He had bent fingers
She said they were the most beautiful hands she had ever seen.

He said they were broken
She loved that they were broken

From across the bar she tapped the mouth of the glass
He poured more in
She put her lips on its hard edges
Planted firmly against the cushions of her mouth,
From its bittered gates she spoke,

I’m old you know.
I know, he said.

Calloused lilies sprout into the cold air
shaking off their scales.

A moment of clarity, before they give birth again.
mercurial joy.
I find myself asking questions from letters,
gluing them into hexes upon myself

growing sentences and growing light
that hides and shivers and runs
before it can fully glow.

My stars prevail.
oh, that fleeting warmth,
I want to melt within the safety of the universe
and inhale the light

so close to the tips of my fingers
ever tipping
further away

A glimmer in the eye of god shown down

A perplexed bourbon laugh
my head on your sternum
felt like
home


You stared.
I stared back.

Torrid, you.

Shaking, blended...
I saw us. I saw me in your hands.

Sinking into this turning glass, I shiver.

deafening entrapment
bursting wings
through tight and suffocating epithelium
born into a beating prison
barred and trapped
clawing crying
out
if only these tears could melt through my body and sweep onto the floor like over filled bath water
to
sink into the earth
   where the turning ceases.
poached wings and a chalk outline
how can you fly without wings?
weighty
lascivious
odious perfection

I have this image of you and me tucked into the most precious corner of my mind. There we are, you with your seraphic face and dancing mind, me, round and brunette, more like my father with Japanese eyes and suffocating hesitation weaved into my DNA, a young five year old grasping your books in my hands.

That is how it began.

The same books I would read as years passed on. The books that watched from afar as everything changed. Books with dog eared pages, pencilled in words of "remember this" or scribbled lines and stars of inspiration, burnt pages from your cigarettes, warped font and wrinkled pages from your tears, my tears, my sisters tears. The tears that fell and fell until the three of us were drowning in that salty anthropomorphic ocean that started out a drop of pure rain. And on your lap, holding us to you, you told us how you built a boat to carry us toward some hopeful light house with twinkling lights and old wrinkled men in rain boots that would pull us to shore. When all along your heart was never our compass, we were drowning in your being. clinging to books in your library of the sea. tearing pages off in desperation.

planted in the sand soaked water,
inhaling the ocean into spongiform lungs
she delves

rusty spider leg fingers graze the keyboard
red dust and cracking joints
clip each letter and space
a dance of bones on hard plastic
pressing out each thought

how I wish to be the ocean,
to have already poured out each drop
of sweat
of tears
captured whole
an entity of its own
contained in freedom