Tonight i will look at the stars,
I will dream of you and I
Now, tell me, Is there life on mars?
Or just stardust in the sky?

William Shakespeare said "When I saw you I fell in love and you smiled because you knew," and this happens to us every morning.

I put my lips to your chest, so I know what your breath feels like.

So when I mason jar my lungs and tell you to take it somewhere I have never been, somewhere far, far away, and you open it up in Utah, I'll recognize the whisper of "I love you" under the 2000 miles it traveled back to me.

And I'll wish it was you, so I could hold you into my arms and sink you into my lungs.

"Love," I'll say, *"Keep the jar. You'll need it every time I look at you."

I doubt
material wealth
means anything
in the afterlife
on the off chance
that I'm wrong
bury me
with my books
and my plastic owl.

Anna,
the young lions won't want you
forever.

Eventually you are going to
get tired
of keeping it tight,
of batting your eyes,
of applying the gloss just right.

Anna,
what will you do when the invitation beds
come to an end?

Eventually the lions will settle,
while you gather cobweb and callus,
while you smoke cancer and wallow in cellulite.

Anna,
find a boy who makes you feel like the sun.

Ultimately,
he's the only one who can save your soul
from all the crimes you've done.

Is only as big,
as your brains capacity,
and your empathy

I like a man with fire in his bones
And where his head should be,
There is a home.

And I wax and wane like the moon
If you turn away you might miss me,
I'll be gone soon.

Dear J,
   I may be at a loss for words half the time, and the other half I might have too much to say, but I can almost always say this; I love you. I have felt fear and I have felt bravery and I have felt loss. I can look pictures of us and I can recall everything we did that day. I can listen to videos of you and I can tell what you felt. And I know that you didn't think I was paying attention, but I knew how you looked when you thought something was unfair. And I knew the look in your eyes when you saw the light just right in a sunset and you knew that nothing could ever be recreated quite like that. I felt the same way about you.
   Wherever you are, know that loving someone isn't a matter of feeling something or not feeling something. It's a matter of knowing what you're feeling and when you need to let go.
   I think that people know that letting go involves unfurling your fingers and watching something fall from a great height. It's the act of following that objects downward motion that gets to us. That once it meets the ground or whatever surface it is deemed to hit, it's gone. What was there is gone. And once you think about that you think of what could have been there. That one last touch, that one last feeling of bliss that comes with knowing that the moment you wake up the sun will be shining in rivulets through fingers that tangle in hair fresh off the pillow. It's sad to know that nothing like that will happen again.
   The sun won't shine the same way. Instead it may simply fall. It won't cascade, it won't flow over the edges of noses or smiling lips. It's the same way water may lose a stone from a riverbed and from there on after it doesn't run quite the same way. But another stone, another pebble will fall in place because replacement happens.
   I guess what I'm trying  to say, is that letting go is letting someone else take a spot. In order for something else to happen you have to let your joints move out of their grip and unfold from their hold on something that wasn't meant to be held by you anymore.
   Sometimes you have to let them land somewhere new.
I only hope that it's somewhere even more beautiful than before.
            Claire

He told her she was pottery; a vase with grooves and cracks.
The patterns of the history she hid behind her back.

Within his words he layered in- like thread upon a loom-
The sweetest undercurrent to illuminate that gloom.

In certain cultures, he decreed, when pottery is cracked
They aggrandize them with gleaming gold to bring their splendor back

For they believe, with certainty, once damage has been wrought
Those tiny cracks, now filled with light, hold truths that can't be taught.