i’ve been folding train tickets into paper planes and casting them like butterfly wings into the night sky, hoping they’ll bring me back to some form of normality like their incessant beating could inject some form of life back into bones that are aching, bones that are breaking, under mountains of nothingness and i watch them snap like wishbones, praying that their marrow
bleeds golden enough that you can look at me and say ‘well done’
i’ve been stripping bark off magnolia trees and i’ve been gifting it to myself in the form of late nights with eyes closed and a heart that won’t still, you have a carousel for a heart, it’s a kaleidoscope of just black, it’s all spin and go and you tell people when to get off and you have jaws in your stomach, you speak with teeth bared and violent, you scream from your gut and it’s a sound i feel in my broken bones.
you never wanted me and i’ve been trying to build myself back up out of clay, form myself into something beautiful enough that you’ll sit it on your mantle piece. something you can be proud of.
if lives are built from bricks of experiences, moments played live like movie scenes, then my life is built from those times you ran away, and if women are looking glasses then my life is simply a reflection of you running and my footsteps mirror yours, i am the product of a suitcase by the door, of vile words spat like venom.
i’ve been folding train tickets into paper planes, in short desperate attempts to get away, to get away from you. i’ve sat through enough anti drug assemblies in school to know the dangers of narcotics sold on street corners, but none of them warned of poison that already lay dormant in blood you were born with.

i’ve been sewing love into daisy chains
and i’m willing you to pull off each petal
ask them
and they will spell

/s
  h
     e

        l
       o
     v
   e
s

    m
       e\

in your palm
its a love letter written in botany
this is how i love you in spring
the same way the sun sends rays of gold
hurtling to the earth
to me
this is how i love you in spring
the same way the ocean hosts voyagers
you hold me
this is how i love you in spring
with each intake of air
with each new blossom, the bluebird that lives in my chest grows
and its funny
i never saw the beauty in the world
not like this
i never saw the earth glow
with such intensity
heard it hum
until i was able to watch flowers bloom
in the reflection cast in your eyes
that is a beauty i will never fully articulate
and
this
this is how i love you in spring

there is fire in a woman
in the words she utters, spilling like a river from lips that know pain and hurting and still curl into a smile that reaches further than her cheeks
there is fire in a woman
in her art
and ‘art washes away from the soul the dust of life’
and often i wonder what it would feel like
to make her body my canvas
let my lips write words on her skin that they could never speak
into the small spaces that lie in-between what i envision our twisted limbs would look like
there is fire in a woman
in her touch, at least i’ve dreamed it so
spent nights, half asleep envisioning what her fingertips would feel like against my skin
or twisted amongst my hair.
i dream of cups of coffee in the morning
that she’ll make me
only to go cold and sit half drank upon the table beside us
because they will never be as caffeinated as her
i’ve spent countless nights alone
with my palm placed heavy upon my chest
checking that the dull thud of my heart still exists
and i wonder what it would feel like
to have the fire that is a woman next to me
and i wonder if i wouldn’t need my palm to check i existed
i wonder if it would feel like dreaming
or if i’d finally feel alive.