I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

I was born in the cold
of the waters, shivering and crying
in the embrace of an armless mother, wrapping around me too tight,
too warm, too hard, too much.
Everything was too much and I
was drowning in it.
I was born drowning.

There was blood on my body then,
and in my mouth,
on my teeth and tongue,
when you hit me yesterday.
When you said it would never be enough.
But no price is too much,
not for you.
I would pay anything, anything
to be by your side,
to feel your flames licking my heart.
I am full of cinders and
cherry blossoms,
trees born from nothing and dying
from nothing,
painted purple by a battlefield blessing,
plum kisses on hands and wrists and forehead,
salt in the air, in your tears, from
the sea on my skin, always.

Write me a hymnal for all the things we must forget,
a rhyme for all to be stolen,
for each barbed wire and rust
sunset painted on my skin in the desert’s forgiveness.  
Because it will forgive me, in the end.
It always does.
And when my body rises, darkly,
from a sand and calcite tomb,
be ready:
for the ocean always reclaims what it has given,
and even its gifts bear a price.

My neck is open and my hands are gone.
No, sweetheart, I don't where or when they’ll be back.
They’re just
                 gone.
My skin is dissolving. It’s melting off; I'm only marrow and sinew
                         and muscle, bubbling and festering, and I
               can’t reach around the sun to get to
You.         I can’t.
I can’t, it’s too far, it’s too hard,
                  and you know I would give you my
life-blood if I could
but I can’t.
Because the sun is too wide around and I
don't have the hands,
                     don’t have any hands, to reach inside,
Schluff off flesh, sickly as it is,
and rip out what you need,
                                           whatever you need:
I would.
I would give it you without hesitation, without penance, without
                                          mercy.
If you want me ruthless and bloodied, then I      
    will carve your name into my heart-skin and whisper it on the wind.
You are on the moon and gravity is a shackle: tell the stars I want to come home.
Tell the stars I have
                      vultures pecking at my liver
and there is a girl,
                singing, behind the rock, behind my eyes,
                             just out of reach.
Is it you, sweetheart? Are you my golden sunshine girl, singing softly where I can’t see you?
                 I just want to see you. I just want my hands back and my
skin back and these bones shoved back into place, ripped out, ripped off, whatever.
                Whatever you have to do, I’m game.
Is it cold up there?       Is there room for me, still?
I built a ladder from my failures and called it Perseverance.
     Call it a royal flush, call the doctor, call my lawyers and my mothers, but this
room is a closet and the closet is empty.
All the clothes are
on the floor. All the clothes are
on my body but I am still so, so cold.
                      I think the sun and I are feuding. I think he cursed me. I broke a rib trying to reach, reach around him and when I felt it snap, I
                   just took it out with teeth and spite and placed it on a pedestal in his altar. Placed it in a
              museum, and called it Discovery. And then I left. I’m leaving, sweetheart.
Tell the stars I’m coming home.

I got in my car and drove west,
                                        police song playing on the radio and sirens, wailing, on my left,
only to stop my car five feet in front of
a dead cow,
                    gutted and rotten,
bones pecked clean and free by that which I ran from.
The air around it was dead,
heavy on my tongue like fresh rainfall,
and I was twelve years old, in a bathtub,
                 trying to figure out
                                         how to die.

But then lightning struck and
                                             my power went out and
              the cow caught fire.
And then I caught fire.

I couldn’t answer his questions because
there was still ash in my throat
and I was still choking. I was choking.

He offered me a glass of water but
                                             that only made mud pour
      over my tongue and through
my lungs,
            clogged pores and sinuses.
So now I was drowning in tar and
                                        a hand brushed mine, so I grabbed it.
                      I couldn’t tell which way was up.
I got pulled deeper.

I died in the lake but they still asked me questions.
I died in that lake and got stopped when I tried to leave.

The moon swallowed around a mouthful of bile and blood,
sangria rising in its throat,
orange knocking on its forehead and honeysuckles falling at its feet,
and turned its back on its humble worshippers.

I threw my bridal bouquet backwards into the ******* void and fell onto the shore,
the sea chasing my heels
angry at only having itself to fight and we laughed. We laughed and the world laughed back, the flowers and bees and dust settling where you left.
Everywhere was where you left.
                You were gone
                                     and the house was about to burn, burning, burnt so
       I told my teacher my homework burnt and she gave me an F and I told her my heart was ash and she gave me an F and my throat filled with cinder and my lungs filled with copper. My lungs filled with copper, rotted away the gold
and with the gold gone I began to
                                                              ­ shame myself, for I was imperfect.
I was imperfect and I was
                                       marble and I was copper and I couldn’t feel
     my hands or my feet or anything, anymore.
The moon left and it took away my lungs and my knuckles and left me bleeding in the
    stairwell on my birthday,
ruined.
I was copper and kerosene and ruined,
soiled, in its abandon. I lay fallow and my eyes had shutters and the clouds were
                                suddenly antediluvian in their loss and in their weight, heavy and
        waiting for another chance to unite the sea with the earth and the earth with bile and the bile with holy water: the floods were coming.
                    The water would pour, was pouring, poured and my gold-turned-copper rusted and I couldn’t move to chase after you and then you were gone.
                                                           ­                                                                 ­         I can’t blame you.
I would leave too, if I could.
                            But my joints froze over like the dead in the lake and you were gone so I had no reason to fight to free myself, or anyone else.
               Before you left, I told you if this means anything then carve it on a cave wall and draw me in blood but you didn’t hear me because the door had already
                                               shut.
My whispers didn’t reach. I knocked from the inside, but you had locked it.
              I knocked from the inside
                                         but my wrist snapped
               and then I snapped and then the world snapped back. I looked through
           the window in the door and the bars
    framed your shoulders like pillars
of some ancient grecian coliseum, of some Shakespearean tragedy, or trees in a forest.
Trees, the space between them,
                                      and the earth beneath our feet, crumpling like origami and folding like cards.
              The ground shattered and so did my heart, the trees fell and so did my hopes, the birds fled as the sky bled out, pink and purple and red, and they took my hands with them so
       I couldn’t do anything. I had no hands,
                                             how could I work?
But someday the birds must land. And someday I will oil my joints, my rust will break. The moon will come home and the clouds will deplete. Someday my hands will attach onto my wrists backwards, and I will write you love letters backwards, and we will live, happily, backwards.

You walk to the woods from the mountains too fast;
trip over your feet when blades of grass nip at your heels
and take up life amongst the low.
Flotsam swirls in your wake;
silt rises to meet you.
The sun sets in deference to your arrival.

You walk among a sea of azaleas and fire:
******-thorned crown:
smoke laying low over the ground protecting your footfalls,
come to convince me of my damnation,
spill mulch in my bed,
and track lake water through my rooms.

You walk with broken glass in your heels
and blood on your cheeks,
spilt milk smile and sickly sweet lips,
cradling a dead bird and a lead heart in your hands
with a gallows leash hanging off your neck, onto the ground.

You walk into the house of my elders,
the sacred burial ground,
the meeting place,
the palace,
and the bar.
You order a scotch on the rocks, a lapis circlet, a book full of secrets, dead man’s blood, and my heart.

You walk backwards
around the cherry blossom orchard and its overwrought signatures,
harrumphing at arrogant petals and snickering birds:
politic in reverse and rough lines in slow motion.
There is something you forgot: it wears white linen and
sits on a rose throne.
You loved it, once.

You walk to the mountains from the woods,
barefoot and starving,
caked in mud and licking the shine off your teeth.
Your knees are bleeding.
Your heart is bleeding

It was night until it wasn’t.
It was night until you crushed and ground
              the bones
to dust and swallowed around it.
Until you
               licked a stripe along a jaw
and laced your
             fingers in the notches
of a spine and
                                     called it holy,
               made it a sacrament.
The phone is ringing in another room, another house, another life.
The phone is ringing and you answer,
                                            but no one’s on the other line.
The phone is ringing and you answer,
                                              but it's not for you. The phone is ringing and
               you don’t answer.
Your lover walks into the room,
                                                      phone in hand,
and says 'how long will it be until you love me?'
You blink and the light turns silver,
                                              liquid moonlight hits your skin.
You blink
            and your lover walks in,
phone in hand, still ringing, and says
'it’s for you. your uncle’s dead.'
So you go the funeral, a different phone sitting like
        an anvil in your pocket,
and your aunt is the color
                                                   of famine.
There is wheat growing in the fields, still, although winter has sunk its teeth into the ground and ****** away its life.          
                                   Your uncle is buried under a broken sycamore tree,
still blackened from the fires, still shaking ash and dead leaves over the burial mound.
Your uncle is dead and interred in the fields of his farm.    
                                Your lover calls you on the different phone that your pocket protects and says 'if I were were double-headed and suspended in bliss, would you join me? if I broke your collarbone, would you forgive me? if I shoved your face in the gravel and spit in your mouth and snapped all your fingers and cracked open your head like an egg and told you how I really felt, would you still love me?' and you,    
                 standing next to the freshly-turned mulch, say “yes” and hang up.
                        You return to a hollow house, a room where the
light doesn’t quite reach,
and bathe in blood and milk.
Your lover rings like a bell,         like a flower opening and closing as if rehearsed, like a butterfly migrating,
                       like a deer’s head bursting open from the pressure of a bullet.
They ring and you come running,
                               slipping and spilling, from the waters.
You blink and, through the window,
see the dark-denim of the night.