I went on a walk,
I found a tree,
In its branches,
Was your face staring back at me.
I began to cry,
I couldn’t stop,
It made me realize how much I miss you,
Since you’re gone.
I know it’s been years,
But it still burns,
I find myself shedding tears,
As the world continues to turn.
I still hear your voice,
Playing on repeat,
In my head,
In a desperate plea,
To convince myself,
With a placebo,
That perhaps,
You didn’t leave us alone.
But it’s getting faint,
As I forget,
How your voice once sounded,
But I don’t want to lose you yet.
How can I move on,
From someone,
Who touched my heart,
Now that you’re gone?

The kitchen smells like a secret I forgot to bury.
A peach gone soft, skin splitting like a bad promise.
The fruit flies know something I don’t;
they’re the last priests of a dying faith,
and they’re waiting for me to leak.

I tell myself I’m healing,
but last night I dreamt I had to eat your heart to survive.
It tasted like burnt sugar and nail polish remover.
I woke up gasping,
your name soldered to the roof of my mouth
like a curse I didn’t mean to cast.

I call it the trick of wanting:
how I keep looking for your fingerprints in places you never touched,
how I flinch when someone says my name in the dark,
how I let the mirror watch me shatter
and pretend I’m a stained glass window.

Here’s the part I shouldn’t post:
I liked it when you lied to me.
I liked it when you said this isn’t about love
and I let you mean it’s about power.

The fruit flies keep coming.
I pretend they’re a sign from God.
I pretend they’re angels. Or demons.
Never both.
I pretend they’re a reminder that sweetness
is just another word for rot.
I pretend the buzzing is the sound of my name-
fermenting in your guts,
putrefying in your chest,
decomposing in your memory like abandoned fruit.

I know I shouldn’t write this.
But I do.
Because I want you to see it.
Because I want you to flinch.

Because I want you to know:
I am the girl who would eat your heart if I could.
I would peel it open with my teeth,
lick the blood off my lips,
smile like a god in a red dress,
and call it love.

And you’d believe me.

The moon the stars and the whole galaxy
A few hours,  A million years, A billion
it warps and changes
it all happens at one
expecting to see the yellow at night
a reflection of irises
A brightness of soul beneath shadows of night

Wondering eyes for stars 
connecting to find strands 
Leo, Lepus, Lynx, Lupus, 
No sextant will find the hue of jade
No eyes will see the forest 
No hands will run through the foliage 

A deathbed shared with a sibling 
and a constellation yet to be discovered

my heart can’t catch up
stuck back in time
when i was your world
and you were mine
the world kept spinning
a tad too fast
but you moved on
while i stayed behind
reaching for your heart back

it’s bittersweet
watching you grow—
cold on the gym floor
melancholy pouring
out of all your pores
i lay in my blue dress,
trembling in your eyes
pouring out my heart
about our demise
your blank words
hit me hard as stone
you said, “you can’t grow if you hold on to me”
but my heart has never
loved anyone else so deeply
but love like this doesn’t vanish
so, i guess, i’ll someday, let go softly

he drifted away
while i stayed the same.
he sits behind me in class
and im still,
silently grieving our past
i turn around
searching in his eyes,
aching for his ghost
but his sand in the hourglass
slipped too fast
“it’s not like we’re strangers”,
he reluctantly said
shifting his eyes away
as my ruptured heart bled
my mind had too much
and reality was ahead—
i never knew that
“i will never get bored”
expired with a “yet”

At the water's edge,
a discarded candy wrapper—
kiting upwards—flitting, flittering,
rising, rising,
falling, falling—
before dancing with the waves.

Waves lap their lullaby
along the shore,
then slip
back to the sea.
The shoreline breathing
with each wave's retreat,
this slow pulse
of land and sea.

In the distance
an orange sun melts—bleeding fire
into a waiting blue.
Minnows skip through the shallows—
sun and shade silvering the fish
in flashes.

A heron calls once.
Then silence,
as a lighthouse's white pulse
traces the rocky shore.

The candy wrapper brushes
against a figure,
a shape,
a shadow,
before floating away.

The figure turning—slowly, barely—
cradled in the rhythm of waves.
Gently pulled by the current,
softly pushed by the wind.

A seagull's feather falls—on pale skin.
Resting a moment.
Before cool water
washes it away.

Everything drifts…
bobbing,
bobbing,
slowly,
slowly,
out to the ocean.

And so it drifts—
this body,
this drowned man,
traveling slowly
to his new home.