My love for you is defined by smallness.
The time before I miss you when you leave.
The space between our lips.
The connection of our hearts,
        No matter where we are.

How long before I reach out to touch you.
The space between our skin.
What we see in our future,
        Aligned to destiny.

From how we feel now to eternal bliss.
The difference in our thoughts.
Shock of coming happiness,
        Shrinks to ever present.

My love for you is infinitely close.
Together in every dimension.
Time, space and spirit.
Two souls once divided,
        Together in one heart.

through little roads tired car pokes
on the track to Ordinary Joe's
gatecrasher, purple shuttered, fort
between two white picket fence houses
tucked up half-pint box out of line on the line
in cold, squeezed, lemonade
sweet spring ambrosia to the lip
of deep green blanket children sit on, play on
running around shoes and socks
thrown on sidewalk hot as frying pan
crack an egg/hear it sizzle
dotted trees all the same side to side
rooms hide in cramped spaces like cubbies
slips of lip like butter roll off snake tongues
daggers pointed
circus act on display or an animal in the zoo
that doesn't fit in this topsy-turvy slide-show
called life
hackneyed stares glued in place on childish faces
like a match of heads or tails
cupped hands carry quarters for crank candy jars
at mall, or pick-up sticks snatched from floor

Think of mole rats,
spiders, mites even,
crawling underneath your
feet without knowledge
or care that you may be
thinking of them.

Think of you, conscious
animal fretting your
mid-twenties or a mortgage
and think of your family,
all blood and genome and
thicker than ******* molasses.

Think of the microscopic
living things which coexist to
make you, animal accident, a
living thing. Bacteria boiling
your stomach, microbes bailing
from your bottom lip. Kiss.

Think of love, in all its
devices, tedium—conquest even.
The smallness of our thoughts,
little whispers skimming the
surface of the pond. Do you
think of what comes after?

I don’t like how the skin below my eyes gets cold after I’ve cried and my tears have dried.

I don’t like how, when I listen to a sad song, my eyebrows scrunch together and touch the frame of my glasses, and I can feel the hairs bristling against it.

I don’t like how my mascara comes off in clumps and takes my eyelashes with it, and I see the white tips where they were rooted in that precious skin that rims our eyes.

I don’t like how the heart-shaped, helium balloons that my parents got me for Valentine’s day float at the top of my ceiling and look like demons crawling across the ceiling when the light’s off.

I don’t like how I can’t be all one color, so I buy skin-colored nail polish and skin-colored lipstick, so that if I can’t blend into anything, I can at least blend in with myself instead of being a walking commodity of incongruities.

I don’t like how I can’t just pull bones out of my body and give them to people.

I don’t like how I can’t walk into rooms and fill up every nook and cranny with myself. I don’t like how I can’t expand and crowd into all the air around me everywhere I go, so that I never have to walk into a space and feel emptiness or smallness, because that chair refuses to wrap itself around me and the floor doesn’t soak up between my toes and the ceiling fall down and cover me like a blanket.