Find me tearing violets, my love,
in a manic daze; I am running out of softness and daylight,
like winter’s cruel hours


“but I will crown your hair with these torn violet tiaras
and your soft throat, twine with woven garlands”


and I will dig into my tongue for the remaining metaphors
beneath the bourbon, until odes drench my lips,
I will stitch my wounds shut and ready for your apricot kisses —
I ache to be kissed away,
to waste away before your sun-speckled eyes
like a tiny fae in your flower basket, I ache to settle
in your dainty hands,
in lithe fingers lost in my wind-blown hair.


My November, my gentlest love,
how I breathe you in like my grandmother’s letters —
how you consume me
in curious ways
and for the first time, I am not afraid of the softness
buried and warm inside my bone marrows.


Tell me, darling, will you stay?
Will we stay
this time
for more than a kiss?
Will we linger longer
than silhouettes in a dream?

Her eyes are sinkholes in a quiet, sleeping state
and I was a girl, lost and misplaced at twenty-one,
looking for love in infinitesimal spaces:

on her palm creases and chipped, ruby nails,
and in the blown-out ends of her lotus tattoo
I find myself tracing a secret,
at the spiked tips of her hair tamed by fairy lights
and on the slits of her skin — a rabbit hole of wonders,
I always fall like Alice in sworn careful tiptoes
and crash headfirst; a broken wishbone, a tainted wish
some habits you just can't quit.
like —
October and her obsidian eyes, and the sunless ways we kissed —
being lost and misplaced made sense for a while in the detached comfort
of her cold bed, colder hands,
warmth has become an oppression.

But this dalliance has always been a disaster waiting to happen
and I am a paramour, a memory, a face in the crowd
swallowed in a seismic fall —

and losing October has always been a disaster waiting to happen —
this bed, always a site of a losing battle
and I find myself in a soiled, torn dress,
lying helpless on the other side of her war.

Tonight, I light myself a candle;
maybe one day, I'll finally learn to run away from a girl made of disasters

and not towards her.

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. ♡

i've always loved you one way or another. i break out of your ribs only to bury myself back in. i've always loved you one way after the other. everything else is a fleeting state — cruel, fluid transience leading me back to you.

some ghosts you just miss, darling — some ghosts, you'd die just to see again.

the weight of your breaths is burning its way inside my skin. this is a catastrophe we're in now, darling, and i resemble all of your crestfallen asters, dried and dusty in your altar — now caught in a forest fire. this is a catastrophe we're in now but heathens like me don't burn down, and i have loved you with such fatality i didn't once possess. i have loved you like stray dust in lilac vapors. i have loved you, like stray wind in a firestorm.

this is the calm we're in now darling — and i have loved you to the point of no return.

this cold sunrise will choke on all the dark, sunless ways that i am in love you. sweet one, let's watch the light as it falls apart and crawl, like ether on our golden skin. this is us sitting in the last of september's lights — this is us in the finitude of poetry, and i have never seen anything as beautiful.

i spent too many times trying not to love you, darling, but i know this now: loving you has always been in my very nature — repressed and buried in my bone marrows.

i'm sorry it took me so long to realize this, my love. i am coming home now. ❤️

i'll always love you like you were the fullest sunlight laid gently on the dark bruises of december. my crystalline hands are bound to start wildfires in your name. and finally when the world burns down, i'll mark your spine with these lips made of sunburnt flowers. in the ruins of it all, you still have all my misguided kisses — all my unbidden words. i'll always love you, until azaleas grow on the softest spots, in the mundane collision of our bodies. i'll always love you, until my ribs fall apart to your autumn eyes, like a babylonian temple that has seen the miracles of god. i'll always love you — in state of both madness and kalopsia. in the explosion and rebirth of the stars. i'll always love you — this is my bareness in the most prosaical state. this is my constant, darling — this is my truth.