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.

You still eat away at my chest
like a mole finding its way out of my body.


God, it’s been ten years now since you last wrote me a letter
sealed with a pressed, dead daisy
and a ghostly kiss mark,
yet they’re still dying under my thumb.


These days slip by and I can no longer write you poems,
my dearest, sweet September —
but still, I hope that you have in your chest
all my papercuts from unbridled letters,
all my quiet midnights,
and all of my unwritten words;
they are yours for missing.


Must you leave a girl then, darling,
whose only fault was being one?

I name all of my lovers after months now
and all roads lead to August and
the Roman cities we’ve burned —
how she walked on crumbling streets as I held the matches —
this poem is a page for burning at its tip:
a lone match, scalding — a firelit kiss
but the flames have always been a hypnotic sight
like a woman perched in your sunlit bed —
her hair, red as flames licking my neck,
red as love that bleeds on itself;
it leaves a stain on pretty things.

Now her skin has silk sheets burning away
like banners in a Roman cathedral,
her half-breath kisses, dying — now embers,
tainting my dress black where her lips had staked a claim.
Now her touch is wildfire crawling on my skin
and I am a wounded doe — waiting. waiting.
waiting.


The only world I know burns to the ground
before my very eyes
and we are no phoenixes, darling; all we do is burn.

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.

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. ♡

Here we are as unclaimed lights fall into the room. Here we are with better names, old letters peeling after the other. Here we are, now made of changing lights and indigo dreams. In the very last month and for the first time, I claim the body of an Egyptian lad and you are the sun god, washing over me like a brand new day. For the first time, December doesn’t feel like choking on poppy blossoms. For the first time, December is freeing as scattered pastel lights.

For the first time, my love, December rests on my skin — and it doesn’t hurt.

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.

my wasting bones are unsettled by kisses. how your lips graze my paper skin and i am an origami crane — catching fire in waking sunlight. watch me love you terribly. kindly. fatally. watch all of my shadows burn bright for you, my darling, into the sweetest, sun-soaked surrender.