milk,

and I am laying down
in the happiest ache from him
knowing we wear our skin down until it is so
thin that
we can't help but feel all of one another.

I built a home for you, out of me,
when the bricks break
it is because I have been raided. The blue sky's
not even immune to cloudbursts
the humid air lifts
to resemble some form of heartbreak.
Call it
a mushroom cloud, I go off almost nuclear.

The truth loves me enough to reveal itself
the truth loves me
even when you do not.

I've decorated the staircase with it
and discovered rope-burn,
calluses like children wanting you to just watch
what they can do
watch a ceremony. What fathers create.  

I've padded its feet
with snow, the whole summer leaks with December
and my kneecaps are rotting wood.

Creaking
using garland as a noose
you know when I walk and when I sit, the truth
cannot stand for not knowing.

I've not let it lay down either,
this ****** affair. My
walls stay white and unheard of, untouched
yours are only
the cream of glue, I should have kept the doorway
shut and tied to you with a string.
Not even the truth can dissolve over a lie
(but I can, I can, I).

But
when God smells fear, he makes it happen
and God can be
a man, a woman, a lover.

I should be writing an essay about Syria,
there should be more meaning in civil war than in your freckles
one two three no more than three
on your pinky finger, your big toe, above your eye (at least
that is where mine are)

and our bodies share the same soul
which is funny because sometimes whole countries forget
that they are conjoined.

I occupy you like pearls in an oyster, six total
and while we birth beautiful shells, war kills six people at a time.

there is a small thing, a paper cut
in my window screen
and for days now I have used it to ask every bird
every bumblebee every animal with wings
if they have met
my dead best friend in the sky
because I see her hopping from cloud to cloud
on my way
home from school all the time
and want to know when she's learned how to fly.

I put on mascara today so you would find my corpse perfect
(all that existence is, looking beautiful for earthworms)
then realized that you could not open the tomb –
yes, the worst part of distance, the last person I see will not be you
(and the mortician will not know which dress is my favorite).

Only you, only you know about the burgundy lace
that we said makes me seem like a dwarf princess or psychic –
in it, I could call you from the past even when I am gone
you would be the king of every maggot delivering my messages.

I would eventually ask to be excavated (and if anyone says no,
please do not have mercy upon them, sweetheart –
wish that they catch the measles or chickenpox or insomnia)
so you could see the sallow skin I blanched even more just for you
the palace in my grave did not matter when you weren’t there.

The first fourteen years of my life
were spent worrying that I would fall in love with the wrong type
of person –

a man
who splatters red paint on black and white photographs of
young girls

the young girl who
is brave on public transit, does not even hug the poles
when her train has very near collided with a second or third nearby,
not necessarily proud. I am just so

terrified that I can love a person who does not
care about anyone

or anything
because nothing or nobody, not even camera lights, has given her
a touch she did not ***** breakfast on.

Because that would be me – I am a girl, my age is that of
breakfast

and my belly once spun like scrambled eggs
when I thought of falling in love, needing what others called
a nameless sensation
but it could be calm boys

men who never care, until you run
the back of your hand across another’s beard when he can’t sleep.

I fear I use my five senses too frantically, like they
will leave and
the souls of people I adore can be shoved into my fingertips.

My hegira, the sweet parasol of which wind takes hold
it walks me in a gingham pattern skirt and
I have enough pills stashed to swallow for months:
a jingly bottle beneath my cleavage
the cups of my bra overflow, is like a Christmas meal.

******* have enough bounce to make me seem happy.
Content, at the least, beginning this journey
to rinse away as a paint stain or something worse
use a sponge to separate and sort all the fragments.

He does not mind: he does not see.
And I still have a piece, one cloudless psalm needs us –
“Of all the things you **** I’m the most empty,”
I say, my body is but a slave for a bundle of nerves.
Turning head left skipping right speak cry *******
to the thought of anything full, even wine jars.

The human form sure can deceive, I am a pink corpse
and corpulence is all my ***** will ever be –
but! I shall discover a new life with chiseled wings
when the breeze comes along to grab my umbrella so.

My hegira gives this hollow spine a tug, a tug.

my kind is wholly
found in white weather, with scarves
                 clasped around our air

The shelter sleeps like a ghost at night
and I walk with him during the
day, his one shoe on my right foot –

I barely look like a woman,
or if anything, a ******* waiting for
someone to provide her a second
glass slipper & slip off her ball gown.

She will lay on her back in a motel –
beautiful as a tulip’s head
nursing on fertilizer for sustenance
but largely agreeable with champagne.

Even lying on pillows like a pubescent
chest, perky and barely touched,
she is a **** alone with leather boots.

No one knows his name but
he comes and goes and feels like home,
the fuzz still in her eyes from sleep
still collected from a previous divorce.

I visit the shadow with my tongue
and only mothballs when the sun sets –
an uncomfortable rat in the soles too.

I only live in your heart,
the masculine particle of your air and
whimsical, my treat within

I will love you forever if only
you keep your breath winded.

A doll, button eyes and two cloth feet
which walks her on a chant –
for that is me, dwelling in your body
I exist as a plaything

or a burbling dream.  

My strings attach to your arteries
and I am on a highway to your soul.

I wobble, topple, follow
your staple, an underground troll
of noiseless, poppy veins
because you welcomed me in the lull.

The ivory flower
in stone, she cannot move
and breathe as petals do

separate
and separate

I see the centerpiece,
the head reaching from a
black hole

it says if you do not
move, I will want to be

inside of you –

an ivory flower fell from
the stem from which
it bloomed

and became as hard as
stone

separate
and separate
the flushed folds of June.

For three years
I have been dirt under your nailbeds, no one’s gotten
close enough to see me. This skin
is a cage
and I know how everyone looks to you

sticking to you in some place, the green goo of
a dead firefly or
an old sweater hung by shoes you no longer fit into.

Your mother is not
from America, but is a mother yet –
I am not from her, nor am I foreign to you.

She watched us in bed together when you were so ill
you thought you would die.

But mostly she saw how

I put more fever
on your cheeks – I wished I would die
for you. No one would miss a crescent of filth you
touch them with or loose hairs
on your sheets. No other girl would notice.

Eight years my senior,
I wonder what I would have thought of him as a child
if I would really think of him at all. I could
have become quite obsessed, worry about his whereabouts past
my bedtime, when I should be asleep and he is anywhere
being almost a man. It could be frantic
or peaceful – like what is called the wise mind.
I had it as a child more than I do today, an inner confidence
that he might put his hand to my face
and give me the time of day,
have the deep attachment of two friends who cannot
break trust. Then again, it is much more difficult to hurt a kid’s
heart and not want to piece it back together again.

I look at you
and you seem to be in the distance somewhere,
I could separate my thumb from my index finger and pick you up
I could do the same to the trees
little branches outspread
like hummingbirds, the attractive male ones,
the very same size
I wonder why nature is so bad at bringing us together
that soulmates and sisters can be born
ten thousand miles apart
but sometimes
that is better, when the world becomes a doll
spread her creaking lungs
made of my fingernails and you are a doctor, put her in your
pocket
the dust will be her feed
I wonder if you would seem closer if I
did not wear clothes, if the landscape would open up for
my natural form
give me wings instead of claws,
I wonder if everyone would feel better
if it was okay to be naked, if everyone wanted just each other.

haikus are about
nature - here is one about
his haematite hair.

There are little folds on your neck
as you sleep
that look like hair scrunchies, I am a little girl
again though in a big man’s embrace.

You were born in the eighties
I am a child of the nineties, had a neopets
sugar daddy at age ten

and I think it could have been you, you, you
that painted my acara rainbow
told me it is okay
to be gay and straight at the same time.

I have not looked at a girl since you
nor remembered how their skirts felt rubbing
unfolding against my thigh.

I had not even said “yes”
to anyone before your big man embrace
because I thought that being silent
was the same

and I think Peter Pan stunted your maturity
so you could help me grow up
too.

When I met you, I stopped smoking
and began to paint my nails every weekend evening. I thought
you could ******* sadness as if it were your own
because I did not drink alcohol,
nothing could dilute it. It was always there on my tongue.
You had never smoked or drank or tried
to **** yourself, though, so you did not recognize
the acid and that hurt my feelings more than razors or erasers.

I was the first girl you slept beside,
you the first to kiss my eyelashes like smelling daisy stems
before I became conscious in morning sunglow.
Even December air had the inside of a lemon’s color.

And that was better than smoking or drinking or killing myself
or painting my nails mint green,
picking off the excess from my cuticles, without you.

She doesn't miss you, she doesn't miss you
but don't worry:
he does not miss me either.

I have to wonder
if there is something I am missing,
some kind of place where lovers are taught how
to hurt one another
because everyone
I have met
so far has done a pretty great job.

The plants began to wilt the day you met her,
got sick and shriveled up
without wounds. Much like how people
age, how people die
every leaf of ours browned. The veins split.

After an attempt, I will probably lay
like a god either in Heaven or the hospital –
no matter what I will no longer be human or alive,
rather a piece of air held under pond-water
and drifting to family members with soggy eyes.

No matter what the man I loved will not
be there to greet me: he, too, is kind of in between
timelessness and *** positions and breathing.

Should I ignore the rabid plea for that reason
or let it brush against my genitals?
The tensing muscles, the ******* goes high & low
like the mood of a tide confused by morning.

No matter what it will not feel pleasant
and pain will accidentally touch my shoulderblade
ignited from the palm of Father God himself –
my mother ate from it, then she died
so she could welcome me like an ambulance.

glasses have no private view
like i could **** myself
when everyone could see,
though it was only meant for you
an image you have “for keeps”
everyone else defiles me

i want to be beautiful
and walk to the library at dawn
but they point, call me a ghost
they claim i do not belong

then, he with no teeth
will bite and snip my dress
until his gums begin to bleed

when they stain my shirt,
i will mourn, death of invisibility
once i scavenge i am caught
to the lens of your eye
climb the brim of your lids,
very tippy bit, you let me die.

I make my feelings into poetry
and you make your actions the same
when you lollygag in rainstorms &
leave love notes written on my face.

And two parts of my body you
make damp, my cloudburst eyes and
what lies between my legs’ land.

But in the afternoon, I’m reminded
that the two are not exact
because only one hole of mine can be
                                                   sad.

From the age of seven, I decided it was easier
to throw myself against a wall
than to cause any harm to the stuffed animal under my arm.

I attribute feelings to everything that can be touched
or confirmed by science –
on May 23rd, the wind wanted a companion,
by July, it lived with a birdhouse, in a happy yellow –

and so I fear hurting a chair,
suffocating my hairbrush through tangles, angering some
blankets left unused at the end of our bed.

I do not fear hurt, I fear causing it. I smack my head with a
fist when mother says
that sometimes punching pillows can help ease pain
because I need to stay on their good side.

I don't know if I lifted my dress up
so you could smell my grain-stained kneecaps
or notice the new bones
stroking your palms on my hips -

please acknowledge any part of me.

sorry, honey, but
she is not invited to
your birthday party.

I worry when I see girls that chew gum like ******,
the bubbles are as pink as their cheeks
before applying blush. Then, I see their fathers memorize
them just in time
because when they grow up, girls leave everyone.
We are sunlight pressing our ******* against moonlight
so close,
     we no longer need our heart-shaped sunglasses.

His naked hands, so cold
I become lavender

sticks poking from lace sheaths, wanting to
be a wedding dress
or just a piece of someone in love

the powder, aroma of a man
who forsook his lover last spring.

Her tomb is just a box filled with earth
that opens to the pearly
gate of heaven

and each of her legs have grown
stiff because god so desperately needed to

shape a marble mold of the most
perfect being he
ever created and killed way, way too soon.

(the road has ended as
many stories as it has begun)

Hot concrete pried her mouth open
and I will be the one to
sing through it until she gets her voice back

like using sugarcane
to lure clouds into leaving the sky.

I keep dreaming of you in that strawberry patch
we had – my backyard, 2007.

The barn was already haunted so I planted my nightmares
in bushels of berries for others to ingest –
you know the old fairytale about watermelon seeds,
well, it also works with spores of sadness.

I wish you could have seen it,
but you must have some time or another. You picked
me from a lineup of a hundred black-haired
offenders, most with blue eyes the color of a package
of ramen noodles or Pepsi cola cans.

Suggestions that I vend my fruit, their ovaries,
were fortified between phone calls from state-over friends
I just did not have the ovaries to do so, no strength:
it would feel like the hair being pulled from my scalp

before I even knew you.
Present day, it is easy to understand why –
I keep dreaming of you in that old strawberry patch
choosing to taste and love my sorrow
over someone else’s happiness, as if it were beautiful.

I see you in the same light of ghosts –
in shadows, against walls
the little bricks that falter as I walk

you are more than meets the eye,
because I barely even see you.

I cannot touch you
or you will evaporate, like water
like a wave that washes away dawn.

Each morning is a phantom,
nothing to be held within my arms.

I see you in the same light of ghosts –
the shivering image I take
in my head, a dream I have made.

You move on all fours, hands are your feet
getting pink-breasted by a garden tulip
and roses gather your thorns to a side street
where we once met, in love just enough.

There was much in that café sort of city,
I thought it was Christmas even in summer:
even on a grey day, you made it pretty
while the clouds so septic, swept me under.

Could not digest the place that is love,
for it felt overgrown and I was just a guest
dining with what is pure, nesting doves:
the meal charcoaled my stomach to unrest.

And I learned that a stationary loving
   is not worth a lifetime of running.

Log-trucks reel these houseplants.
The dog will bark, weeds flood a window –
tires resonate as though in a metal pencil box
                  but at least I am not alone.

How can young bones have old blues
when they do not keep strands of their dead wife’s hair
in a kitchen cabinet, too lone to rot or grey.

The sun moves not at inches, but in miles when it sets
and that is how I feel every time I am left.

My fingers creak when he touches me.

He trusts my heart enough to sleep on my chest
breathes onto the origin of my breath –
I do not dare move a centimeter, forgo our bodies’ sync.
I do not trust that any minute stays existent.

I met him with old scars
have been given young ones on the heel of love.

Mostly, the blemishes appear like a blush
which is only just blood settling in and surfacing by a
titanic of skin.

I think of a young person twirling their hair
around everything, pencils and fabric and water bottles
that both new and old lovers will
touch and believe they got the closest to her scalp.

My insides are silver, his are as
gold as the trail the sun leaves to remember dawn.

The only silly part is his asking for more air, I want to
say that he is alive and because he is alive
he has plenty of air
(but I would gladly offer the remnants of mine).

I have become even less than a postcard
stamped and dated more than two months ago.
Here, the slight echo of your existence
lives through your ***** swimming in my body
and I think we could have made a baby that
looked beautiful even when her stockings tear.
But she and I are only a hiccup
the wedding waltz you could not complete
a souvenir packed in cardboard: no one will find
I am only known as a second of your life.

There is thunder in my ******
from my ******, falls her monthly rain –

I like being a girl, but I hate being a woman.  
This is what all of us say:
give me estrogen but not too much.
give me the babies but don’t make it hurt.

And all their milk is store-bought.

                                       April 25th, 2006.
             Judgment day, in white pants
I give orange pulp to everyone –
the Sixteenth Century has me by the ovaries.

I do not know the name of your colors,
they all mate with each other
and come out curiously, like priests
heaving Bibles in that basketball façade
your whites and pinks fit their sort of face.

Yet it stirs some type of discomfort,
also unidentifiable and costly –
these hours, we are not.

You cannot be when I cannot breathe
another shade of blueberries, so fat and
birthing their seeds. Resigned to
their train-track coloring but dreamy,

moonlike, thinking about nothing
and being everything  as tall as a steeple
then as short as Communion glasses.

Say these must be the violets,
in the golden stems and grape heads
found by a grass pit: just like your eyes!
as if artificially placed inside, before you
could only see in black and white.

I do not know the name of your colors
except by the weight of things,
paper & plastic, bows & bird wings,
these heavens I discover on your seams.

I would eat my own heart if I could,
and spit parts into a glass locket
so everyone could see inside

me, the breast split open and
pumping. I would eat my own heart
if I could feel its pulse on my lips,

have the red rouge paint beauty
where there was only white before.
These veins that **** compulsively

for something that was stolen, airy
and pleading. I would eat my
own heart if it’d make me feel full.

I had a summer love once, but my fingernails were too long
by autumn. I slit its throat with them and
have done the same to mine more than once over,
more than twice over, more than fifty or even sixty I assume.
My summer love sang songs to me in winter
that sounded like a harpsichord
although they were made by a computer or something. It
is not ruined as long as I feel like strawberries are
in season – I taste maple syrup on him,
coming from places too cold to stick on your fingers, I have
myself knee deep in the twelve months of a year.
The walk to orange groves will take
too long. I know I’ll be sick of calling him my summer love.

He wants me to shut up about before and after, he doesn’t
sleep anymore to throw off a balance
between now and then,
here and later, when it happened in regards to tonight. My mind
works as a clock of who we have become since:
my body only exists in the place of Our Great Divide.
Morning is just sheets of velvet upon a
lover’s breast, to be peeled, to reveal her strawberry scars.
Evening is when I feel her fists inside my skin as if
I am being penetrated by icebergs
and I cry, your **** hasn’t been the same since it happened.
The blood seems to get lost in the train-track
to your veins. In our divide,
I wonder if most of it was passed to her half of your heart
but that thought makes me so sad I remember I am mostly water
whereas there is simply the milk of her curves:
I have the talent
of turning myself inside out when I want to be dead.
She just curdles. I was once the same,
he wants me to shut up about before and after but at least I
can cry on anniversaries without needing a calendar or
rotting the post of my ex-boyfriend’s bed.

He has been lying for a hundred years
and I have too,
only good on my back. The flower you never want to wilt –
placed in cement, eternally beautiful even if
you will never see her again. He
lied for us, I lay down
hoping he can drink nectar from two women at once,
I lie on him and he lies to keep me happy.

Palm-brained, more sweet than salty
you do not wilt and you do not expand:
cats always land on their feet,

I worry like your owner. He may fall,
he may stoop on his knees a fateful day!

And the ripples seeming ocean waves,
pale as an eye’s center, brine inside
your skin goes a particular way beneath
curdled fur, covered you so –

you are a still a ****** to my hands,
though I have tongued your fleece case
there is the special salt pulsing below.

We are bigger than sin, we have size on
huffing waters. They are wafers –

lanterns, their latches open and shut
but we say the same: I worry & you haze
not concerned that I will jump,
girls are like cats landing on their feet

girls who fall because they believe
their palm, a parachute is expanding.

Paper thin are the words I have composed to you:
I despise this fact,
hours and ink spent on my ruminations
form letters not more substantial than cigarette smoke.

As a little girl whose excitement of snow is
wasted on stained glass windows
that are unable to preserve the print of her breath.

Your comb on the dresser where you left it
would take days to be delivered, and your birthday gift
can only be seen on my nightstand
in photos I take. But I purchased something made of
porcelain to write love poems on so they will
not be ripped or

vaporized when August and six dollars gives them
to the famished mouth of your mailbox
empty, but for bills from
hospital visits caused by my hand heaving onto yours.

I just want to write your way back home to me
and I know the wind could
blow away my every wish, thinking you may ever stay.

Miss mother nature, goddess of earth
your grass masturbates my feet
and the clouds cushion my bedhead –

I am alive
as the plants breathe, I
can watch myself as they watch me.

I am mundane, plain, a concrete building
brutalist and manmade
but their real existence, live vines climb
and make me seem attractive…

Even as I want to be dead,
they kiss me as a husband would his
sleeping wife –

even loving when unaware, forgetting
acknowledgement
being beautiful all alone.

Miss mother nature, goddess of earth
I am alive
no longer manmade in your home.