You and I would stand in front of my bathroom mirror and
just hold each other, naked, acquainting ourselves
with the strange, biblical union of joints and hair
and skin and crevices and curves that we make
together...

Fingerpainting reverently on your chest,
I'd kiss your freckled shoulder, eyeing your reflection as it melted,
falling for me again-- and you'd
tell me in return
that my eyes are beautiful, and that they are green,
just like yours.
They are brown, I'd say, and
laugh and
leave
you to
confront only yourself
in my mirror.

Every day that I stand again
in front of my mirror alone--
a similar but emptier amalgamation of joints and curves--
I could swear that my eyes
look a little bit paler...
like if I
point my nose up to the high hat on my ceiling,
with the fluorescent light spilling into them
the color could certainly pass
as the same green in your eyes and
I wonder,
and I hope

that being wrong all this time
doesn't mean I was wrong about you, too.

i washed and folded my dreams
            my threadbare memories
everything i had and i
carried them with me

it was all so much
            lighter than i remember
there was so much more

i was
wearing nothing
but my name
            i never needed anything else
it
            used to keep me
            so much warmer
than it does
now
i never knew how cold
            we are

i remember
looking down at my concave palms
            the ones i knew were mine and
            they opened so deep i could gaze
                        into the blazing eyes of galaxies
                                    –my galaxies–
            every star charted and named
                        nurtured and
                        loved
                               ­     so loved
now i
im not even sure my hands are mine
i know my eyes arent
            i know they
            cannot be so hollow

            they cannot be so hollow

when i went to unpack
every color drained into the ground
and
everything was
ashes

i
touched
my cheekbones and under
the faint shadows of my paper fingertips
my body crumbled
to

d
            u
                        s
          ­                          t

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.

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.

i want blue eyes
glistening like moon ripples on
mirrored lakes

i want blue eyes
burning like sapphire flames
in the furnace of half-baked
dreams

blue eyes
that churn glittering snow
and overflow
overshadow

blue eyes
like
liquified winter skies
dripping, seeping sorrow
wings of iridescent dragonflies
fountains in secret grottos

blue eyes
like yours
lost
            in their own ocean labyrinths
            in thought
            in other dimensions
where brown eyes
            cannot follow

sometimes i think
that maybe
if my eyes were blue
too
maybe you would

take me with you


            take me with you

I.
hair in luxurious brown ringlets
            stiff with hairspray
arm bent down my back
            elbow in my face
            fingers contort
                        jump and spin
grab the zipper and
zip up my dress in front of
                        the mirror
            bejeweled bodice weighs me down
                        bright blue drowns
                                    me out
let the reflection of my own
            two hazel brown eyes
                        hypnotize me
            fingers absentmindedly re-twist my curls
                        then
                              ­      snap
            out of it
plop onto the floor and strap
on my heels
            practice walking
            calves and ankles clench to
                        keep from falling over

II.
picture-perfect makeup
            dates in pressed tuxedoes
find your friends
elegant silver jewelry
            sequins sparkles and flowing colors
                        blur together
hold hands
            pose here
you have an eyelash
            fix that one button there
careful don't trip
            you look beautiful
                        quick one more
smile
            
III.
bass pounding
            pulsing in the walls
                        and behind my eyes
dizzying rainbow lights
crowd jumping
                                    blind and deaf
                        screaming
            curls fall out
                        makeup melts
            fists make dents in the humid air
                        ties loosen
            heels ripped off sore feet

IV.
stumble outside
            soft cool twilight
bass still rattling the floor
but someone's prom date
            is a poet too
pure thoughts about
            art and
                        constellations and
                        calculus
            silence the mob inside
hours fly
            sky darkens
stars
            reflect like glowing freckles
            onto smiling cheeks

V.
put your shoes back on
            "get his number!"
because you think I won't
            be satisfied until I
                        kiss him?
we spent a night
            under the stars
            together
our minds together
            crafted thoughts that
                        penetrated the cosmos
            and will float among the stars for
                                    eternity
we were in each other's lives
            for as long as we needed to be
                        created infinity together
                        and
            now –
                        we
carry out
our life sentences
alone

When we have stood, cold and raw, cracked open, underneath
the waterfall of time for long enough that
it doesn't burn our skin quite so much
anymore,
I hope that you can repair the heart I
tried to break as gently as I could.

I hope that you find a girl who has always wanted to
name her baby Cody,
who can ski like a demon and
take her liquor like a cowboy and
lives for Silverados and Colorado sunsets.

I hope that when you remember my laugh,
it doesn't sound quite so pretty as hers, and that
when you scoop her up from behind,
it will feel like you are doing it for the first time.

But when she sees you cry and
says she's so grateful to have a boy who knows how,
I hope you are reminded of all the love I gave
to help you learn.
When she hugs you and thanks you for listening,
I hope you remember the time I spent listening to you,
teaching you what it means to be heard.

The way that I love you is not a fake, flimsy kind of love that
floated away when I left you--- no,
I want your girl to be all the comfort and safety and warmth and devotion that I could never be to you...

And if she isn't,
I hope that she reminds you of me
enough to make you leave before
she breaks you again.

I am the quiet poet
I draw my silk from
            the writhing aurora borealis
                        in the frozen sky
            and twist its ethereal light into dripping ink
            still wet on the page
You think you know me?
            you don't know me.

I am the serene night sky
                        and the boiling hot stars
I am the tempestuous seas
                        and the playful shallow shores
I am the relentless scorching desert
            and the soft smooth tides of sand

I was a prodigy, a freak
            I came into this world
with a pen in my pudgy little fingers
and a notebook clutched to my chest
I watch
as diamond rings fall like rain
onto the fourth fingers of my peers
            imprisoning them
but my female ancestors slew dragons
            I am free
            I will always be free
                        no man can handle me anyway

I am a captivated student
            of the authors and poets before me
books are my haven, my lovers, my dreams, my life
I am not human
Arms open, eyes shut, head to the sky
            I am but a channel
for the flow of the universe.

I like the days when
I wake up at noon
            and crawl slowly
            from messy sheets
            to greet with blurry eyes
            the lazy afternoon sun
and eat breakfast
over the sink
at two PM

I make my tea
            lemon ginger
            with honey to calm the steam
and carry it upstairs
I sit at my desk
            in my pajamas
            half my face covered
            by my frizzy bedhead hair
and
squinting out my window
into the pink and periwinkle sunset
I pick up my pen
            with soft cold fingers
and scrawl onto a napkin
from yesterday's dinner
my poetry
in ink
the color of
            anxious afternoon sun
            steam from lemon ginger tea
            brown of unkempt hair
            and the
pink
and periwinkle

sunset.

darling, I can still chart the precise geometry of your nose,
count the number of freckles underneath your thin green eyes,
delineate the lifecycle of the stubble on your cheeks,
and all I want is to come back home to you...

aren't you going to miss
the way I could slip your belt out from under you
with my eyes still swimming in yours
while you lay down, hot and panting in the dark?

who will caress your naked chest as tenderly as I have,
slide her hand up your shirt the way that makes you shiver
and kiss you everywhere like gentle rainfall,
warm and soft and fervent like poetry?

who will bandage the fall wounds
on your torn up knees and elbows
and wash your 22-year-old body like a baby in the bathtub
when you're so drunk and tired you cannot stand?

who will stroke your hair as you sleep with one leg bent in her bed and
scratch the back of your neck and
hold you close to calm your racing heartbeat and
remember the pills you take at night and where you keep your contact lenses and all your family stories and buy you Tylenol and your favorite Gatorade when you're sick and never,
ever,
ever leave
you the way that
I did
?

that morning, I was woken up by the beating of your chest
against mine.
it was faster and that meant you were awake,
my love, my darling,
you were
awake and thinking and moving again,
no longer just your soft, comfortable, sleeping body,
and I cried in your arms because I knew that
it was time to leave home.

there is nothing quite like being with you ...

sitting cross-legged on your warm crumpled comforter in dim amber light
with hunched backs against the white stone wall,
silently working to piece each other together,
merging thoughts and shoulders,
falling into each other's gravity and orbiting like stars–
we couldn't figure out
how to get any closer ...

we lived in shoeboxes then,
in ***** laundry and ramen-flavored freedom,
the soundtrack in our background
shuffled steps and muffled laughter through thin walls,
pencil scratches and elevator dings,
wooden doors and heavy coats,
cars in the snow rushing by our open windows,
hot cocoa, creaking bedsprings, and
singing–

I have been listening for the music in the things here–
I have searched in comforters, in stone walls,
in laundry and ramen,
in slippers and open mouths and pencils and elevators and doors and coats and cars and snow and windows and chocolate and bedsprings and everyday I try to remember something else I can dissect:
some texture, some melody, some pattern, some rhythm
where you might exist too,
but your music
is nowhere else.

we live in big empty houses now,
in hardwood floors and toothpaste-flavored loneliness.
I can still hear our shoeboxes
and feel the pull of our gravity
somewhere
fading ...

All this war and yet, there is nothing I would rather be.

I have grown to appreciate,
            as a nonpartisan–
            a silent sommelier–
the subtle earthy notes of irony with which
my deflated ego scolds my hollow spine.

I know my own hypocrisy, my instability, my naivete.

I have been raised in the midst of myself–
I carved and nailed these philosophies together to make trellises
around which my elastic grapevine limbs have learned
to wrap and coil and hoist themselves toward the sun.

I have built myself,
and I, alone, tend to my vineyard.

There are distortions in these wooden lattices,
and there are seasons when the grapes grow sour
or the vines do not flower
at all,
but the crop is resilient and the wood does not break,
and there is enough sunshine here
in the summertime to sustain
and to yield something complexly beautiful because it has been weak,
and it has known the cold.

I have built myself,
and I, alone, tend to my vineyard.

There are plots of land far more fertile than this one,
foundational structures far sturdier and more symmetrical,
grapes far sweeter and more robust of flavor,
but there is no wine I would rather have flood my veins;
there is nothing I would rather be.

She squints her stubbornly sapphire eyes
            so she doesn't have to see
                        how sharp the edges of the world
                                    really are
She blasts music through earbuds
                        into her sensitive ears
                        even though it kills and burns
            so she doesn't have to hear
                        the truth about people
                                     or life
                                     or herself
She cuts scars in her soft skin
            that bleed the blaring music
            she forced into her head
                        so when they dry into scabs
            she won't have to feel
                        what dreams are really made of

Her eyes
            her ears
                        her skin
were a gift to her so that she might
see
            hear
                        feel
but the cruel, ugly world
is too much for her
            Why me?
                        she whispers
                        through hopeless tears and clenched teeth
            Why am I Chosen to see
                        the world
                        through the lens of raw reality?
She begs for
blindness
            deafness
                        no feeling
like the rest of them
It is too much for her
to be
truly

Aware

yet i stand again alone and cold
watching
an onslaught of angry wet bullets
pummel my peanut-shaped torso

if every midnight a new ghost
was born to loop again through my day
all my naked peanut-shaped torsos
would be standing here
too
all my red veiny feet burning a hole
through the white ceramic floor
and thousands of the same absent brown eyes
watching
– only a few
seeing

all my fingertips work in sync
rubbing face cream into
millions of layers of sticky skin
as our gurgling stomachs tie themselves into knots
and we record in our dejected minds like abused children
shivering in the corner of our skulls

the sickening feeling of
being both
perpetrator and victim

i started going to therapy when i
felt my legs buckling
under the weight of my heart

when
i knew that
it had become so drenched and
dripping with guilt and longing that i
couldnt possibly carry it
anymore

even still
morning felt like
            sharp red stings
                        in the papery skin stretched over my
                        temples and eyelids
            and tasted like salt and secrets in a thick paste
                        on my lips and tongue

even still
day always left me with
            imprints of bathroom floor tiles
                        on my throbbing forehead
            stains from your raspberry laughter
                        in my ears
            and fresh wounds from your dagger eyes
                        penetrated deep into the concave surface of my sternum
                        i couldnt help it that my scars were in cursive
                        and read like poetry

even still
at night
            i cried because my head wouldnt forget
                        those dream-colored moments with you
            i cried because every day your eyes told me that you had
            i cried because your laughter tasted like you never knew
            i cried because my heart swelled heavier every day
                        and my arms
were getting tired

i stopped going to therapy when
in my white dress and
            t-bar high heels you said you liked that one time
i drove myself home
            after graduation

when
with a straight face and dry eyes
i knew id never see you again
and my heart
would never need
any more carrying

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.

there were golden forests
and skies like seas

feathered magenta sunrise
floating on silver breeze

and under rosy ecstasy
the grass sang
"all is but a dream"


there were boundless scarlet sunsets
spidery grey trees

slender green shadows
yellow sidewalks agleam

and as spindly limbs swung quietly
the grass sang
"all is but a dream"


there were blood orange moons
seeping like molasses through
blackened open wounds

sandy-grey clouds swallow the skies
their toothy gaping mouths smothering cries

and as the sun turns to ash and steam
and dusky fields burn at the seams  

the rotting grass hisses  
"all was but a dream"

The poets
have staked a claim.
They are not always the type to decide
or declare such things, but
on the matter of the Season of Beautiful Death,
they have unanimously put their dissociated feet down––
Autumn belongs to the poets.

They plant their feet like roots and stand
with limbs like bent branches in half-hesitant salutation of
the low-hanging sun,
and of the wind that smells dangerously
like the citrus-salty sweat on the sternums of
lovers who have long forgotten them,
like smears of strawberry sunset-stained tears on
sticky steering wheel leather,
like caramel-amber irises that they could only then taste by
licking the syrup off the cursive characters
in their own love poems.

Here, now,
with these stacks of decades still decaying in the corners
of our ugly, cluttered crowns,
this is our ritual:
squinting up at the lavender-blue sky, we
concede that we are still broken – (alive, but dying) –
and reinitiate ourselves
as poets.

We breathe in this different kind of death, this
​beautiful
death –
our sticky strawberry reds and caramel ambers displayed like artwork on
these glorious twisted giants –
and we can
pretend we
believe that we
and our heartbreak,
too, are beautiful.

And we look on with aching solidarity
as they burst
into a fireworks display
of a funeral.

I want to exist in a way that floods my capillaries with
the silver sparkling sea foam that erupts out of the sky-colored lake
and fizzles out like I do,
like I will.

take me with you,
seagulls and woman in bohemian jewelry
and billowing brown—

I want to exist in a way that I will never.

until my palms can absorb crocuses,
crumble into sand and soil for them to grow networks of roots
in my bloodstream, I will cry by the water
and every time

I see men with white beards and squinted blue eyes riding bicycles,
years swirling behind them as they pass because
they already know how to live,
how to accumulate life distilled from tumult.

it is too much for my drying throat to hear the orchestra
without being able to drink its dripping scarlet passion,
to nourish myself with it,

but I could not live without the smell of music.

I don’t know what I came to do here,
so take me with you,
ocean and seagulls and bohemian woman and old men on bicycles with secrets, and
take me with you, violins, in a way that you cannot,
nor that I can even describe to you.

someone took a pair of scissors to the sky today,
the way the light burst through a sliced-open seam in the storm clouds,
the city across the lake still in a fog and the water
in a tantrum

you are all chocolate curls and puppy dog eyes,
family fireplace warmth,
lips magnetized to my skin and transparent smiles,
and she's quiet in silver revelatory haze--

in this quantum-split universe I've been
living in the wrong halves, in the storms, and even I
would have rather been left for dead
again

but your palms make me angry that I ever
trained myself to swallow rain,
convinced I could make dresses out of fog--
I am angry that I wanted anything besides you,

and I love you,
the way you glow with fervent comfort,
dripping in sunlight

we're all the same, aren't we?
beaming rainwater-soaked prayers through our windows into the cloudy cold twilight or the red morning,

reading underneath creamy lampshade light,
teakettle steam fogging up our wooden cabinet doors,
twinkling kitchen high hats like tiny constellations in a cosmos of homes...

I know that I am not alone in the way the boy sitting in the restaurant window shifted his weight onto his left leg and tucked it underneath him,
in how the girl in white sneakers hopped over the puddle in the sidewalk,
in coathooks and shoeracks and umbrellas and rubber boots,
in the things we have made to protect and aid ourselves against the rawness of the earth.

and I miss your home, your rusty pans in the sink and rough gray towels, your irish butter and frozen burritos in the fridge and nothing else,

but there are so many lives and so many mornings shared among them to comfort me; I am not alone--
we are all missing homes, love, and I am better knowing that I am only feeling what I am supposed to.

With plastic crown atop his head
and draped in splendid royal red,

he arched his back and struck a pose
to loud applause from costume rows:

the pilgrims bowed and paid respects,
all masks and hats his new subjects,

the ghouls and ghosts saluted too,
and, standing tall, he liked the view.

When spinning 'round to win more cheers
from Mother who must be in tears

to see her son no longer small–
but as a lord, a god, of all,

he found that he was there alone
and where she'd gone he did not know.

Forgetting all his lofty dreams,
he felt unraveled at the seams–

the costumes then all came alive,
with teeth and blood and crazy eyes.

The king who once was lord of all,
lay crying, sobbing, feeling small.

A hand then pressed upon his back–
his mom had found the royal rack,

and wiping tears from burning eyes,
he wished he'd trusted his disguise.

the alarm clock
in my childhood bedroom
has always been
fast by a minute or 2

every month or so i
realign the last digit
with Apple's universal truth

and every month it
slips
out of sync
again

it must be off by such a small fraction
of a second
i tried to calculate it once
0.00001 some-odd something
one brick so minimally out of place
causing the gradual collapse of a skyscraper

i havent found the energy lately
to practice this ritual
and today

my old clock
is fast by 3 minutes
neon green bars flickering silently
marching on
announcing fates to the unwilling and
making
rash judgements

there was nothing i planned to do
with those 3 minutes
and i knew it was
justified in its conviction

but i
realigned the last digit
and watched for 3 minutes
the green flickering rhythmically against
the black screen
climbing minute by minute
finalizing again
my execution

when I fall
I fall hard

and fast
deep and
heavy

my heart eroding
            in the acid of its newest
discovery

            I hate

that
it only pumps when
            its blood is draining and
its fibers are being eaten
            
            alive

when I fall
I fall hard

rib cage swelling
            hinges nearly snapping
                        cracking
                       ­ breaking
as it unfolds
             and remolds
to fit

            you

when I fall
I fall hard

in my mind's echo chambers
my own voice dissolves into air and whispers
            its unconditional surrender

            I only hear yours
                        in eerie
            reverberating eternities

when I try to breathe

my lungs only
have room
for

y
            o                        u
              ­          y                        o                        u
   ­         y            o            u
y                           ­                         o                                       u
            y            o            u
                       ­ y                        o                        u
            ­o                        u
y
             o             u

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.

the sunwarmed stone singes the long-dormant nerves in my adult fingers and suddenly I
remember what pear trees used to smell like in June,
as backyard swing rope burns emerge on my inner thighs underneath my slacks
and sweat cooled by dusk on the back of my neck.

the heat accumulated over years of summers
is my loss of virginity too, and I realize now that pear trees
in August smell like ***,
like sweat and shame.

there is a handful of jolly ranchers and pack of cigarettes
on his bedside table,
to which, afterwards, he says, "take what you want"
and I wish that I could as freely as he took me,
but I am no longer angry at men for this because
I know I could just as easily have done the same.

we all have to decay somehow,
after the pleasure like candy we take from each other
and **** out of the earth to consume in glut,
and after suffocating each other with our selfishness --
what more appropriate fate than sugar and smoke?

so hesitantly I take one of each to his balcony and do my penance,
and hear him come up behind me to take my hips into his palms
and when I feel sick I think about my mother's pear tree,
despite its history and crimes still flowering every spring.

”yet the fervent flame that fuels her will flatten her to bodilessness” — bodiless by Christina Weiler

her blades like
shiny silver roots
            dug into
cold white soil

shaped thighs and calves
ankles forged from steel
firm and strong
            s    t    r    o    n    g
know their frictionless home
            better than the restrictive
                        ground for mortals
she learned to
            skate
                        before she could
crawl

the chill that
            penetrates
her
does not freeze–
it
            charges her body
                        fizzles in her blood
fills her lungs with
            red hot molten
                        fury

each powerful
            gut-wrenching
            scratch
          ­              scrape
            sharp            edge
carves
   ­         echoing prayers into
the heart of her
            unforgiving god

ordered
            by a world that doesn't
            understand where she came from
                        (whether heaven or hell no one really knows or cares)
to shatter
            the ice dreams that saved (or cursed) her
to obey
            the ground
to pretend that she will find that thrill—
            find herself— in
            something else

but through the aches she knows
she will never
forget

your memory isn't quite so loud anymore–
you've dwindled
into a two-dimensional
grayscale outline

you don't have much color left
            to bleed into my fingertips
            when I try to remember
that used to leave me
            blissfully intoxicated and
            helplessly madly addicted
no it's

faded and everything's
quite tame now

now I suppose I'm
just
missing you quietly

waiting
            as you still bubble
            on the back burner–
the steam has begun to dissipate and I've
            started to survey the mess I made while
            hopelessly blind

now I guess I'm
just
missing you quietly

feeling the heat of your palms
            evaporate and
waiting

waiting for my skin to remember
            how to fend for itself against the cold
                        – I wish you knew how much it still stings –
hearing the last remnants of your voice in soft broken echoes–
            consonants whispered into the breeze
wondering

as I watch you
fade

if I will
            ever
draw in color
again?

I still find myself summoning you

even after I have been numbed and dulled and
painted greyscale,
the crawlspace between my bones and skin filled with spent ashes...

my stomach has learned to fold origami butterflies when she
feels like reminiscing,
missing when her floors weren't littered in corpses...

I still find myself summoning you

when I think that I have found a potent lighter fluid,
just to check that he still isn't enough,
and remember that I am still underwater...

I still find myself summoning you

playing your music, singing your songs in the voice that used to sing with you, and I am envious of it as it follows the melody from a memory I exhumed tonight because
it sounds like it remembers you better than I do,

but in the end I am glad I am forgetting you
even though it will never be my choice to let go
because perhaps one day I won't remember
what it was like to sing with you,
and I won't even notice I'm
underwater

I want a million pictures of the moment I'm kissing your cheek
to see what I look like in love,
and I want to see their faces flinch
just a little at the red sparks
popping and jumping between us

I want your black curly hair on my pillow cases and
in between my fingers while you're driving up
and down hills, face brightened by the city lights in the distance
that make you quiet and lean over the steering wheel in awe

I want to wake up with you on the pull-out in your parents'
living room, to the rushing sound of the ocean you grew up on,
biking up and down the coast,
your freckled nose and collection of memories just a little smaller

I want to sing you to sleep every night,
but not as badly as I want to watch you play guitar,
fingers remembering, listening,
I know you can tell when it sounds beautiful
and see the scarlet flames licking
up my neck and ears when I hear it too

I want to hear you say "hello, Little One" to toddlers
swinging their arms and grinning at your soft warmth
every day of my life

I want to dance with you, dead tired, half naked in the quiet
early hours of the morning

I've never been afraid of you and I never will be

I love you and no distance will change my mind

I want you and as we grow up together I'll only want you more

she finds that time is not linear
in the gospel-like gold and amber
that glaze the green poplar leaves
in her suburban summer evenings

what is she left to be?
she with a warrior's heart
but with legs in tired atrophy

at dusk the water ripples with silver-toned echoes
whispering mythical adventures and heroes
and the words churn and boil in her mythical blood
"I would rather be ashes than dust!"

what is she left to be?
she with a warrior's heart
but with legs in tired atrophy

every night still she stargazes through her ceiling
a coward's tears on her cheeks slowly peeling
courage like corn husks from her ancient soul
leaving her core shivering in the dust and dusty cold

what is she left to be?
she with a warrior's heart
freezes
with legs in tired atrophy

My loneliness makes me taste like toothpaste
because over the course of my shame-polluted day,
regrets pile up like grime in my gums, and she
likes to pretend,
(hundreds of miles deep into the night),
that brushing my teeth for an extra two minutes or so
renders me finally clean, and
forgotten.

She makes me use the peppermint that stings, because
it’s easier for me to picture the rotten remains of my
ugly, fumbled words losing their sticky grip
on the insides of my cheeks,
dissolving in fizzles and bubbles and fire as if in
flavored acid.

My loneliness tastes like hair and
skin pulled taut over bent knees
because she imagines that her set of
tired, unwanted bones fit together
like an awkward origami cocoon enclosing,
(shrinking)
my repulsive, obtrusive body.

And she folds around me
despite the sharp, stabbing aches
in my curved spine and knotted appendages
because we have learned that her skeleton
is the only thing that will protect
me.

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.

I decided one day
            as a child of no more than seven
that when I grow up
            and have children of my own
I will name my first daughter
            Celeste
☽      ☆      ☽      ☆      ☽      ☆      ☽
My baby girl Celeste...
            stardust shimmering in her black eyes
                        hair the color of red giants
            Saturn's rings on her delicate fingers
                        comets coursing through her veins
            constellations on her cheeks and collar bones
☽      ☆      ☽      ☆      ☽      ☆      ☽
She will daydream too much
            but her teachers will understand
                        that she does not belong in this world.
Her laugh will be as brilliant
            as glowing nebulae
                        flowing purple silk
                                    trillions of miles wide
                        floating in the void
            bursting with new life
If you make her angry
            she will turn you to ice
                        2.7 Kelvin
            crystallize your tears
            make your breath
                        freeze
☽      ☆      ☽      ☆      ☽      ☆      ☽
But if she loves you
                        like she will love me
            she'll never leave you
Because my Celeste loves you more
            than the Sun loves the Earth
            than black holes love the light
            than galaxies love their stairs
and she'll love you until
the universe itself
            stops
cold.

through my apartment wall I can hear my neighbor writing on a chalkboard,
only a couple of scratches every night,
and I think he must be making tally marks:
another block of time passed stacked on all other passed time, segmented for ease of reference or glorification or
erasure...

there are cobwebs inside the gaps of my joints --
I am 21 and I have been kissed and I have
tripped and fallen and burned myself on hot metal and
drunk too much sobbing from the alcohol sloshing inside my organs and dissolving holes in my soft tissue and I have
tried Christian novels when I felt aimless and lonely and
been undressed by people I don't speak to anymore and
my body is a haphazard concoction of chemicals,
some ash and some poison accumulating already
into something irreversible...

my body and my mind is a sandbox I've been ******* with in pitch black, hoping a fistful that I throw one day will at least hit a light switch,
and I must have packed a pile of sand too high because now she misses you,
all her concavities ache for you... and
I'm not sure she knows who she misses, in particular,
just that she used to have a hand to hold in the dark,
and that she doesn't anymore.

In a large mixing bowl, add:
- 1 ½ cups all-purpose existential anxiety
- 1 ¾ teaspoons philosophical meanderings
- ½ teaspoon purple fatigue from the under-eye
and beat
and beat
and beat
for an hour or two or
until the mixture becomes a pale periwinkle.
​
In a separate bowl, cream together
- 1 cup sticky nostalgia
- 2 cups creamy moonlight, chilled
then crack 2 large wet pupils, at max capacity,
and mix, watching the salty yolks
dissolve sugary memories,
until time travel
begins to make you sick.
​
Then, stir in ½ cup sweat
from folded creases and crannies,
pour the batter carefully into a greased pan,
and bake underneath hot cotton bedsheets.

While waiting,
pluck 6 of the brightest stars out of the black sky,
pound into flat sheets, then
collect 6 pearls of hardened regret
and wrap each in a star.
​
When the cake turns a greenish-grey,
uncover and
top with star pastries
and pink marshmallows
from the early sunrise.

i.
i was 7 when my sister pointed at my chest
covered by a loose pajama t-shirt
and said “you really ARE getting ***** aren’t you?” and laughed
and i
ran back to my room and cried
and thought about how
i could saw them off
without
the blood attracting too much
attention
so until i could figure out a way i
kept my shoulders hunched over
to hide myself

ii.
i was 8 when my mother bought me a bra
she scrunched it up in a plastic shopping bag
into a ball she concealed in one tight fist
she came up to my room
quietly
carefully closed the door behind her
whispering as she knelt in front of me
unwrapped my new shameful secret

iii.
i was 10 when my father first
grabbed my shoulders and told me to
stand up straight
gave me a lecture about bad posture
told me stories about old women nobody ever wanted because they look like turtles- can’t pick up their heads to look at you
i could only tune him out because
i couldn’t tell him that id much rather sink
into the hardened concavity of my aching spine
than be seen

iv.
i was 13 when i got my period during a test in school
feeling the weight of another secret on my
already-bent spine
only made me cry again
only affirmed the stereotypes we were trying to shatter
in the minds we were trying to change
i begged the nurse not to call my mom
but she choked the phone number out of me
and that night my mother couldn’t
speak to me without that pitying, distanced
look in her eye that i hated so much
but it burned the confidence i might have had to say something

v.
i was 15 when i told my father i didn’t want to go swimming
that i just didn’t feel like it
let him conclude that i was self-conscious, embarrassed,
too much to even say so like
every other woman he had ever known in his life
and he told me i had to be more adventurous
that he was worried i was never going to have fun in my life
never going to be outgoing enough to get by
while i held back tears and the voice about to say “I’m on my period”

vi.
i looked
in the mirror
and allowed myself
for a moment
to notice the body i was trying so hard
to evaporate
i felt
so defeated
that it was still there

there was pain swelling
growing like a cyst
pushing against the backs of my retinas
pressing through my papery skin and cradling
my eyes in
tired
bruises

my pathetic reflection told me
i hated living in secret
flattening my chest so no one can accuse me of being a woman
shutting the door so i can pour hydrogen peroxide on stained bedsheets because i can’t put them in the family’s washing machine
stealing my mother’s razor and shaving everywhere to look like the other spotless girls at school

i hate the whispering
the hunching
the hiding
and pretending

vii.
there is not much
a few pretty strokes of ink can do
but
i am here now
to write about
shouting
about truth-telling
and openness
about rebuilding and restoring
and change

change for shattered girls who hate themselves like i did
much more than i did
whose hunched spines break under the pressure of the unseen
who set torches to their Power and burn themselves to ashes

no more ******* secrets.

Tell me who this child is––
this Boy King of Cinnamon Orange Forest,
glowing rosy and regal in late October light––

christened by Pennsylvania Sun with freckles dotting
his tiny scrunched-up nose,
and streaks of shiny golden-blonde in his pin-straight russet-brown hair...

Toothless Prince of Red Cheeks and Knuckles,
with eyes pressed closed in firecracker laughter,

when did you last cry?

Can you see the black grease stains on your calloused working palms when you are 15 years older and taller and bigger and rougher and a thousand miles away from here?
Can you feel the boots on your feet and contact lenses in your eyes and splitting pain in your shins and fire in your voice and knots of glorious rage and obsession and passion in your stomach and

can you feel my fingers
in yours,
loving you –– tiny toothless sunkissed you ––
and all of you for always?

Did your heart always know who you are?

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.

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.

the next day the rumors had already stained the walls
            red as the shame on your freckled cheeks

everyone knew what you had done

the words passed around like morning coffee
            poured half-n-half with frothy nervous laughter
            snickers and side glances

"cassie kissed a girl with blue hair in the parking lot of glory days"

they must have been watching you
seen you in the moment you wanted to protect from them the most
             to bury deep inside your guilty heart

but you were their entertainment at glory days instead
            the perfect accompaniment
            for their 1am pancakes and gossip
emma glanced out the window
            and in the dim amber light of the parking lot she spotted you
                        and your girl with blue hair next to your car
            watched her take your shaking hand
                        caress your cheekbone
and they all laughed at their perfectly-timed sideshow
            laughed at the love you couldnt help but feel
shrieked shamelessly
            syrupy mouths full of pancake
            when you lifted her bowed head and kissed her gently
they were taking notes of every movement for school tomorrow

as i watched them break you apart
i hoped so badly that you didnt notice them there
            that you didnt see them pointing from the window
            that you didnt know they were selling pieces of you
            that you didnt hear them laughing
            that they would all forget

and if you knew i hope they couldnt take your pride away
            that you would always remember it as just
            you and your girl with blue hair
            in the parking lot of glory days

can i ask you–
            my last request
            ill ever ask of
                        anyone
will you
            **** everything i was
            leave no molecule of ink or
                        inkling of madness

burn all my poetry
            and swallow the pathetic pride
                        escaping in the fumes
scrub my skin
            boil down all the feathered hope you can find
                        it is the only half-decent detergent for tear-stains
            scrape until i glow
wash out my throat
            bleach the mold with indifferent silence
                        if you lay it thick enough
                        the words should lose their sticky grip on the walls
            and drown my lungs in perfume
use forks and trowels fashioned from steel apathy
            to pick out the overgrown weeds rooted deep
                        in every crevice of my brain
            dig out the parasitic seedlings of poetry never written
                        plans never executed
                        fantasies never realized
                        words never understood                        
                        storie­s never told

            **** them all
superglue the shards of whatever is left
            so she
                        will never know enough
                        to care
and bury me
            in the clothes she touched
                        when she told me
                        she loved me

girl
with sun-kissed cheekbones
and golden-red hair
fingertips brushing daisies
in the warm summer air

girl
with freckles like stars
tears like silver prayers
don't stray too far
in the warm summer air

the sun's hugs feels like home
the daisies like angel hair
but when the sun sleeps
you can't stay
in the warm summer air

you've fled too far
in the warm summer air
shadows stain
your golden-red hair
raging hot stars
outshine your freckles
and I cannot answer
your helpless silver prayers

the night swallowed
your daisies without care
ashes cover
your golden-red hair
but promise me
you'll learn
to see through despair
to keep reaching
to keep dreaming
of your

warm
summer air

Poets don't see what people see
          I'll show you a treasure trove
                    of pearls twinkling with metallic luster
and all you'll be able to see
          is rain
I'll gasp and excitedly point
          to mysterious black calligraphy
                    carefully inked onto the purple and orange
                    bruised back of the horizon
and the harder you look
          the more you will only see
          a tree that has lost its leaves

Poets don't see what people see
          but that doesn't mean what we see
                    isn't there
With knives of love
          hate
                    joy
          anger
     ­               nostalgia and
          agony
we whittle away at ordinary things
          until our poetry emerges
dripping with color and glitter
                    a perfect replica
                    of the glowing soul within

scoop your old coffee mug
into the sunrise
fill two-thirds
with steaming pink and yellow brew
and one-third
with crisp cool breeze

mix in a few crystals
of shimmering sunlight
from the drowsy trees

pinch a few strands
of silver cotton candy
from the bellies of the clouds
stir until dissolved

close your eyes
and sip slowly