He wants me to shut up about before and after, he doesn’t
sleep anymore to throw off a balance
between now and then,
here and later, when it happened in regards to tonight. My mind
works as a clock of who we have become since:
my body only exists in the place of Our Great Divide.
Morning is just sheets of velvet upon a
lover’s breast, to be peeled, to reveal her strawberry scars.
Evening is when I feel her fists inside my skin as if
I am being penetrated by icebergs
and I cry, your **** hasn’t been the same since it happened.
The blood seems to get lost in the train-track
to your veins. In our divide,
I wonder if most of it was passed to her half of your heart
but that thought makes me so sad I remember I am mostly water
whereas there is simply the milk of her curves:
I have the talent
of turning myself inside out when I want to be dead.
She just curdles. I was once the same,
he wants me to shut up about before and after but at least I
can cry on anniversaries without needing a calendar or
rotting the post of my ex-boyfriend’s bed.

Baby, angel, I have begun
growing chamomile on the left side of my mattress:
you left it warm enough to grow something
as impossible as weeds. And I know
I am preferable to the sun
at least to you, but what about the moon? There is just
something about luna, the moon, lune.
Sometimes I want to talk to it the way I would
you: moon, oh my stars,
I did not believe in naturalism until I believed in you.
Baby, angel, we are only embers
of what we once were. I heat us up as tea
and grow herbs where you once would breathe.
Warding off bumblebees by
taking their stingers into my paw, the air can hurt us.

I have a friend who says he cannot be my friend anymore
in case I want to kiss him one day.
He is the type who makes me guess what language his favorite singer
speaks, and if I guess the right answer, he will present a

shark tooth that I can make into a pendant. Yet
he does not want evidence
that females exist at all, all the way in Denmark or just downtown,
driving forty miles to get to a movie theater so no one will
recognize in case I want to kiss him one day. I will not

yet he worries my parents will throw him in jail as if it is our
culture, the way the girl he is in love with
wears capes every day, even in summertime. She is the type to
sweep dust petals from the floor in a shape of hearts.

My friend in love with her, is still more worried that he may kiss me
and what it might do to their thousand miles apart
if we get caught. He forgets it would be like sliding my tongue
into a shark’s mouth to whisper some sweet goodbyes.

I am pretty sure my love will be leaving me soon
for a woman whose skirt does not lift in the zephyr of her sadness:
we kiss and we tie
maraschino cherry stems with our tongues. The
same labyrinth puts rosy skin in our teeth, here is his ***** hair
knotted with saliva. When I think I have everything,
it just means that we are stuck together –
I realize it does not mean that we are happy together. I think
someone poisoned the water
with glue, and it is I who dispenses more to let my love escape me.
He is as happy as a child who has finished a puzzle
except for a single missing piece, repeating the movements
again and again. That has got to bring it back.
For seven months, we have been handed the gift of pretending I
can feel the inner-workings of who he is and why he is
and I am pretty sure he knows he never has
to pretend again. It is there in the silences: across the room,
across the ocean where hundreds of babies have died,
babes with mothers and fathers and parents who weren’t divorced.
All I hear is my love toying with a Rubik’s cube
he never learned to complete. I have a Magic 8 ball saying
I should let him go. I mostly worry about telling my mom, who will
tell my therapist and then we will have to
close too many doors. As long as I am sad, they are locked. A
key is stuck in the mud or in someone’s molars –
my room is empty, the air is quiet, and he has not even left me yet.

I cannot say that I write about you
because we are in love,
because you died,  or because you broke my heart;
moths unravel those possibilities like yarn.

You are picked up by fairies,
a powder, the scent discharged by dryer sheets.

To be honest,
I write about you because you did the same to me;
you had me in the crook of your arm,
a dusty novel composed by
southerners, although only read in the north.

I cannot say that I write about you
at all, these verses are not about your existence
but how you could have
opened the world as if it were a book of mine.

I do not imagine suicide as impulsive,
rather the day I wake up and travel thousands of miles
in my thoughts
to tell everything I have inhabited goodbye.

Nature will have the instinct to swallow my skin
in its blanket, the breeze whispers
to my boyfriend that I love him anyway.

A crew of mushrooms shall lay me on their breast or
beneath their umbrellas as in a rabbit hole

and upon lying down, petals spill
across my tired eyelids, and the breeze murmurs
that it is okay: I will not be missed because I will have
nature holding my bones the entire time.

She is there, playing my hair like a harpsichord,
whisking me away.

I’d like to think that I touch something
in the people who I am not in love with but have names for me
like sweetheart, honey, or doll,
perhaps in some way I am their daughter or lover

and I hate thinking that somehow I could be both to every one
I have ever wanted inside me.

The child in their hotel room, too tired for breakfast
or the body of bruises
born in motel mattresses, creating stories
from the popcorn ceilings. She sees stars and bugs but gets lost
in counting sheep because no one has ever been able to

hop over a fence as long as she has lived.
I wanted to ***** out the contents of my life with the bile in
my stomach

and all I got was a few years missing so I am too big
to touch things in people
but too small to touch their outsides. I know people who can be
called honey but not be sweet,
I know girls who get ****** and never are full.