someplace else, icarus has taken one look at the sun and recoils like a banished angel. lo, the cheerless shadows befogging. lo, the waxen wings he clipped — swallowed by solid ground. lo, the skies melt above the sea, in horror, as he falls in place over his bones and sinks into his sunless chest.

i can never love you the way i claim — delicately and without violence. i remember hating flowers and broken seashells, and my grandmother, hand-sewing pastel dresses. deep down, my bones are raised on stories of ancient wars and biblical battles carried from memory to memory, a string of generational blunders — i am made of my father's bitterness and my mother's denial. so i will love you with corruptions and apologies, with bled-out  veins, giving in like an emptied river, with all the poems i have read and forgotten, and with everything that makes me finitely human.

i am sorry but my bones will always love you like hell, like it was war, like the world needs to end in the process, like the hand of god, taking you out of my ribs and now he needs to return it back where it rightfully belong. i will always love you, in godless sacrilege. i am sorry if i don’t know any other way.

the world ends: it looks like an empty bed,
sheets running under your body the night before,
a faux lace dress caught in aventurine nails —
it fits like a memory, clings like an emptiness worn well.

together, we turned our backs on the saints,
but i pray to them like i haven't
forgotten a word; surely,
a plea is bound to keep you here
just long enough for me to forget:

the world ends: it looks like the corner table
where i last saw you; i pocket
my dizzying daydreams from across the street
and walk past a wormhole.

the world ends: it looks like wounded lips — pink daffodils
drunk on the slight touch of our fingers;
nothing heals from this.
new lovers will zip my skin open so carefully, with their
untainted hands
and find you buried; i never loved you
is all i say.

the world ends: it looks like a forgotten year
and some souls are always the first ones to leave
but i empty my veins, dredge up relics of your presence —
it still leaves me
disconcerted, breathless;
i pour my love in a letter, in paper flowers
and my tainted hands still find you buried:
a secret i can never keep
so i let you go
is all i say.

pour sunlight down my throat, it burns
like a whiskey secret taken to grave: my chest

is a bed of incarnadine moss
where i retire and lie, not knowing — waiting for
death or life, for
words to be purified by fire
the size of my live-coal heart;

what is there to write
out of it anyway? after all,
i am now incomprehensible to myself.

here, i confess my sins, absurd in their triviality,
but the sky hears, declares a sentence, unforgiving.
i cannot hear, for

i am now incomprehensible to myself
as i **** my nails clean of dirt, of meaning,
like a poem; emptiness is just a blank slate
not knowing where it's headed.

here, sunsets lick my bones clean — its tongue has long stopped burning
from inside the numbing walls
of a coffin: my skin is the pall draped over —
aventurescent-white under the fevered sun.

the stars weep over all the terrible ways i have loved you —
dress you in their light caught
in my aprium kisses and cigarette daydreams.
empty my ametrine veins,
disembodied to hold your bones together —
kiss you, break me, leave me
burning and trapped in a lantern room; watch me
sink ships to come back to your arms; you've always waited.
and they all still weep and fall
over all the terrible ways i'll still love you

long after they die.

i have inherited pandora's careless melancholy, her tiny box of regrets, her white-washed, quiet horrors and terrible decisions — staining like a memory passed down from her reckless hands to my old, ***** claws, digging for something raw, something parasitic, something miserable, something always goes wrong beneath my ribs. it wants out, like a beast, a misplace fragment, an aphid. and these days turn their heads away — blur themselves blind before my many blunders.

before the wrath of a false god, will my bones ever learn the art of being unapologetic?

to love all of you within the noiseless half of a sigh is a time-swept fever dream stirring in my fists — part firework smoke, part lavenders, part quiet, cautious limerence. how you enchant and unsettle me — i run high and aimless, and free fall in seconds. i am smitten. desperate. love-sick. wordless now, for all i care, darling — i'll leave all of my poems strewn in your bed, like a girl shedding her mortality before a goddess in her truest form.


to disrupt this is a human blunder. to bask in it, divine. ♡

will my hands ever forget the habit of clawing my own wounds for warmth? i lay my vulnerably human skin on sun-dried poems written to breathe, breathe, breathe in — breathe through january's oppressive cold.


i breathe out a mouthful of asphyxiated flowers