There’s a sway to the way you move
darling, like pieces falling into puzzled
places, a song in your hips and a soul in your
breast, in your chest, on your
mind;

Let the color roll on out of you, like the
waves that emptied you at home, like the
flare of your skirt and laugh in your
throat, like the vibration of your ribs when you
sing;

Your clothes are just as much skin as they are
salvation, as they are an invitation, incantation,
invocation, of all the ways you lift your body towards
the sun; towards the sky;

To the fairest;

To the wave of your body, to the pieces you’re
missing, to the way you love like motion is
emotion, like freedom is a right, like there is
nothing you can’t do while your heart is still
beating;

To your confidence, your eloquence, the way your
eyelashes fall against your cheeks, how you make
love like a thunderstorm, drink tea like
meditation, dance like honey, laugh like spring is
coming;

To the one who lives and flows and
sings, the one who wears flowers in her
hair, the one who speaks of the end like it’s
the beginning and never learned how to
stop;

Raise a glass;
Break the plinth;
You need no apple to prove your worth.

I wrote this five times over because it wouldn't come out quite right. Because I’m tired, and there’s nothing I can hear but the silent chatter of my mind on repeat, screaming at me to be better than I am (better than I can be).

In January, we slept in the same bed and I dreamed of kissing you, of taking your hand in mine and pulling you close and never letting go. I followed you around like a lost puppy as you talked about nothing but home.

In February, I was told to wait and left to wonder and doubt and dream. My thoughts swirled until I convinced myself that there was nothing between us but my arms reaching out for you as you turned away (not out of spite, but because you didn’t know).

Felicity, you call me Serenity but I am by far the best at convincing myself that I am unloved, and by far the worst at thinking that I’m worth loving. Felicity, you have been extraordinary from the day I met you, a cacophony of color and beauty that shocked me and entranced me. You are all that I want curled around me at night; you are beautiful and wonderful and mine.

Felicity, most times I am not quite there. I am in the past or the future or the could-have-beens. I am not always whole. I am not whole. It’s hard, for me, to give the entirety of myself when I have trouble finding it, when it’s rotten and breaking and lonely and hiding.

I’m afraid of the dark and blue cheese. I don’t like hypocrites or the way I act when I feel like I can’t breathe. My mouth is bitter from too much coffee, my mind is buzzing from too much worry, my hands are empty because I can hold nothing without it slipping away from me in the end (it was never there in the first place). But you- you are a certainty, and I don’t know if I want to cry but I do know that I want to hold you forever and kiss you a hundred times until you know that you’re worth more than should be possible.

In January, the ball dropped over Erie Bay and I looked past the stumbling drunkards to see you, cheeks pink with cold, and wondered what it would be like to be brave. Now it’s November, and I backspace the ending words to each goodnight text and think about the very same thing. There's sugar in the edges of your fabric, darling, chalk dust kicked up along the road, and I am better when you smile; I am home.

The flames in her lonely eyes
ignite flowers in her wake;
bright blooms twist in a wreath
to crown a queen, though
she’d rather her footsteps be
encircled with love;

Her footprints fill with pearl water,
pinky finger hooked with mine;
I can feel the love she doesn’t know
she has flow through her veins
and from her smile into my sighs;

I miss walking beside her,
fiery water licking our toes;
but she’s become so afraid
she can’t trust in me
or her compass to guide us home;

We follow lanterns hung from treetops
make a path where we’ve not gone
with pixie dust trails
and fairy garden archways
and the second star to the right;

Straight on ‘till dawn.

I lie facedown on the tallest tree branch, hair bleeding into greenish-brown wood that tastes like dark rain. I reach my hand up and curl it, ring finger to thumb, just within my sightline. My fingers feel soft against each other, slick with moss and the places between the bark that glisten with last night’s rain. The circle I form with my hand fits perfectly around the edge of sunlight melting over the horizon and I stare until my eyes begin to burn.
My grandmother once told me that the cure for anything could always be found somewhere in the world. “It might not be five minutes away,” she had said, pinching tea into bags that had gentle embroidery along the edges. “But it’s out there. Be careful what you give away to find it.”
I close my eyes. Open them. Smile at an aphid making a home for itself on a twig near the sun between my fingers. I like this silence before my house and my friends wake and take away the light. I like the cadence to the world, the light between my fingers, the water against my cheek and the rhythm of my heart slowing down. I put down roots with the old oak tree, drinking in the medicine of the mineral rain.

Well you know boy, if you play the earth in a game of loaded dice you'll find out real quick that it don't roll so great on empty gravel with all them melting icecaps shiftin' the balance.

And you know girl, the dealer's gonna say "Your loss, my gain," and give the ****** dice right back to you, melting poles and all. "Try a stretch of universe full of cheaper stars if you wanna get rid of that ****."

And kid you'll take that dice and pay the price because all the guns they say they have ain't gonna stop the world from goin' bad real fast as that dealer smirks and says "Not much time left 'till it's gone. Not much time at all."

"This is nothing," she says (like nothing is the touch of her lips or kisses of freckles or anything she says with her eyes that I'll miss when she turns away).

"It never was anything," I say (like never is the day I first met her and was swept under the current under the water under the sheets under her skin)

So we go now (so it goes, going, gone) our separate ways-
In a parking lot at midnight (asphalt gravestones and keys in our hands and does it say something about us (about me) that we're safer walking home alone in the dark than we ever were with inches between our hands).

No one ever told us we shouldn't try to make ourselves two of a kind but it's too late now (we meshed the parts that hurt and the buzzing of the streetlights reminds me of her and the way she looked at 2am when I first realized that she no longer made me smile)