This is the touch and go.
The breath before the giveaway.
The feeling of every
ghost dancing from the
pit of your stomach through
the vines of your throat
telling everyone that
you are letting them go.
They won’t want you to leave.
I can promise you this.
But you’ve been burning
without fuel for too long
The sun licked your
cheekbones this morning
and you wanted to know
what it meant to be only light
to be dying star
to be collapsing supernova in
the galaxy of terminal illness.
It is okay to say you
want to give up.
I call it wanting to go home.
I call it being tired of
having calloused hands
desperately fighting time.
Fighting the inevitable.
We are not a rainstorm of lost faith.
We are a baptism of acceptance.
Goodbye can rush out
of your open mouth
whenever you’re ready, darling.
I will cradle an “I love you”
to sail down the riverbed of
whichever afterlife you choose.
This
This is how I will always
find a way to be
next to you.

I think I’ve forgotten the sound of your voice…
Well, at least when it’s saying my name.
Last night,
I dreamed myself back in New York City
and woke this morning smelling like
Thompson Street after it rains.
I woke up drenched in the scent of us making love.
Baby, would you believe me if I said,
I think I’ve forgotten how to love?
Well, at least when it’s someone whose not you.
I give myself away so easily now
because I expect everyone to let me go.
Please don’t think I’m blaming you for this-
I know some things can’t be helped.
I’m not saying I want us back…
my mouth is still an open wound
and I wear my blood for lipstick.
Not all “I miss you’s”
mean come home…
Sometimes they’re asking
“why’d you leave to begin with?”

A year later, I would still fold myself into anything you wanted…And that’s the problem… when you have a body made of paper, you start seeing how easy it is to crease yourself over…it becomes easy to forget who you ever were before you learned how to bend.

Going to an all girls school,
the one thing that kept us
outside the gates of adulthood
was chain linked inside our mouths
Braces
made us all feel like we
were made of rusted nails
and anything that said we
couldn’t be touched

The day
a classmate had her braces removed
was the day she became a woman
**** a bat mitzvah or a period
An inviting smile gleaming
like ivory castles in a
new Facebook profile picture
meant she became everything
that was glory

By my junior year,
I was the only one left
with a mouth brimming
full of metal
I was just as awkward
as my smile
Grew so accustomed to
feeling alone in a sea of crowded
that I let myself become faceless
Avoided school dances
because I was convinced
my skin didn’t want to be held
But in all of this,
I ironically felt small for the first time
the day my braces came off

Felt myself sink in the
abundance of “Oh my god,
you’re so pretty now”
On a date with my middle school
crush, he licked the ridges
of my teeth as we kissed
Told me I became
“so hot” by senior year
This was when I realized
for the past 8 years
no one had ever
touched me with purpose
As if the day my teeth
became aligned with
everyone’s idea of beauty
then I was worthy of being stared at

Suddenly,
modeling agencies wanted
to freeze frame all the firefly
sun bleeding out my face
My mouth became so fuckable
boys would tell me how good
I’d be at swallowing all of them
Girls, became nothing
but the chatter of crows
telling people pretty was
all my womanly bones
were good for

I started wanting to pull out my teeth,
one by one, hang them around
my neck then ask: “How much of a
wishing well does my smile
look to you now?”
So, don’t call me pretty
Call my mouth ******
Call me an open wound
made of honesty
I am everything mangled and crooked
I am everything vicious
I am the gap in my teeth
headgear couldn’t fix
Tell me I am a broken violin bow
when I speak my mind
I’ll tell you to shut up
as I become a
symphony of graceless rage
My words
a deliverance of
God’s best sermon
My soul
is the brightest firework
your open hands can try
catching but never will

When we’re taught as girls that
the only thing to aspire to as a
woman is having a desirable face
It makes my body want to wrap
itself in all that is ugly
So don’t ever call me pretty
As if my smile burning
golden like its own sun
depended on your compliments
I have always been night sky
crawling her way to morning
I have drowned here
I have survived here
I am nothing but a holy resurrection
of self love standing before you
knee deep in past insecurities
So, Remember that the next time you
want to compliment me
and call me miracle instead

Going to an all girls school,
the one thing that kept us
outside the gates of adulthood
was chain linked inside our mouths
Braces
made us all feel like we
were made of rusted nails
and anything that said we
couldn’t be touched

The day
a classmate had her braces removed
was the day she became a woman
**** a bat mitzvah or a period
An inviting smile gleaming
like ivory castles in a
new Facebook profile picture
meant she became everything
that was glory

By my junior year,
I was the only one left
with a mouth brimming
full of metal
I was just as awkward
as my smile
Grew so accustomed to
feeling alone in a sea of crowded
that I let myself become faceless
Avoided school dances
because I was convinced
my skin didn’t want to be held
But in all of this,
I ironically felt small for the first time
the day my braces came off

Felt myself sink in the
abundance of “Oh my god,
you’re so pretty now”
On a date with my middle school
crush, he licked the ridges
of my teeth as we kissed
Told me I became
“so hot” by senior year
This was when I realized
for the past 8 years
no one had ever
touched me with purpose
As if the day my teeth
became aligned with
everyone’s idea of beauty
then I was worthy of being stared at

Suddenly,
modeling agencies wanted
to freeze frame all the firefly
sun bleeding out my face
My mouth became so fuckable
boys would tell me how good
I’d be at swallowing all of them
Girls, became nothing
but the chatter of crows
telling people pretty was
all my womanly bones
were good for

I started wanting to pull out my teeth,
one by one, hang them around
my neck then ask: “How much of a
wishing well does my smile
look to you now?”
So, don’t call me pretty
Call my mouth ******
Call me an open wound
made of honesty
I am everything mangled and crooked
I am everything vicious
I am the gap in my teeth
headgear couldn’t fix
Tell me I am a broken violin bow
when I speak my mind
I’ll tell you to shut up
as I become a
symphony of graceless rage
My words
a deliverance of
God’s best sermon
My soul
is the brightest firework
your open hands can try
catching but never will

When we’re taught as girls that
the only thing to aspire to as a
woman is having a desirable face
It makes my body want to wrap
itself in all that is ugly
So don’t ever call me pretty
As if my smile burning
golden like its own sun
depended on your compliments
I have always been night sky
crawling her way to morning
I have drowned here
I have survived here
I am nothing but a holy resurrection
of self love standing before you
knee deep in past insecurities
So, Remember that the next time you
want to compliment me
and call me miracle instead

The first time someone called me a poet
it was in the cramped back hallway of a party in early July
heat rising between our ****** spaces
sweat collecting at the base of my brow to keep anxiety at bay
I listen as someone who I could barely call an acquaintance describe me to a boy I just met:
“she is an amazing writer, trust me, she’s so cool”
As if me using metaphors for antidepressants
and words as bandages for wounds
was reason to make me worthy to get to know beyond my first name
to pin my feet onto a pedestal I didn’t ask to stand on to begin with
I press autopilot in my muscles,
mechanically flip my hair,
split my lips into a half-*** smile,
****** my hand,
and let my laugh ring with the music.
Little does everyone know I am the broken jukebox
with a disappearing voice.

I hide behind love and at 19, I wrote “What High School History Taught Me”
It was for you
you, the NYU junior with a mouth that clung onto vowels
and whose fingertips could read the braille embedded in my skin
You loved chasing storms,
I was almost named after a hurricane,
and this was how we were born after Hurricane Sandy-
it was never a question how we found comfort in destruction
But I still remember telling you
that I wanted to love you forever even if you didn’t stay to find out
And ever since I spit that
men come to me looking for their taste of mystery
for their chance to be immortalized
They don’t know I only speak in train station
and everybody is always a few minutes too late
No one has gotten the chance to get too close
because it’s never romantic to **** the girl who makes love to her own sadness every night

I’ve stopped seeing the fire in my poetry like most strangers do
because to them
my pain is pretty
my heartache is dressed in a bow so
they can all sleep better at night knowing
some 20 year old girl in California understands them
better than she understands herself.

I have been singing in a language I never fully understood
because I am the girl who attaches my reflection to a man
whose memory I still keep prisoner in my mind
and this is how I hide from myself
this is my disappearing act

This isn’t poetry anymore
and it hasn’t been for a long time
This is the sound of survival
This is my heart leaking gunpowder and discharging bullets
Right here
on this stage
is where I understand what it feels like to choke on the gas chamber of lost dreams
Right here
is a dusky New York City apartment
with a boy dressed in the mask of a man hunting me as prey
This stage is where I come home to after being at war with myself
This stage is my peace
my prayer for forgiveness once a week
Right here
is why friends from school don’t call me that much anymore
This stage
is why me and Joe broke up
This place
is why I don’t sit with my family at the dinner table no more
because why
Why share grace with those who can’t understand
how these lights I stand under make the full moon I need
to break my neck and howl at some nights

This is where I pluck the guitar strings of my throat to sing like a bluebird and slow dance with every ghost
This stage is the only place I can forklift
all the misunderstood out of my chest and force you to watch
and you
will still call it art
you
will still call it poetry

But this isn’t poetry anymore
it hasn’t been for a long time
This
is the sound of survival
This
is the sound of me using the inhale of night
just to make it to the exhale of morning.
Right here.
On this stage.
This
is where
and why
I
fight.

it doesn’t happen all at once
it happens slowly
like a flood with water rising cautiously
a quiet rebellion spilling over enemy lines with a vengeance
minute by minute, i feel it
the gravitational pull on his body moving him further away from me
my mother says 3,000 miles doesn’t mean anything,
that i will find my way back to him,
but i’m not so sure
it doesn’t happen all at once
it happens so slowly i couldn’t even see it, until it was too late
until the love waltzing in the ballroom of his chest went quiet
and everyone stopped dancing
i tell him i don’t understand
ask him how he could change his mind so suddenly
that things were fine the day before
but it doesn’t happen all at once
the earth is moving microscopic distances as we speak
and neither of him or i are in the same place as we were yesterday

-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

when they don’t love you back
and no poem, no movie, no book on this good earth makes you feel strong enough to walk away
you will stay.
dig your feet into the sand.
you bury them.
and wait for the tide to rise

you’ve tried it all before, haven’t you?
you’ve tried to be every person they ever loved, and they still don’t see you
so you think
maybe if you just yell a little louder, they’ll turn around and meet you halfway
you think maybe
maybe if you set yourself on fire they will pull you from the wreckage
giving anything for you not to turn to ashes
but it never works that way

you always thought heartbreak was hidden in silence
until he introduced you to the earth shattering symphonies made from the echoes of a dying heart and a soul’s last breath
you are alone but you will not leave
because you think the false idea of his company is better than not having any at all
so when he calls, you will answer
you will tuck your pain into your wallet
hide it into your back pocket
only to take it out when you want pay for one more night in his ghost presence

when he reaches across the table to hold your hand
you will notice his hands aren’t the soft memories of release you had once grown accustomed to
you will see how they’ve become cages and you are the entrapped songbird
writing melodies in hopes of discovering any trace of love left in him
but all you will find are broken and scratched records that don’t even get stuck on your favorite parts of the song
but you stay
and you can’t bring yourself to cover your ears
because some noise is better than none at all, right?

when he asks you over
you don’t want to but you will go
wearing his favorite outfit, his favorite perfume, straightening your hair because the curls were too much
you have found yourself a slave to an unwilling master
you will knock on his door and he won’t meet you at the top of the stairs like he used to
he won’t stand to embrace you when you walk in the room
you will sit in silence as you watch him work and convince yourself that this is exactly how it used to be…how it should be

when he asks if you want to stay the night
you will not answer
instead curl into a ball on the side of his bed you once called your own and try to find familiarity in what has become foreign territory
he will spill words down your throat that you will believe are remedies to your self hatred
you will breathe out “i miss you”
and he will tell you to stop saying that
you will mistake this for love

when morning comes you will find yourself hoping when he wakes and rolls over to see you sleeping
he will believe you are angelic, wake you with a kiss, and tell you he prefers to see your face bathed in the sunlight so he can admire every detail
but you know, he will not
you know, he likes hiding you in the cloaks of midnight where he can make your face look like anyone else’s but your own
and morning is just a reminder of the regret he chose you
because you are nothing but a cemetery to him
a place he goes to when he wants to reminisce over what is already dead

when they don’t love you back
and you can’t bring yourself to walk away
you will stay.
dig your feet into the sand
you bury them and wait for the tide to rise.
let an ocean of unrequited overtake your body.

a part of me drowned that night when you said you never loved me
i am still trying to learn how to resuscitate her and stop calling her murderer a past lover

i am made of forgiveness
and you break my bones like they are promises
my anatomy depends on how many times a day you say
“i’m sorry, i will be better”
and i dress my wounds accordingly
this whole time i thought your kisses
were like drinking the cure to my pain
but you were the poison festering a disease

**** you.

before i met you,
this pain was my only comfort,
now i find myself reaching for you
as if i’ve forgotten how it feels.

And **** you
for finding every lonely crevice
and filling it with your light;
now whenever i cry,
these holes fill with stars
that poured through the sunroof of your car
the night we talked for hours on my street

**** you even more
for making every sunrise this week about you,
and every dawn a new page
to be filled with your name.

and **** you
for showing me what love is
and for proving how wrong i was
in believing it wasn’t for me

but **** you most of all
for making every experience unreal
until i shared it with you
and ******* you, my love,
for giving me a second chance
to fall in love with everything
that you’ve found in me
and i only say **** you
because if there wasn’t the distance that jammed himself
between us causing an ocean’s divide
i would’ve said i love you in due time

i should’ve known
our love had died
when your lips
started tasting
like those of a corpse

on july 13th, 2013: George Zimmerman
a florida native with a history of violence
was found not guilty for the ****** of unarmed 17 year old African American boy Trayvon Martin claiming self defense

on may 8th, 2012 African American, Marissa Alexander:
a florida native with no history of violence
was sentenced to 20 years in prison for discharging a warning shot out of self defense from the wrath of her abusive ex- husband

marissa,
i often wonder how you felt on july 13th when you heard the Trayvon Martin verdict
did you feel the heaviness of invisible shackles weighing your hands and feet down like you had stepped into the 1600s?
did you feel a surge of anger burn through your throat like i did for you?

did you ask yourself if you should’ve continued letting your husband play picasso on you?
Letting your body be his work of art as he splattered blotches of black and blue making a tie-dyed canvas out of you?
because the jury treated the bruises you wore as if they were the plague
saying beware of a black woman who protects herself
it takes 20 years of solitary confinement to cure her of this disease

marissa,
are you afraid of the skin of bullseyes your two children were born into
knowing that society will use them for target practice every day like they did for you?

can you not sleep at night out of fear anytime your child pulls a hood over his head
that he is marking himself as sacrifical lambs to our legal system?

did you tell your mother the next day to burn your babies black hoodies
because on July 13th it was made known
being black and wearing a hood means danger
that being black and wearing a hood means you have a hunger for ******
that being black and wearing a hood means you have cosigned to a persecution?
and yet…we all seem to forget the ones in white that fit the same description

marissa,
i hope you’re starting to see America has OCD
wanting to color within the same lines, with the same two colors
segregating black and white
neglecting to realize that blood and blood shed never bleed out in the same two colors
just look at the crime scenes of Trayvon Martin and your ex-husband

marissa,
from now on when you bite your tongue while eating
don’t spit the blood out
leave it, let it settle, then swallow
and let it be a reminder of all the trayvon martins, all the emmett tills, all the james birds, and all the little black boys who died for standing their ground like you tried to

marissa,
i know you feel like god abadoned you
as if he stabbed you into the back and sent you on a suicide mission
but please
know you are my symbol of hope
you are my hero
the woman i wish to emulate and be
you are the one i pray for at sunday night dinners while holding the one hand of my black mother and the other hand of my white father
hoping one day america can sing free at last and actually mean that
hoping one day america can be blended and still be considered alright
hoping america will stop painting pictures in only black and white

we were born nameless
using words to create meaning
for what we cannot understand

so
if i run out of words
to string together and send you
i will create new meaning
from the things we see

i will swallow constellations of stars
shining for you to gaze at in the middle of the night
i will expose the mountain ranges, rivers, and hidden valleys of
my inner soul
i will allow you to be the captain weathering the sea of myself

come as a traveler carrying nothing
i will guide you
for when you carry another’s heart
as you know
it feels weightless
so let me guide you with more than words

write your heart out
that’s what they always say
so i did
i bled her out entirely
i turned my chest inside out
severed my stomach and coughed it up
onto a silver platter meant to be served

poetry is taste testing
watching each person who reads
take a bite
savoring the faint beat of every memory
too sweet for some
too bitter for another
too spicy
too rubbery
so raw it’s become impossible to swallow

sometimes writing makes me feel helpless outside of my own body
watching my heart die in the hands of others
she once used to beat
long before i wrote her out

if my words are
rough and jagged
i apologize
it comes from those
who disguise themselves
in wholeness
taking pieces of me
to use for themselves
over time

if people only feel alive
in the arms of their lovers
something needs to be done
about the number of deaths
my body withstands
whenever we are apart

i am a feather
weathering a windstorm
fragility is my definition
please
remember that

i never desire
to be the girl of
any man’s dreams
the one he compares
to every ghost of his past
i want to be the one
he never imagined
with my flaws, bruises, scars, and holes included
i want to be the only one
his dreams never expected

this is my last
poem of longing
sent shivering into the wind
for you no longer
have a home inside of me
may your cold memory
finally find warmth
in someone else’s bones
for you and i both know
you will commit the same crime
making her brittle
until she breaks

tell me what keeps you awake at 2 am
whether it’s the girl who took the knife of her absence and stabbed it into your sternum
or the loneliness that swallows your skin

play the one song which releases the floodgates in your eyes
and let me listen to it over and over again
until i find which line makes your heart drop to your stomach

describe the story of your body to me
tell me of the invisible scars too
and with each detail you describe
i will make a map
so i know which road bumps to avoid
or which holy sites to fall to my knees and kiss the ground of

remember that
i wear a mask brimming with self confidence and an armor of words that are both easy to tear for they were thin like tissue to begin with
i am sensitive
taking to hurt the way a sponge absorbs water

do not hide me behind closed doors or keep me entrapped in bed sheets
when you walk past me, do not pull your hood over your head and avert your gaze
i need you to look at my eyes as if they illuminated the entire world
and kiss my lips as if they are what allow you to breathe

open the door.
bring me flowers.
because the only boy who did either was my 5th grade boyfriend

be willing to meet my family and friends
for they were the ones who created the marble statue whom you marvel at today

take note of how my heart is a reflection of myself
how she is too kind and will kiss the same man who tore her in two
so please do not say words which will make her wings flutter
if you are not ready to be the nest she flies to

let me know that me, as myself, i am enough
that i do not need to be a chameleon
dipping myself in new colors each day to please you

remember the little things about me
like how my first phrase i uttered was shut up to a man in an elevator or the delight i take in handwritten letters and mix CDs, or the significance of my first tattoo
because everything about you is being etched into the walls of mind
so that i can never forget

trace your fingers with a loving tenderness over my scars from the times i transformed my body into a crucifix
pinning my hands and feet onto a cross out of habit
thinking love was a word synoymous with self sacrifice

you must learn my language
know what zips my lips into silence
know the difference between when i want to give up versus when i will actually do so
and be there to hold me when the seams start to unravel

if you want me to love you
know that many have tried and failed
that people like me are not meant to be soft
if you want me to love you
know that to me
love is not a word you spit out of your mouth and juggle in your hands
you need to promise that our love won’t be like an hourglass
for my body has been disfgured enough from the times my chest turned inside out from the pang of abadonment
if you want me to love you
reaffirm my body is a kindgom, my heart is the treasure, and that i am your queen
paint pictures for me in what you do and say
telling me i am worthy to be loved, worthy to be kept, and worthy to stay

but if you really want me to fall in love with you
tell me what you see right before you close your eyes at night to fall asleep
and if you tell me it’s me
i will fall unfathomably further for you than i already have

my heart once unfolded
as a delicate red rose
but after him
each petal was ripped
leaving nothing but thorns
i come to you now
as a barren stem
with nothing but a promise of growth
if you promise to love me truly
my ribs will no longer be cages
but gates to a garden
with sparrows singing
and an abundance of flowers in bloom
if you promise to love me truly
i will open this garden for you