Our little collegetown is a jungle tonight,
with the deafening, staticky drone of locusts constituting
its own kind of warm gravity,

sidewalks drenched and carpeted with a rotting mess of
blood-red maple leaves, and

thousands of spiders the size of human eyes, glaring
down from the dead-center of their backlit, dew-drizzled webs.

I always thought that I'd never be loved enough.

In crafting anthologies on the angles of my favorite noses,
I pretended I didn't want someone else’s protractor on my own,
and prepared for a life sentence as the uncharted geometer,
the invisible painter, the secret poet,
the immortalizer, rather than the immortalized.

I find myself, now, to be a poem––
your poem––
etched into the curvature of your jungle-green eyes.

But walking home in our jungle tonight, I feel sick.
Your ears distort my hesitant laughter
into a dissonant, deafening euphoria, and

when I lay my head on your heated chest, I can feel the blood
gushing underneath your skin,
surging through your veins, storming, drowning
you, and I feel sick because all this love you pump for me--
all this love you are drowning in--
only rots in my guilty stomach...

When my memory is watching me
with her thousands of glaring eyes,
she will always mourn the breaking of a beautiful heart.

Before I left to walk to your music show in the courtyard,
I slipped the knife my boyfriend gave me into my dress pocket.
It was heavy enough to weigh down half the outfit, and
radiated something putrid or dissonant in that crowd
of flowers and sandals and paint and honey-chamomile
for the entire duration, but
I needed a reminder of who I am now.

Being near you at all was already a betrayal of myself
because now I guess I'm playing his type: the ******* girl--
the stereotype-smasher-badass-***** girl--
calling her a "girl" isn't even fair
because she chopped enough of her hair
to be Wyoming's worst "******" nightmare,
and she wears work boots and flannels and scars,
(and sweatshirts to cover my secret scrawny arms--)
She’s a piece-of-machinery girl,
a rachet-and-wrenched-myself-together girl,

and it took so ******* long for me to forge a metal exoskeleton
hard enough to smother this stupid gushy heart.

Because a heart only compromises the real **** I have to do in the real world--
not your fantasy world where no one has a job but
slurping your excess passion alone is somehow enough to sustain, and
the men sweep bundles of wild violets-- shooting straight out of the New York City pavement--
into their hands as gifts, and
their women smile and flip their Pantene-commercial hair in slow-motion, and
together the lovers paint poetry onto each other's chests in the dark, and
your long-expired promise of that love-- of your dream--
that you had me believing
still plunges deeper into my stomach than I ever planned it to and it feels like a white-hot
knife splitting me open from throat to bladder--

You came out to hug me when the show ended.
I walked home crying a hydraulic expulsion of the final remnants
of my old, foreclosed heart.
Then he was right there waiting for me at home, and it was so easy
to pretend.

last night I dreamt that I kissed you,
Mr. Too-Tough-to-Care,
fumbling over grease-stained t-shirts and hair
to find your tungsten-scorched neck,
slipping my slotted fingers onto your left ear
and charging my palm with your heat.

last night I dreamt that I kissed you,
Mr. Beer-is-My-Therapy,
I kissed your ***** nose, sharp and pointed,
prominent, belligerent––
a power symbol––
but it's always the first on your face to flush pink when
I talk back to you––

on saturday when I ****** up the car and nearly
gave you a heart attack, Mr. I-Ain’t-No-Little-*****, you
held my hand with the same
concealed desperation––

I know because you were looking at me
when you instinctively–– against the will of your mechanical masquerade––
forced your sweaty fingers
into the unsuspecting
pockets between mine.

Mr. Brake-Fluid-Doesn’t-Bother-Me
froze...
the honey seeping through the pores in my skin
must have been even more corrosive because,
Mr. Romance-is-for-*******,
you were paralyzed,
like you suddenly realized you’d become
the target of your own jokes––
your heart's powered by something much softer than gears––

news flash, Mr. Too-Tough-to-Care:
you're just as unsalvageable as I am.

I keep close watch of the scars on my body,
making sure that their stories don't liquidate and seep out
like blood when I'm not looking,
that they don't fade and discolor before I remember
who I am without them.
I'm afraid of letting them vanish before
you let yours vanish too.

So I stare pigment into the blisters on my right palm and I
still remember
the first time you held it,
at Six Flags when we were both high on funnelcake and the fumes of late summer mixed with bus fuel and sweat.

I do the same to my shoulder,
where yours would always be after I missed the midnight shuttle
and trudged home with a scarf up to my eyelashes
in the nearly horizontal snow.

And to my ears, because
I'd always have more work to do,
and you'd carry your stereo to my room and play
that song you stained so thoroughly with your voice that
I can't bear to listen to it
anymore.

I spend the most time re-burning the skin around my eyes
to precisely the degree that you did when you brushed the tears
from under them,
and that I did later when
I scratched away at the same flesh because you weren't there
to do it anymore.

I keep close watch of what I never thought would
turn into memories,
making sure that our story doesn't liquidate and trickle away
when I'm not looking,
that it doesn't fade and discolor before I forget
who I was when I knew you.
I'm afraid, too, that you've already long
forgotten.

There was suddenly sun spilling all over,
and suddenly hyacinths everywhere.
I have watched everything change so slowly
that nothing ever seemed to move at all,
and in my obstinate blindness, I didn't notice
that the ground had thawed, never mind that it had begun
to bleed spring.

I have never seen spring.
In all honesty, I have never lived
in any sort of weather –
only the starched, air-conditioned bedroom
in my parents' sickeningly stereotypical suburban concoction
of a house, where nothing –
not the dusty closed blinds or even
a blade of grass – ever moved at all.

Here, there are magnolia trees that move,
swaying in soft rhythm.
They have peeled themselves like vinyl stickers off
the backs of my windowpanes, and they really are
alive. I know because they wave to me
in flurries of dip-dyed pink petals –
like a good diaphragm-laugh,
or maybe like a good cry.

I have never laughed,
or cried.
But I cry at everything now –
now that I see it is all alive.
It must be what happens when you start living
alone – growing pains –
I imagine the hyacinths must get growing pains, too,
from exploding like purple fireworks
out of the frozen soil in
no time at all.

I liked the way you and
your crisscrossed legs sat on
my middle-school-ignorant
navy-blue and daisy-patterned comforter,
watching,
hearing,

the way your fingers crept
towards the neck of my ukulele
while the magnetized look in your eyes drew mine and
my own fingers fell
slack in divine-driven intrigue,

the way you and
your eyes
full of quiet study and wisdom, like
worship, like
your respect of this instrument as not wood but as
hundreds of years of polished amber-tinted history
has earned you ownership, and it
does.

you and
your fingers then
spun aching minor chords, like
worship, like
somehow, in the sparkling incensed-violet melody you
spilled all over
me in my righteous nihilism

you and
your body became an
offering, and
the wood

burned my fingertips when you
handed it back to me, ashamed and awe-stricken, like
worship, like
your life is an offering, and even

when I found the notes you played
(on this instrument that is not mine)
200 days and 200 nights after I knew you and
your legs sitting on my bed and
your multidimensional fingers,
worshipping,

no matter what I tell myself, I
am not a believer in beyond, and
pretending to pray just reeks of
my own mortality.

my diet as a young, unsuspecting girl consisted mainly
of the saccharin that crystallized in between
the glowing, smiling teeth of Disney princesses,
and the artificial-like aftertaste that
coated the walls of my mouth,
enchanting me with fantasies of formulaic love –

level-headed, perfunctory love that
feels like knowing the color of
your dress complements some manicured uniform
waiting offscreen until the waltz your costumes are programmed
to perform, indifferent
(as you are)
to the bodies
that fill them.

so I painted myself monochromatic,
spending my days planning, calculating,
and trusting, wondering
why it seemed that other girls never got too hungry,
(living as they did only on sugar highs),
or bored of the one color they had chosen to become, to wait inside,
but starving was easier than searching for
(or, god forbid, finding)
what I knew I was missing ––

"you are a passionate person,"
he says to me,
truth spilling through my rotting teeth into my shriveled belly,
all rich and creamy-like, as if
he doesn't know what the inside of my mouth
should taste like, as if
his mouth doesn't know
how hungry I am ––

I know
that passionate people
spend their days feasting.
they lie underneath black starry skies
and spoon their own moonlight-infused tears into
each other's mouths, and chew crunchy, fizzling morsels of poetry
along with fistfuls of shadow-drenched notebook paper, and
guzzle violet-tinged philosophy and insomnia until sunrise, but

still, unfortunately, love is what sustains us.

passionate people
are no better at surviving than Disney princesses, but
their bellies are too big and their palates too sophisticated
for light, sugary, level-headed love ––

so, in our wild, potent love, we cram ourselves with
these decadent and deliciously painful things,
and when time and distance and gravity make us still
ache with hunger, we swallow fire the colors of our lovers' eyes and
we burn like kaleidoscopic beacons,
smiling.