i.
i keep score of
a million impacts eaten by the hole
of my missing heart.
quietly chewed, faithfully tallied,
winning and losing a hollow game.
like counting craters
on the dark side of the moon.

ii.
what do i wait for?
serendipity? inevitability?
hastened by recklessness and a prayer
that you may witness me flying
toward the sun-- seeking icarus' ashes
in a blue sky
and a blue sea.
send love to my father, who sought to
raise and keep me well.
who feared too much,
and lived too little.

iii.
what hurts?
nothing. everything.
two perfect misalignments.
i'm the greatest kind of awful (and that's fine).

the seeing eye can predict movement of the oceans,
turning of scattered stardust,
silence on the moon.

my two eyes watch the spinning of
his red pen, pointed
while the rattling chamber-room of his mouth
collapses.
  coiling harder, the spring tightens around
the cold pit of my stomach.
burning already, a sunspot.

when the second hand stops its revolution,
my two eyes melt
into the sea.

i wear yellow and stare at planes
folding themselves into downy blue.
if i crash too, let the headline read:
icarus loved the sun
just as his father loved him
(but when the waves caught his body
he returned to his mother's embrace)

a cold, a fish, a baseball.
i can catch a snowflake on my burning tongue.
i can catch a falling star searing through the sky, a sudden **** in the night.
i can catch you curled around a phone-call.
it's past three and the wish i made from our bed
smothers itself to death on
some field in Nebraska.

is named
for her practice:
she cannibalizes her lover to nourish her offspring.
Lives until their hatching
at which point she too is consumed for their lives.

You always thought it was beautiful that something could sacrifice so much.

When you dug yourself into the body of my father and tore apart
his entire being,
how could you know that I watched?

How could you know that when
I bit into your fingertips, calloused from toil,
I savored the flickering second of your breath?

I keep peeling off my face and
throwing the skin into the earth
hoping the ritual of burying
can flower a new layer upon me.
All smooth and poreless.
Erased in all the ways I've been taught to long for,
yet somehow retaining features
that some ******* corporation has spoonfed
generations of us into loving.

inside my professor's mailbox is
a blue journal.
  his stomach is turning on the red eye to California.
in the spring i make an A
from 150 pages of longing for a ghost.
-
inside of me at 5, there were
pinworms gnawing,
ropes of curled tails squirming around
  some gnarled beads coated
  in rust
and i cried opals on the nights i could hear them chew
right through.
inside of me were dreams of nothing.