Everything is too
sugar-spine, salt-lipped,
staticstitched and jitterglow.
I can’t sit still
without turning into
a girl-shaped emergency.
I keep my synonyms in jars—
one for ache,
one for almost,
one for the word I made up
that means I miss you so much I become a faucet.
Language is a loose tooth.
I tongue it until it bleeds metaphor.
Call it poetry.
Call it coping.
Call it anything but what it is:
me, peeling the world into vowels
because I’m scared if I say what I mean,
you’ll hear it.
And then what?
You’ll answer?
You’ll echo?
You’ll send a voice memo
saying same
and I’ll combust on the Q train
like a well-read matchbook?
God, I am so
caption-core,
pun-drunk,
rhyme-accident-prone.
I named my stomach pit afterthought.
I named my wrists reminder.
And I named you
don’t.
But I still say it
every time I open my mouth
to speak.
Some relationships are a loose tooth. You know you’re going to lose them, but you keep poking at it. This poem is about that—about obsessive love, about knowing better and doing it anyway, about aching where someone once was and still is. Language with a wobble. Feeling that throbs. The before and after all at once.
