and there's something about
turning 16
and filling your lips with
the deepest red
in the mirror

how it feels
like you've become a rose
freshly unfurled from
some skeleton,
your colours as rich and
viscous as your dripping blood

yet a rose that's closed
in a glass jar, you are
turned and admired, you are
twirled in fingers
like the stem of a wineglass

because at 16,
you feel you are something
refined,
mature and flowing and
beautiful

older

but it's only
your mother's lipstick;
she too is getting old.
at night you take
the crimson off,
and the rest of you
comes into focus.
all your yellows, all your blues;
you will need to love them too

and don't you let the laughter
slide off from
your new scarlet mouth
because you're 16 now.
it will try to
and you will need to pick it up
off the floor

because you're 16 now
but remember one thing for me:
you are far more sturdy
than just a rose

you are a girl
you are every colour
you think you haven't become

somewhere
between 4 and 15,
your innocence was lost
in the angles of your cheeks

and the hardness
of your dreaming
wore itself down
like bark on a tree

now you're standing on an edge
looking over at the sea,
with softer hips and aeroplane feelings;
you know
that you are leaving

somewhere
after 4 and 15,
you learned to be gentle,
to hold yourself
more carefully

you were
a flightless bird.
you are
a girl, becoming
woman, turning
over her dreams
like tea leaves.

you know
that you are leaving
somewhere
behind.

A fire breathing dragon lived inside the nook of a tree,
Small enough to fit in a man's watch pocket,
Big enough to singe the bark around his door.
We peaked around the nearest trunk,
His smoke billowed around our adolescent ankles,
From his penny-sizes nostrils protruding from the plane of his oak.
We figured he ate the ivy snaking through his neighborhood,
But noticed no pin-sized tooth marks in surrounding leaves.

We then became bored with our own imagination.
We realized this black mark was only mold,
And we aged ten years.

In the aftermath, I lay across my adolescent
comforter in the faded spot, hoping to soak up any
remnants of a sun that refuses
to show its face today.

Raindrops stick to my window,
spattered from juvenile tyranny,
born out of temperamental
tempests that literally manifest
from nowhere. These are the tears

I wish I could cry, for even the sky
prays it could hide from the tumult.

my childhood was removed from me
inside of a blue mustang
and what remained after that
I tried to barter off the highest bidder
but I grew,
not up,
but forward
further away
slowly releasing
hands of defiance
fists chock full of hopeless words
like anger, the flavor that aches the bone,
the cold kind,
more barren than the green of Christmas lights
glimmering off the icy veneer of a white picket fence
overeager, in the apathy of theatrics,
to strip off the remainder
because the empty feeling that followed
might one day
make a decent poem

My hand searches for yours
under the table
in this semi-crowded place.
Our friends chat amongst themselves,
their words like white noise,
but they glance at me and you,
expecting you to make a move.
No one sees what we are doing,
but they know.

They know.

They grin and give you a thumbs-up.
I sigh,
half out of raging embarrassment,
half out of content.

My hand has found yours,
but now my lips want to do the same.

This is a poem for nobody’s eyes
About my students
my flowering black and brown baby girls
more bud than human, saying all singsong how
black is ugly ugly ugly
holding their arms up to
one another, comparing hues
About the instant I realized
I loved women too
and sagged hard against my bedroom door while
dread and hope danced a strange dance
in the pit of my gut
About the college kids I see in class everyday
popping Aspirin and Xanax and the pill
with their headphones and angry publicness and
******* ******* **** this
and notebooks and pens and
soft privateness and
I love you I need you I need you
About the boy I couldn’t speak to for years
without feeling sick or small or unrequited
About Audre, Toni, and Maya teaching me
how to start revolutions with a word
About how I dream again and again
of kissing the girl I am in love with
and sometimes
we are the in the dark and sometimes
we are laughing and sometimes
I am moving breathless
into the room saying
I have never loved you more than I do at this moment
and lips are on lips are on lips
About how I can’t look at this one
pink nightgown because I was wearing it
when my father said he was cheating and
too many tears fell on those
tiny satin cherries
About Holden Caufield and that
******* merry-go-round
About a crazy, unquiet and
utterly illuminated self
Me, spoken yet unspoken