If I’m gonna be heartbroken then I’m throwing my shame into your lap.
I have no use for it. This is a brand new theatrical performance.
The guilt can be your footwear, not mine. I’m a map not a floor mat.
This chest is a windrose and the terrain is a glory that beats behind my ribs.
My spinal column will surge up like a barometer, bobbing to the nape,
but you’re not my storm anymore so sit down, stay still, watch me.

These directions aren’t so cardinal now; I swapped them around.
I was born facing up, my laboring mother cursing her derision
like she knew someday I would raise up, face the sky again
and let loose a fury that began in me when I was conceived.
I am a violent flicker and I can syphon out the light until I swallow it whole,
until you’re begging me to swallow you again too. I am not seasonal.
Keep frantic at that compass in your hand. It won’t bring me back.

You very nearly arrived in the caul.
When I reached between my thighs
to touch you for the first time
without a barrier of skin, muscle, and water
I felt taut, soft, rubber instead of the
slick velvet I’d come to expect.

It’s supposed to mean things, keeping
your 10 month membranous home around
you as you enter into this world from yours,
bringing your planet to us.
Good omens and seers and a symptom of
sacred luck.

I like to think the way you splashed into
this existence was just as auspicious.
You quietly keeping to yourself until
the very end when the bag ruptured and
poured right before your crown, like
you knew you deserved a headdress or chaplet
of dauntless liquid and warmth.

No jazz hands here, just the crowning
of a soul who decided that the quiet but
relevant ordeal of the amnion was too much
and the rare gush or early trickle of
water was not enough. So instead you
chose the in between:

Kept your foggy sheet wrapped
tightly around your body until the last second
then announced your arrival in a burst.
Bringing you to us, but also claiming
your quiet possession over yourself.

I took my luggage to you
and you said, “Just check it over here.”

Then we went sailing
as people do when they find one another.
We went fishing
for words and atonement.

I said, “I am this violent thing and
I thrash about like there’s anger when there is not.”

We put together seven hundred and fifty pieces of a
puzzle and it made my heart ache.
You put pieces together of me and I put
a few together of you.

You said, “You’ll leave. I am not enough.
Never was. That’s how it goes.”

We sat in a park, on a graffitied picnic table
and did nothing but talk then sit quietly.
I was once taught the value of silence and stillness
but before that park I felt too raw to practice it in turn.

I carved curves and names into the table beneath us
and bumped my shoulder to yours.

Interim with salty eyes and a slowness
that comes with the hollow sadness
that nips at our calves like we’re
little girls again, disturbing the grasshoppers
of summertime with our stamping feet.
This buoyant heart is from God,
even if I don’t know him too well these days.
This lightness in my cage of bones is
growing.
You are a thief of heavy things and
you fling them off the highest hill
until we are small again, and our souls
aren’t haunted.
We stand, hand in hand, with our faces
to the breeze. You say,
“Brace yourself for the joy.”
and I believe you.

You joked and joked
until there was nothing.
I never started laughing
and you finally stopped.
You couldn’t hold a cup
or a pen or my hand.
You just played a
phantom piano,
that transformed into a foxtrot.
Nothing could make us
laugh
when the Greek dance
took over your body.

There were these written exchanges
where you told me I would find a
place for my chest to settle into again.
I said, “No.”
There was too much to weigh,
even then with all the inevitable consequences
of faulty nerves.

I burrowed into the landmine
of your genetic code
and you kept shoving at me,
telling me there was more than
just you, here, now, and after.

The same week you kissed the boy I sorta liked
you said you wanted to stop going to church.
“God isn’t doing much for us these days.”
So we never went back.

Our Sundays stacked into a tension until
you threw a pair of kitchen scissors at my feet
then smashed in the glass front of a cupboard.
We both stood there shaking.

“I can’t use them anymore.”
God didn’t do much for us then.