Our divine mandate
fell suddenly, fire from heaven
on a Tuesday afternoon
landing on our tongues,
so hot that it felt
cold.
We refused to believe
our roles were scripted,
but defiance did not make us gods,
it only
proved us illiterate.
We mounted a roller coaster,
knowing in the end we'd
taste dust and blood.
Our calling has
always been progress,
never regret -
and we are nothing if not
debutantes.

my life is yet untitled
and i do not want your name
scrawled across the cover
when you did not
sit here, writing
for hours
through splattered ink
and broken lead
and calloused fingers
and cramping hand –
that was me.
yet i continue
to doodle your name
in the margins of my pages
i am slowly realizing
i am the author of this book
i am not obligated to you
i am pulling out my eraser
because i have work to do

because the night burns heavy
like tears hugging
the back of my eyes,
and the seconds run electric
like air buzzing
in the space between your fingers.
Rosy I-love-yous
turn to quick to
thorny goodbyes
stuck scratching my throat
as my lips fight fate.
Give me breath again
show me we were never happy happenstance,
string my soul out into
baskets woven holy
for the sanctity of us.
Drive slow
buy me time to pray
that we are eternal beings,
unbound from time, able to see
beyond seven colors to someday.
But maybe
in the end it doesn’t
matter how slow you drive, because
even after you leave, I’m there
in your car
always, every moment
in memory.

I won’t forget to
mention how I
hate your asymmetrical gait; it
offsets my lucent cynicism
and offers me seasoned lucidity
which I already told you I don’t want.
I’ll continue to make
my disjointed offhanded comments,
thank you,
much to the vexation
of my sharply shrinking social circles.
Advice has always been icing on
cake which I
scrape off with a knife and
use for shape-making on
the edge of my paper plate
as the other party goers
advise me not to play with my food, it’s
childish.
And rude.
And anyways, who doesn’t
like icing?

and suddenly we are two
acquaintances who don't know how
to have a conversation
walking four feet apart
back to where we had our first date.

You are evil.
Did you know?
Or were you blessedly unaware
that you exceeded the limits
of Earth?
This is not heaven, honey
this is the closet
where saints run
to cry.
And you are here
which makes you
holy and broken
and a lover of mine.

red zeroes,
circumscribed about
our sallow
wrists. yellowed
paper, we
circle our
mistakes and
fatal flaws
no erasers.
lemon eyes
pulp and
peel crammed
down our
throats. how
were we
to make
lemonade? four
american dollars
to our
names, it
means everything
it's worth
nothing. crowds
love the
tragic heroes,
but we
suffer our
own stories.

I’m tiptoeing around
my tsunami,
the same one
that drowned you.
I dried that bouquet today and
cried for the day you gave it to me.
Forgive me, darling,
for all my tears that should not
have been yours.
I want you
but I’ll settle for words
that dance around your likeness
teasing to capture
the beautiful face
I crumpled.
It gets harder
every day
to tell myself
it’s not my fault.
I’m cowering
six feet under you,
trying to look away
and let you live.
I will shrink myself
every day,
if it means you blossom
and with dripping cheeks,
I will tell myself
I am watering your garden
from three hundred miles away.

languidly glows in your cheeks,
just north of
the lip you split trying
to tell me you loved me without
saying you loved me.
Saturday morning
breaks burgundy behind
your head, silhouetting
every piece of heathered forgiveness
we earned without merit.
It rises and splatters
in my chest like laughter and it
shines from your eyes to
the edge of your jaw.
Saturday morning
solidifies sunrise in memory,
with its hallowed rays streaming
haloed from your long lashes. It’s
interlaced with the scent
of you,
suddenly flooding my shuddering lungs.
Saturday morning
swirls early in whispers like dew
steaming
toward balmy April ether.
It supersedes time as it
unwinds the hands on the clock,
flexing post-Friday and
stretching pre-Sunday.
Saturday morning is everything
delicate and divine
that is ever-coursing from
my soul to yours:
I love each Saturday morning
because I first loved you.

you're not going to ask me why
I'm
picking away the scab on
the back of my hand,
though you can see in my eyes how
it hurts
as they spill salt water into
my open wound
because nothing has changed
I still won't let myself get better

Year eleven
English class, you’d sit in front of
me, unaware I could hear
your pencil, scribbling
throughts you scrapped
when we all wrote poems.
The back of your neck would
flush angry red
as you tried to cram rhymes
against their will, into
stunted couplets.
You hated free verse (well,
most poetry, at that).
“It should have rules,”
you’d argue with
the teacher, trying to
derive the lexical formula
through some slip of her tongue,
convinced she was
safeguarding the key
to composition, or at least to
the coveted A.
I sat behind you,
sadly, seeing unborn poems
slip between your fingers,
trickle down the legs of your desk
and settle with resignation in the wastebasket.
I said nothing;
I sighed, and penned
a poem you’d hate
about all the ones you threw away.

Happy makes its tracks
searing, one hundred and twelve degrees
shower streams to skin
and from the corners of
my eyes to my jaw.
It gathers in droplets atop the
jaded pink tiles
that droop along my bathroom walls.
It condenses in distance
between us and words,
and splashes from my cheeks
to kiss the floor.
It bounces off my bedroom wall,
echoing,
slurred like dying art -
it hits me, head on,
brings me to my knees and
burns the carpet below.
You make me so happy, darling:
I'd never lie about that.

we seemed the perfect match:
i loved to talk about you
and so did
you.

In silence, my words are swelling
pressing against the sides of my skull,
dying to spill
from the corner of my mouth
or the ducts of my eyes.
But stuck to my palm
is your sideways glance,
rendering me listener
as you drink in my thoughts,
quelling my quiet anxieties
before I part my lips.
Of course, you’d never know this,
so I owe you an explanation
as to why
sometimes
I stare at my hands,
smiling,
and don’t speak.

She does not shout, she’s
the color of mirror
and the shape of song.
She whispers that she loves
herself; she’s clarity
in the absence of reason,
perched on the apex of pain.
She hurts like my stomach on
my birthday,
glaring red beneath my sleepless
eyelids. She was
firstborn from darkness and sprawls
fleshly into light.
Hers is a compass with a
hidden true north,
a tapestry woven of
all love and evil.
She’s poster tack stuck to the wall,
in little shapes like a near-cloudless day.
She is all we can pretend to know,
the only thing we create and
never fully understand.

in the night sky,
the way the crest of the moon seems to kiss
Venus; how you’d never know they were
miles apart.
I see us
in the morning fog,
the way the clouds brush the dewy
grass, how they don’t know they’re supposed to be
in the sky - or don’t care.
I see us
in old couples
pacing the beach after crowds trickle home,
filled with conversation,
still learning about each other after decades
together.
I see us
in the
air between my fingers,
always moving, always there.
I see us
in pairs of teardrops descending
imperfectly from my eyes,
falling together
hurting together
turning to mist and
returning to the sky.
I see us everywhere beautiful and chaotic and
tragic, and
I want it all.

Red midnight glares above my head
heating coals in my belly,
pushing tears from the corners of my
eyes.
Education, success, modernity
boil me - I scream to sleep cold.
Just outside the window rests
a faint outline,
the shape of my future.
A train shudders to a tired stop,
miles away
the driver
daydreams of going backwards
or getting off
I dream of today, now yesterday,
as I enter, sleepless, tomorrow: today.

Blindly first he walked,
trampled saints with righteous soles.
Blinder still he fell, kissed dust
writhed beneath the gaze of God.
Weaker still, buckled his knees
like pride and war and dark and faint;
chaos spans his vision now.
His horse was night and wrong and run.
He had no eyes for outstretched hands.
Where is your righteousness now?
It steams with mine,
it is mist and overdue goodbye
it evaporates with myth and law.
Drought waits for monsoon,
famine waits for feast,
he waits for light.
Now it floods,
bread breaks,
scales fall from his eyes.
Now is sight and scab and scar.

I don’t yet know Love
but I know you
and that’s good enough.

Of course I cry into the hollow
space between my stomach and happy
there is little else I can do.
Don't pretend to understand how it aches when I breathe
you, who have trained your tongue to do
what it should
do not let it curse the smoke stuck to mine; I
know the contempt in your eyes better than I
know my own reflection.

Everything we once thought unique
settles guilt-riddled into
misshapen paw prints on the dusty
floor.
It shakes with the sound
of the television set,
blowing blithe static,
glowing black and
blooming into the everlasting
forgotten space between hello and good
bye.
It leaves me dehydrated, coughing, spurting
riotous air from the ugly gaps in my
teeth, barely
audible over the roar of nothing. It's goaded
by accidental location permissions, loaded
with deafening illusions of privacy
which hold fast to the hands
of individuality.
They tighten around my neck
and press against my stomach
and demand to be
always remembered, never noticed
like oxygen and
extinction.
So we will do nothing but obey;
rebellion is a luxury we
are too proud to know.

I sat by your porch and
watched the flowers I left
wistfully wilting with every
passing hour
of the time you couldn’t spare me
and it felt like tar
on my tongue
when I wanted to say I loved you
and instead swallowed
lumps
of snot and tears.

he warmed her edges until she
caught flame,
so she might burn bright like
him.
he splintered her spine and
peeled words back from pages,
flung them to the wind.
now the pavement is wet with
the shreds of her,
flushing away the last vestiges
of who she was.
she was once a book
with his name written in red
in every chapter.
each of the stories shared,
cautionary tales
thrown on the ground and
trampled under careless foot —
but all at once,
in a furious storm, he
tore himself away,
and even she cannot make sense
of what is left behind.

You write my name on grocery receipts
and lose them the next day;
I whisper your name in my sleep,
and forget my dreams by sunrise.
We sit sunburnt on the lawn,
me watching the clouds melt,
pretending not to feel
your eyes on me.
I want to write you a song,
but the words don't make it
from my heart to my fingers.
The sticky notes you leave
on the fridge don't stick, they
slide underneath,
forgotten dust-collectors.
One day you'll remember them,
you'll read them to me and I'll cry,
because you wrote about me,
and I never wrote about you.

and I was supine
on the couch, with thoughts
flattening my chest, usurping
oxygen from my open mouth.
I watched a muscle
twitch in my leg,
the image bent through the lens of
an unbroken tear
and wondered if my body
was even my own.
Of all the things I
must accept
that I cannot control,
my body will always
be the most difficult.

It’s because I’m dehydrated, isn’t it?
That’s why my knuckles bruise fast dark blue
why I jump without looking
and love angry men.
It’s why my eyes blaze crimson
and I don’t cry,
why food scrapes my throat and
why I don’t have a job.
My body must crave water,
my soul must crave success and rightness -
because they must.
But I never wanted safety,
I want to be dizzy and sick and spinning,
I want to be bone shattered and love lost.
In the end it doesn’t matter to them
what I want -
“Drink more water, dear,
put some stone in that glass heart of yours.”

You saw through me
that first day you stepped in that garage
your eyes sharp,
making their incisions,
finding things even I did not
know.
They call people like you
old souls,
your knifelike philosophy
they name intuition.
Sweetheart, I'm sorry
I couldn't save you from seeing all of me
I couldn't stop my tired feet from running
you couldn't save me from myself.
Yet you still came with me,
you rode the elevator down just to see
what I was hiding from
and you found her, Anna,
in all her glory, tumbling from the window.
You cut your foot on the broken wine glass,
just like I do every time.
She laughed at you like she laughed at me
and you ran from that cursed hotel
while I stood and let her rip my heart out
again.

A couple falling in love, first date,
another falling out, last fight.
Two boys playing chess,
a girl hungry, won't eat,
a reader, a writer,
an ocean full of thoughts,
and the rare listener.

Hope runs down your skin in waterfalls
begging for my hands
puddling on the floor and flooding
the air like light.
The first time it touched me,
it shocked me at
the small of my back,
tingling and spreading to my
mouth. It was the
electric taste of
Eden’s apple, the choice
that rewrote the future.
It knocked wind from our lungs
a half-breathed epiphany,
the blessed assurance of symmetry:
darling, everything exquisite comes in pairs.
You are everything I
spent years on my knees for,
praying with my fingers crossed.

we'll glide into the next decade
like we own it
skating on razor blades,
twirling knives like majorettes
what is there to be afraid of?
you leave a funny taste on my lips,
like nightshade or something i wasn't
supposed to eat.
i like waiting with you
parked in your car by the bus stop,
talking about pseudo-psychology and
goodbyes,
which one is real and which is a
scam
it's 2 a.m. now,
and i'll be up again in 4 hours.
that's just enough time to
listen to your favorite album
and tell me what you dreamed about,
and catch the bus before sunrise.
i haven't slept in –
oh, i don't know.
i've been up with—thinking of—
you
the idea of you
and me have been up all night,
waiting at that **** bus stop.
the unholy voices whispering to me
sound just like you.
they—you— make my head spin
when i think too hard
about who you are—
are you my punishment,
some divine, poetic justice,
for an act i've committed?
am i to be driven insane,
tantalized, eternally unable to eat or drink,
with food and water just out of reach?
maybe so, but maybe
insanity is letting
someone like you
disappear.

don't be the clock
who tries to run time

you can scream at the universe softly
to please, let it happen
just this once -
that you would get what you want
you can stomp on the ground
slam both feet into the Earth
and it won't move
you can try to tell the sun
just how badly it burns
but when it finally sets
your skin will be red and
peeling
you can try everything
and you will
but maybe some things are
unlearnable
and wishing never goes away
maybe you have bad luck
but you can never fix the world around you

Dramatic irony flowed freely
from all the poems I wrote
about how I didn't write poems about you
and wedged itself in the spaces
between my heartbeats.
And there you slept sweetly
warming my aching ribs and
getting drunk on my tears every night I
awoke weeping
for the miles between us,
and all the purported reasons I shouldn't love
you.
Now poetic justice tumbles forward
from desire into delight
it’s plastered to my skin
and it feels just like you.

she was a chrysanthemum,
disenchanted with the sun who stole the water from her roots
disillusioned with the rain who ripped the petals from her face
disaffected with the gardener's boot who crushed her stem
she cursed the wind as it mocked her,
flying light and lively above her head
she met a bee once
who would sit on her petals,
fluttering its wings and staring
as if the world were dry
and she were the last sip of water.
and for a moment she thought
just maybe she was,
but she was a chrysanthemum
in a garden of too many flowers,
and the bee was gone before
the sun had left her to the mercy of the moon.
then one day,
a pair of hands found her wilting.
they scooped her up
planted her in a ***
brought her to a window
and watered her just enough.
she took her first real breath and saw
in the reflection of the window
that her stem was straight again
and her petals were strong and full.
she thanked the hands and
they went on being friends;
they gave her water and love and
she gave them beauty.
now she looks out the window
at the sun
and the rain
and the owner of the boot
and loves them.

I am empty song silence,
written without words
heavy drifting from the earth
pleasurable deterioration.
Crumble with me,
run quick on milky tabletops
sweep easy like the dust
between rug and solemn shine
fit where no one is
meant to be.
Flattened, minus one dimension
ground to fine lines and
humbled there:
rest is nothing when
time is not.
I long for nothing
when nothing is me
nothing nothing nothing
lines and zeroes
nothing.

You skimmed my words and
smiled, almost
and you thanked me
as if I'd ever write for you.
I write for the ******* the phone every night
when she’s supposed to be sleeping,
so she knows she was never in love.
I write for the girl who lost sleep for
lovers who could not love,
so she remembers to love herself first
next time.
I write for the girl who thought
she knew it all,
so that she learns just how much she
doesn't know.
I write for the girl who’s learning that she can write,
the girl pouring her soul onto paper
in scribbles and corny metaphors.
I write for the girl who
wrote for the wrong people
so she can learn to write for herself.

Wear me tonight
in your front pocket,
pressed against your chest
like a dead flower
against fresh linen.
Pull me from Eden for purpose,
and when the sun strains against the horizon,
sew my shaking roots into soil
and forget you ever knew my name.

I'd love to
create something beautiful
from my pain,
but it's not a skill you can learn.
I wish I knew how
to do anything but
cling to you when I'm hurting,
desperately hoping you
will lift me up
but every time, you fall
with me, and then we're
slamming into concrete
again
and I think to myself,
it's really rock bottom
this time
and it's my fault
again
and you don't know
how to help
again
and the only thing
I can think to do
this time
is let go of your hand,
watch you drift away
and lay here
alone.

You're dangling again, darling;
existentialism isn't your color
flush bright and laugh skywards
finish your homework and fall in love.
You rise with blithe baroquism,
I can see it in the faint
shadows beneath your eyes
as you rush windward into past.

It's alright to love the program, honey,
but if you're over-cautious
you might turn too perfect.
Just don't while I'm alive, please,
for I love the curls in your words
and the feathers in your walk.

Be me when you don't want to,
and be you when you forget what it's like.
Just remember me around the edges,
paint me in the corner below your signature
and remember my kisses goodnight.

I want you
to be in my skin,
holding me as
my tears spoil my cup of coffee
outside the cafe.
I want you to be good
at comforting me,
I want you to tell
me what I need you to say
wrap me with your words
like a blanket when
I'm shivering in the snow
but you're not even in the
same city,
and you can't bring yourself
to understand why I'm cold.

will you ever be able to clear
the clouds over your eyes
that cast shadows on your mirror?
it's so dark in here
and you've hidden the light switch
as if neither you nor i
are enough to see your true colors.
but i knew with my eyes closed
from the sound of your voice
and the touch of your skin
that it was always
and only ever you
who could be enough

"Would you like cream and sugar?"
the barista
my lips pressed together
"Yes."
You,
speaking for me
I hate cream and sugar

I'm losing to the wind; he knows
I need his wayward rushing gusts
and I love the way he puts
my hair in my mouth and
air in my chest.
His spirit gently roars,
tangling my words and
bringing me to my knees.
He carefully envelops
past, present, and future; a
tornado deftly encircling
everything I've ever known.
There’s something ethereal
in the way
gravity shies from his gale
and how he artfully folds rhythm
into my breaths.
I wish I could love him with
even an inch of the miles he
spans, but
until I learn to fly I’ll
lower my windows and
fill my lungs.

Darkness grins on the horizon
it looms and drags and coughs
I shudder and shutter my windows,
I board and splinter and nail and bruise and seal
and lock.
It's not quiet inside,
it storms in here too
it's acid rain,
it's sandstorm and blizzard
I'm igloo,
I'm fire,
I'm puddle
you echo and echo and echo
Won't you leave?
Why didn't you stay?
you echo and echo and echo
I scream and spill and slam and still -
in sudden silence
darkness seeps through
the gaps in the walls, then my pores
it's here, it's me
I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine
you're gone and
so am I.

waiting at the crosswalk
next to a man, but with
an air of being alone.
She stands proudly in her
body, her feet planted
stoically on the sidewalk
her lips are slightly parted
to blow a single silver ringlet
out of her face.
I wish I were her,
for even an instant,
instead of a car passenger
stuck staring out the window
at strangers she's known for
a lifetime.

You've never been to Spain,
but I could have sworn you were there
on the beach in July,
giving me sunburns with your golden gaze.
I was driftwood, tossed by panic, unaware
of your silent anchor sinking patient beneath.
I told myself everything but the truth,
and felt your your tears ebb and flow
with the tide, until I
finally agreed to swim.

nihilism is your Mecca;
apathy your temple
i abandoned religion to follow you.
i thought you were the north star
but as it turns out,
you were nothing but an airplane
bound to crash
with one passenger inside.
but death doesn't matter, does it?
nothing does, in the end.
i was the eye of your hurricane,
the ostensible object of your affection,
terrified to
venture beyond the tiny circumference
of peace.
you'd line your shoes with razors
just to prove you felt no pain.
you were untouchable, you told me;
you concerned yourself for nothing,
i worried for everything.
as it turns out,
your glass ceiling was fragile
and sent you tumbling to rock bottom
when it finally shattered.
you loved the thrill of the free fall,
but i was afraid of heights.
i wouldn't be there for your downfall
though you seemed to know you'd survive.
i was left with no faith
little hope
and more questions than i knew how to ask.
it's been years now,
and still i wonder
were you lying all along,
or just deluded?

if we are going to die
hand in hand,
then we'll be okay.

I slept with your silhouette stapled
to my eyelids again,
and woke up without you
again.
I cry thinking of
how the morning light would
skitter and fragment colors across your prismic skin.
Next to me on the couch,
you fracture my thoughts before
they reach my lips -
"I love you-"
All that escapes.
It's time to go, you tell me.
Wait, please - I try to say -
but instead
"I love you-"
again
and you go,
leave only your imprint on the pillow
again.