This is what it is to fall
for a boy with blurry edges.
He will be unfinished but you will trust
him anyway. This is how you learn
how tenderness can be the texture
of a hand in the darkness, the chill
kiss of wind on your cheek, something
you never saw coming.

This is how not to write a sad
story. Say something a little
sweeter. Smile like that night he locked
his keys in his car and you spent
four hours learning how to break
into something
you had no right to be in.

Forgive him for being one more door
your hands shook too hard
to open.

This is how your song goes.
You bring the lyrics and he brings
the tempo, you choreograph the dance
and he forgets the steps but you
forgive him.

You had a dream once where you got
married, you never told him that,
the wedding was in your study
and he showed up half
an hour late. You cried. You hugged him.
You were in love.
Even your dreams
taste like disappointment.

This is how melancholy marks you,
hopeful and hurting,  
how you make stained glass
windows out of the shards inside your chest.
This is how you bleed and make
it something beautiful.

You went to his party and you swam
in the pool. You ate his ice cream and you
took his love. His refrigerator looks
like a love letter to your face but he won’t
speak to you in person, you wonder
when you stopped
being two people in the same picture
and started smelling like
wet paint.

Your life like a song you sing to yourself,
an old one, the kind where
the words come easy.
His name like a tattoo you shouldn’t
have gotten, a memory you can’t give back.
How did you end up here.

This is where the music stops,
the band packs up, your family kisses
you and walks out the door.
This is when the party’s over
and no one wants your sadness
anymore. Vibrating
and waiting. You have lived all
your life to hit this note.

Heart like a washing machine. Heart like
a peanut butter sandwich. Heart cracked open
on the surgery table, hopeful and broken.
Haggard and raw. They tell you when
you use a muscle too much
you can hurt it.

It is beautiful to be the architect of your
own injuries, to choose who will
do you harm. To understand that healing
is just another way of getting stronger.

This is how you look out the window
every night and forgive him.

His face like a mistake you could
have made and always did,
like there could still be something more
than this.

This is what it is to love
in a world where people can be broken.
To believe they can be fixed.

A good way to feel lonely
is to drive the highways at night.
Fall in love like the headlights
that never touch,
only pass by,
feel like writing poetry
about the margins
that define missed connections.

Go home and make
as little noise as possible,
turn the lights off behind you.
You know how to make it look like
you were never here.
You think this
is a sad thing to be good at.

A good way to breathe
is to wake before the sun
and swim in the chlorinated pool,
partitioned and glassy,
think about brushing elbows
with the body in the lane next to
yours just to
see if you’re still solid.
You know you are less dense
than water. These days it feels
as if someone could pass a hand straight
through you.

Pull yourself out of the lane
and pad to the showers,
scour away the clamminess
with steam and liquid soap,
think about all the lives that intersect
in locker rooms and sit
in silence for a few minutes
just to listen.
You like the way the words echo,
just in case you missed them
the first time.
You always miss
them the first time.

A good way to escape
is to order packages from stores
you’ve never heard of,
diagrammed and backlit, fall in love
with the mystery of receiving.
Feel the calendar days
like empty spaces, hollow and aching,
missing parts of your body that can only
be filled by the miracles about to arrive
in the mail.

The postman crunches steadily
up the driveway, gravel
buried in the treads of his
boots. You think this is beautiful, to
carry pieces of where you’ve been
like last night’s spinach
in your teeth. Shameful and secret. Dark
and delightful. Something not everyone
is capable of loving. Lock
eyes like hands,
thank him as he turns away.

Think about
asking him to shake out his
boots, so all the roads
he’s seen can stay
even after he leaves.
You need
less things to leave.

A good way to mourn
is to write poetry at night,
chasing a tail that tastes like
mixed metaphors and
melancholia,
you have told your story
so many different ways
and none of them
have ever made him love you.  

Think about memorizing
his handwriting
and using it as your own.
Write grocery lists that could be his
and taper your signature to lines
so sharp they pierce and wound.
If you’re going to use his hand,  
make it hurt.

The curves of these letters
do not belong to you.
Your hands are so broken
they can do nothing but miss him,
and there are suddenly too many
teeth in the sickle of your smile.
This may be one fight you never seem
to stop losing and I know most nights
the lines of his shoulders cut like knives
but believe me,
this is the most exquisite
way to bleed.
If you’re going to hurt,
make it poetry.

It's Friday night and I could pretend that I'm going to some party where
The boys are too drunk and
The girls have lost themselves in between the bathroom mirror and the bathroom floor.

Maybe the music is a bit too loud but the smoke outside should cover it up.

You might be leaning against the side of a couch or
Up against a wall with someone else-
A girl, maybe, with too long eyelashes
And hair that reeks of perfume
(I know you hate it).

I would probably walk in and change the music, do a little jig that makes people laugh but I won't remember it in the morning.

You could come over and pull me out into the biting chill of the backyard's night and tell me about the things you saw in the bathroom upstairs.

I would grab your face and kiss it all over and you'd let me because you'd be doing the same thing.

Step one, step two, step three
And it led me home.

And that was last night and I'm craving for your skin again.
Goodnight.

you are sitting next to the boy who drove you
to the fast food restaurant, who drove you to
prom, who drives you crazy,
the one tapping his fingers
down the swell of your forearm,
the one you love in pictures, in postcards,
in senior photographs with his tie askew.

you love him the only way you know how,
call him crying and ask for help
but desperation is not reciprocal,
and needing someone will not
make them need you.
it has taken you much of a lifetime to
learn this.

in the passenger seat,
in the plastic bucket chair,
in the doorway as you convince them to stay open.
you are sending dark globes flying down a polished lane,
all flashing lights and glossy surfaces,
stale breath and obscenities.
you bowl a gutter ball.
you bowl a strike.
this will be the night you realize
he fits you no better than the lurid shoes
cramping your toes.

at his house, at his kitchen table,
in the chair he eats breakfast in every morning,
you are staring down the fist-shaped
hole in his wall, jagged edges
and dark spaces,
it keeps showing up in your poems.

on the artificial green of the mini golf place
down the street,
on the metal bench with the arms
too cold to hold you,
on the luminescent dance floor as he says your name,
watching him heal from heart surgery
wondering what you’d have to do
to make him love you as much
as his body loves catastrophe.

in the backseat with the broken subwoofer.

under the fluorescent lights, your hands unintelligible,

you are crying but you don’t know it yet.

here I am leaving you warnings, here I am
singing you to sleep,
here I am bookmarking your memories
with the words you should have heard.

when he speaks, listen to his words but do not
picture him speaking, do not crinkle with the creases
beside his eyes. do not fall.

he will not catch you.
he will not care.

do not call him next week, on your birthday.
do not tell him about how your father made you cry
or how you feel alone at night.

he will not love you for it.

here you are reading the pages you’ve written about him. don’t cry.
wrap the ribbon from the bouquet he gave you
around the handle of your dresser.
do not think he’ll give you anything else.

on the sand glazed with seawater,
on the overstuffed couch with the cool kiss of a cell phone
against your ear,
in the arching concert hall with the chapped wooden seats,
you are saying his name.
he is there and there and there, laced through your life
like a child’s frayed ribbon, unraveled and imperfect and beloved.

he is beautiful and he is broken
and you love him for the scars he leaves
but you can’t will people back together.
you cannot fix this.

he is telling you he’s leaving and he means it.

he is not yours to miss.

I don’t like the taste of *****
So I add it to a lot of lemonade
As if I can make the world go down easier
By diluting it with fantasy
And I don’t care
As long as the result is more pleasant

I thought it was lovely,
When the words rolled off of your lips,
Into my ear,
And broke my heart.

I thought it was lovely,
Because though you were causing me pain,
No one in the world,
*could've looked so good.

My life is a rollercoaster.
I'm on my way up,
Meaning this is going to be a hell of a fall.

And we didn't even talk about anything real

And when you kissed me it felt so sad,
and I was difficult to dismiss,
But thought hey at least I'm with him and I have something to feel.

And after we had ***, you fell asleep and I stayed awake watching Ancient Aliens.
And when I looked over at you,
faraway and safe in your own world,

Where you didn't carry the burden
of feeling forced to talk to anyone about anything that is actually real,
not in this outside paradigm but the realest thing you have,

what is lulled in your heart,
that which you hold so close and so coveted and so hidden
and I knew you were gone.

And I saw then that you have been gone for a long time,
that you tucked your heart back into it's secret hiding place a long time ago.
And maybe when I found it back then,

I didn't know the preciousness of what I had,
and maybe you didn't know if you could trust me to possess it
or maybe I never found your heart at all,

way back then your heart was still just where you left it

All I have now is that look in your eyes when you tell me you can't stay
when I reach for your hand and you brush it away
A lesson learned in love, may it never again feel so cold

And if I ever run across that look I found in your eyes again,

I would sooner sell it to the devil then give away my soul