-migratory birds always find their way back home, so can you
-even the dictionary is burdened by the weight of words
-there is an emptiness that comes with being forgotten, do not let it consume you
-you do not have to give yourself away just so another person can have the best of you
-the theory that every person is searching for their other half is *******, don’t ever let anyone, not even a god, tell you that you are anything less than a whole
-if you hold onto beautiful things for too long, even they can bruise you too
-each vein you trace will somehow find its way back to your heart.
-you are your own zenith.
-if you feel your past love has sunken into your bones, know that it takes seven years to grow new skin cells and that is more than enough time to become something they have never touched
-you can never save people, but you can do a **** good job of loving them even if they don’t love you
-no one, yourself included, is ever entirely alone
-you will make mistakes that feel like ******, kiss mouths just as sad as yours, you will fall asleep with bruises and ****** knuckles, lust after hate but the end of the world does not look like this…it does not look like this…i promise you

i am a phoenix who has spent every year of my life
burning to ashes and being painfully reborn
you knew this and threw me into the fire anyways

2. i didn’t just fall in love with you
i crashed into it
like a drunk driver who couldn’t wait for the light to turn green
and i didn’t have any insurance

3. i was always competing with
the ghost of your ex-girlfriend
and you saw her reflection in my eyes
it wasn’t a fair match from the start, was it?

4. you said i was the most lovable person you had ever met
but you couldn’t be the one to love me
i think the word you meant to use to describe me was unlovable

5. you treated my affection like ******* currency to help you sleep at night

6. i always had to butcher the truth out of your mouth

7. i wrote you my first love poem
it was called “putting you into words”
because i couldn’t ever find one word to accurately describe you
but i found it now:

…*******

8. you taught me what lonely people do
how they can’t touch anything without leaving their fingerprints behind
without painting your skin in midnight
when the sun comes up you will both be on the ground again
with stomach aches and dry mouths
this is what lonely people do
they stay the night and wake up thirsty
and their only cure is drying out your canteen heart

9. ask me how many times i’ve trusted
the men with twisted fingers and crooked smiles
how many times i’ve cut my hands on their jagged edges
sharpened like a knife by pain
ask me how many times i’ve let men say my name like they’ve created me

…i will tell you i’ve lost count

10. i am a giver
who surrenders my softness to sharp teeth and sandpaper hands
i am giver
who falls in love with far too many takers
and never learned how to be both

11. i am made of forgiveness and
you broke my bones like they were empty promises
i will always be walking on someone else’s ending
and crawling over the ruins

12. if pain makes craters then my heart is the moon

13. every poem i ever wrote for you
is now a testament of how you wasted my time

14. you were the final shipwreck
that sent me reeling out into the water with my mouth wide open
i taste like seawater because there is so much inside of me that is trying to drown

15. love is the worst illusion man ever created

16. i am 19 years old
and i am entirely too young
to believe it doesn’t exist anymore (k.w)

he is going to ask you about him.
just know that it will be the first question out of his mouth
when he sees the empty parking lot look in your eyes
when you pass certain places.
be prepared to tell him. are you afraid?
one mention of his name and your mouth burns for hours afterward.
you won’t know how to talk about him. the other one.
what are you supposed to say? be honest.
tell him how your heart was a city burning to its knees when he left,
how every object you came across looked like a weapon
because it reminded you of him
tell him about the withdrawal, how you tried erasing
the taste of his lips by getting lost in the mouths of strangers
tell him what it felt like to love him,
how it was the bravest and stupidest thing you’d ever done.
you are going to choke on your own pain.
tell him you buried him next to your innocence a long time ago.
then have another drink.
when he asks you about the one who came before him,
you aren’t going to answer. you’re going to run.
the one before him taught you how to do that well (k.w)

i’m 19 years old
and i’ve never written a love poem that didn’t taste like loneliness or regret
i was born with a sad mouth
the kind that holds nothing but tempesteous storms of gray
the kind that curses god, doesn’t believe in fate, and kisses lips more crooked than my own
you see
it took me 21 days to squeeze the ink for this poem out of my pen for you
because i’ve never written a love poem for someone
and because i can’t put you into words
but i’m going to try

1. you are the run on sentence that leaves me nothing but breathless
when you speak, i see colors i never even knew existed
i would lift my head to you if you said my name even with a broken neck
i couldn’t sleep the first week we met
because i knew the empty space in my bed was meant to be filled with the curve of your back
and that your smile was the only sunrise i’d be able to wake up to
i spend all my spare time collecting the different ways you’ve called me beautiful to wear as a golden chain around my neck, close to the pulse in my throat, and thump in my heart
as a reminder of how you’ve made me feel alive again

2. when we first kissed
i couldn’t even find the right words to string together to describe how i discovered home on your lips
i love you speechless and i am terrified for just that reason
and i don’t know if i will ever be able to forklift the reasons why out of my chest
but here’s a start
you want to know why i’m scared? i’m scared because for me
love was always a lot like throwing yourself off the edge of a building
and i had a nasty habit of falling for ghosts who couldn’t catch me
but your hands,
your hands weren’t callused, they were soft
they gave me amensia of all the times i shattered against the pavement
the first time i held them they gave me so much reckless abandon that i knew
if i took my heart and catapulted it to atlanta, new york, london, or cuba
you’d be able to catch it blindly
so please just outstretch your arms and do it

3. i know i said earlier that i didn’t believe in fate
but that was before i started writing this
and because you exist
i believe in fate now
because someone, somewhere
made you carefully, painfully, slowly, and deliberately just for me
because there is no other explanation
for the way my bones ticked like the angry hands of a clock,
counting down the seconds until you found me
i believe in fate now because
the moment we met
the possibility of you and i even breathing the same air
and the number of hellos and goodbyes we will exchange
must have been thought about for centuries
when we were nothing but dust

4. if i could take a minute
somehow place all the galaxies into the palms of my hand and rename every star, every constellation after each moment we’ve had and the little things no one notices about you
like how when you blush, you say “oh gawsh” and it reminds me of a bad western movie and my childhood innocence all wrapped up in one
or how you hate being interrupted
how you have a scar on your abdomen from that surgery you had when you were little
or how you wear bruises and bloodied knuckles from all the times you’ve hated yourself
i would do it
i would make this universe into a story only the two of us could understand
a story that says,
i love you…
for as long as you want me to (k.w)

listen to me, you are going to be loved.
more importantly, you are going to love.

you’re scared because you’re older now
and you’re still all alone,
but i promise you,
you will be loved harder than most.
because you waited
and because you are made entirely of longing.

you’re not going to get the practice,
the dry runs that everyone else gets,
you’re going to get thrown into it
like a wave crashing on you
and you won’t know up from down.

you are going to be so lucky.
you are going to fumble through all of it at first,
you’re going to throw yourself out of every window imaginable
before you find your feet and your head.

you are controlled by your heart and that is okay.
you are lonely and you’ve been waiting so, so, so long.
but it’s coming
and you aren’t going to be ready for it;
people like us are never going to be ready for it
but that is why we will be okay,
because our mistakes will feel like the end of the world
and there is nothing better than feeling the ground crumble beneath you
and there is nothing better than finding out there is a surface underneath it.

you are going to love hard and probably too much
and you will be loved back so fiercely
you will want to crawl out of your own skin and float away,
but you won’t
you will stay
and you will learn to accept it.
you are going to be happy
and you are going to be scared shitless.
you are going to change.
that’s what i think love is,
when you can’t remember who you were before
and who you are after it
but it’s all okay (k.w)

january:
when he left, he took the whole world with him.
it was clanking behind his car like
a bunch of empty cans

February:
the 8 wonders of the world were
in between the miracle of our bodies breathing together

March:
after him, everything was empty sky.

April:
i tried making my head on your chest feel like home again
all i found was how pain makes craters, and my heart was the moon

May:
i said his name out loud. over and over again, until it brought me to my knees.

June:
you were the one my mother warned me about
the one who will do anything to pull the earth out from underneath me
you always made me feel as if i were falling

July:
we are not supposed to disappear inside of loss or love. someone should have told me that sooner.
this was the month i truly learned what it means to love.

August:
at some point, the paint chips away
and everything is black and white.
you are faced to keep going or to let dying without him **** you
i chose to keep going.

you can’t make a home out of the same building you burned down thinking the welcome mat will still be waiting when you decide to come back
my past love, you can’t make homes out of people
someone should’ve taught you that a long time ago (k.w)

they always say
the second time you fall in love
will be far different from the first
diffrent from the usual you had grown accustomed to
did you notice the second time,
how your bones didn’t ache from hurt
but instead they whistled like those recorders
you used to play in 4th grade?
how your bones became empty and hollowed?
how they weren’t trying drown you in their heaviness
like the first did?
they always say
the second time you fall in love
will be far different from the first
because the first is like a freight train collision
but the second,
the second is a sigh of relief someone cared enough
to pull you out from that same wreckage