For three years
I have been dirt under your nailbeds, no one’s gotten
close enough to see me. This skin
is a cage
and I know how everyone looks to you

sticking to you in some place, the green goo of
a dead firefly or
an old sweater hung by shoes you no longer fit into.

Your mother is not
from America, but is a mother yet –
I am not from her, nor am I foreign to you.

She watched us in bed together when you were so ill
you thought you would die.

But mostly she saw how

I put more fever
on your cheeks – I wished I would die
for you. No one would miss a crescent of filth you
touch them with or loose hairs
on your sheets. No other girl would notice.

I know about reciting love verses when you are supposed to be
writing your grocery list – fruits and vegetables
become a metaphor for why I hold my hand to your face
and I realize you told me not to fall in love with you, so I fell in
love with how we exist together instead.

Like salt in the ocean,
wires from a wall, I know I breathe for you a little too much –
matching the exhales to yours. I have a language that
only accepts the two of us, sounds lovely only because you live.

Once, there was a man who wanted so much to love that he
snuggled butterfly bodies back into a cocoon
like a small manila folder. He married their two existences together
and braided her antennae to signify an engagement ring –
never kissing, not as a husband and wife would
just would light up the nerves below his skin any time he showed
his butterfly what became of
the earth outside of air holes. In a way, he lived there, too –
breathed through the sheer fabric of butterfly wings.
He knew how to love, every eyelash looked like her flying again.

Paper thin are the words I have composed to you:
I despise this fact,
hours and ink spent on my ruminations
form letters not more substantial than cigarette smoke.

As a little girl whose excitement of snow is
wasted on stained glass windows
that are unable to preserve the print of her breath.

Your comb on the dresser where you left it
would take days to be delivered, and your birthday gift
can only be seen on my nightstand
in photos I take. But I purchased something made of
porcelain to write love poems on so they will
not be ripped or

vaporized when August and six dollars gives them
to the famished mouth of your mailbox
empty, but for bills from
hospital visits caused by my hand heaving onto yours.

I just want to write your way back home to me
and I know the wind could
blow away my every wish, thinking you may ever stay.

My mind does not sleep through the night, the questions
have their before and after. This is the
after. I ask again if he was ever really here at all,
this is June
this is very nearly July
and I am colder now than I was last December on his
breath, that I could see wiggling
wanting to escape into me as a pillow would into a case.

My mind is full of his absence,
I think it grows every morning I wake up without
a moat of our bodies cut into my bed. We were only just
children playing house
without the need for plastic appliances and plates,
made linen from hair lockets, leave

seed marks on his skin. I ask again if it still remains
touched like an early ripened strawberry.
That was December,
was supposed to be, but I cannot trust a memory of my
head resting against the fabric of anyone’s jeans
because then it may be true
that he really loved me after all, and maybe he does still.

God made girls full of sap
so we chew on our hair when we get nervous
and blood falls
from us like butterflies from cocoons.

I want to be inside every girl you ****** before me,
show you the birthmarks you never noticed
shaped like canoes and rocketships.

I will get her chest to rise, then fall,
steal the very source of her breath and curl my fingers
around it –
into dough, how you never could knead.

I have my hand on her throat
because you hated when she would talk.
We could work together, tie her hair into a knot.

I just want to be inside the girls who have intestines
like cotton candy and ******* like watermelon
explain why you should
have loved her as a woman sometimes.

You say you prefer my skin, and the way I whimper
but maybe you just did not
**** her hard enough.