at 4 am I am reading Nabokov,

thinking about the taste of your lips,

the feel of your fingertips

I know that I am alive,

but sometimes I see smoke seep out of my skin,

and I swear you were the arsonist

to the burning building that is my body

I thought that if I stared at a fixed point for long enough

that I could be saved,

but you never made me feel safe

I was in love with you-

you were in love with something else

as I crawled on my hands and knees

trying to find a place to breathe,

to bleed

I don't know what to do with this body

I never could find a fire escape

everything I am collapses

to the sound of you leaving

I always see the end of things when they begin,

but none of my escape plans ever went anything like this

my emptiness is a bruise,

and it hurts to be touched

his hands aren't like your soft ones

and he can't see through me

I still beg him not to leave

because God, I'm so empty

I take off my skirt

my mouth is now a graveyard of his cells

I try to remember when my heart wasn't an empty casket

I wake up in mourning

I still felt you in my sleep

sometimes I still choke on how much I love you

and the shower makes me cry

because I remember getting caught

in the rain with you

I'm sick of holding my breath

like I'm at the bottom of the Atlantic

and I'm waiting for you to love me again

for a while I found comfort

in losing my oxygen

but now I'm tired

of the way I love you unconditionally

and the fact that it's been months

since you last called me

my chest is so black and blue and bruised

and I will not be the kind of girl

to bend over backwards for you

if you ever want to find me

I will be standing ankle deep

in the Pacific

and breathing

inside me is a house of mirrors

i look at everything from every angle

until i am lost in it

i take these pills to stop

the negative reflections of my haunted body

and sometimes i think that

it would take the whole bottle

to do the trick

i don't wear my mess with pride

i have been shattered so many times

that i'll end up with years of bad luck

and the glass shatters my stomach

until i can't feel anything else

i'm cutting my tongue

on the shards i threw up

and i'll keep on tasting this blood

until i stop trying to find a way out

she wrote out a to do list

on the corner of a college rejection letter

and tried to tell herself that her list

(1. get his smell off your skin)

was as easy as they used to be


she waited until midnight

and the moon lit her up with light

(and she thought, “God,

just like his skin")


she scrubbed his fingerprints off the shower head

and she felt the water break her

(like being underneath his skin)

and she watched as the scalding heat

turned her into a blood-shaped girl


she saw him on the steps of his house

(as she definitely did not drive past at this hour)

and she touched the skin of her knee

and smoothed down her skirt

and never saw him again when he wasn’t there

once you fell asleep i scoured dictionaries for a word to describe what you mean

when you awoke you caught me on the floor at 3 am

with Merriam-Webster's in my hand

and Oxford American's open face down on my leg

as i traced useless words with my fingers

and rolled them around on my tongue

"love", you whisper

"there isn't a word for everything"

the coolness of the Atlantic hits us like an epiphany

you tuck a willow in my hair

as i taste summer in the air and insanity on your tongue

those nights when we felt like fireflies trapped in mason jars

and we watched all the others follow the lifeless lights of city streets

enduring the foggy-eyed mornings that follow with a blanket on the floor with you

a forest fire ripping through my head

(i loved you)

a bass drop of a song in the backseat of your friend’s car

my heart flutters like sparrows to the sound of thunder

and the sun trembles over the horizon

i know how this will end, just like i know you

but for now we are young

the wind hits our broken pieces and fills the holes

i count up all our mistakes and they seem beautiful

as we wait for the fiery effervescence of violent waves

i hope we remember how they sound when we get old

we let the meaning of everything cloud over us for a while

(i loved you)

broken air conditioners and laughing out loud for no one to hear

and we wonder if we exist at all and i think how strange this is

as phosphorescent waters swish and spill

i scream inside so there is no echo

my sleep took over slowly that night

i used up all my colored film on you

and i found the pictures in the glove compartment today

i love(d) you