i.

there is a certain grace to being a heartsick whore
though you know of grace as little as i know of depravity;
i am wild and ugly like the ocean
whose gestures of swelling praise
remind me of the only boy whose heart i’ve ever broken.
you know the projections of eliot’s sordid images
and they linger in your mind despite attempted banishment,
and god eludes you as, in your dreams, you are cradled (your desires are fed)
by countless men.

ii.
bruises and swollen pupils, the symptoms of young love…
the violent growth of this girl who can no longer will herself to be angry.
your thoughts seek a vessel in words of a dead language
(do you have a philosophy to spare?),
that these drug-addled speechless boys could never
translate to your liking. but oh the temptation…
lines in shapes, like her face, that you could not comprehend.

iii.
my faith in a higher truth is as frail as swallowed protestations;
my resolve to search for deafening illumination dissipates as i feel the warmth
of a body, your body, and other things promised to me to fill
the void beyond the hidden horizon.

iv.
god is not sex, no matter what the hedonists say; drowning in flesh
furthers the contradiction and numbs your anguished panic
until you are crippled with carnal delirium.
(she can’t help it, she really can’t, and she’s sorry, but these boys are on her mind.)
you long for a connection that is not fleeting, and since you’ve given up on love,
you look to the universe: the echoes of the abstract and infinite
time and space crumpled by these ocean limbs, god falls silent,
you settle,
you fuck someone,
and your solipsistic prayers go unanswered.

i kissed james

after i kissed daniel

and i loved james more

but daniel got there first

and they will both turn to jane

and tell her that i’m a bitch

daniel didn’t mean it

jane is beautiful

and i am forgiven

we never held hands

from my baptism in early june

until the empty soliloquies on christmas morning

your fingers abandoned their posts

to cling to dollar bills

i don’t remember whether or not it was raining, but it was night
and i sat in the beige of unfamiliar faces and friends
who poured me drinks
even after i told them not to.
the earthquake between you was tangible and everyone knew,
so she quelled the tremors with her tongue
as she sat you down on the unfamiliar floral print couch
and kissed you for the first time.
it wouldn’t be right to say that her hair was a curtain that framed your face;
i don’t remember what color the curtains were but the front yard out the window
reflected the eyes of the lookers-on whose whispers carried sardonic laughter.
i belong to you, or at least i did, at least i wanted to,
claimed by her weaving hands and trembling hips and skin
against a mottled throat.
sleep is poison; she called to you
as you held her with affection that was anything but habitual,
and the poet gods of teenage boys cast their blessings.
i wish i could remember what happened
when we woke up
but i was still so terribly drunk.

i’m a stranger to the cruelest month but i am no stranger to sex,
familiar with the tremors and gasps of your thin paleness,
but not to the gentle breeze of april and the new flesh that it brings.
each word seems an accident, each kiss a mistake,
but i would love nothing more to indulge your misogyny
until the struggle becomes your cognitive quest.
i remember when the thought of you was impossible; i recall my silvery smile
filled with trepidation when you spun my flaxen thoughts.
now it would appear that i have five roads ahead of me,
and four eyes would follow me down each one,
transcending androgyny to elicit a memory from dreams of old.
my youth is just beginning but the novelty wore off when you rubbed it out,
leaving me with nothing to lose, and i plan to lose whatever i have left
to corduroy, to cyan, to the forest, to the hills, and to the sleeplessness
found within the shell of you.

what is it about mist that makes me think of you

is it reminiscent of the o your mouth makes as it exhales clouds (like in the car the night we found each other again)?

or does it remind me of wilting green hills sodden with age that the fog winds its way through on damp mornings and how your eyes look like that when they look at me

either way

i think of you when it rains

i can’t write about god or art but i can piece together divine fragments of the words of others and hope that they spell out our new religion

images accumulate and abstracts swarm and puddle around my ankles… why my thoughts decided to rest there i don’t know; they are weak, but they help me stand and so i suppose they laid the foundation for my entire being

there are certain colors that when combined in any form provide a pleasing scene, but they’re all the same, they’re all trees and hills and lakes and naked bodies, but do we really need anything more?

you could kiss the landscape of my weak ankles and the spatters you left behind would be more beautiful than they could be on any other canvas

the smell of breakfast and the hum buzz of my sister’s television shows used to wake me and my eyes opened to the pink fabric of the creaking recliner and the faded print of poppies in a rusted frame

the duct tape on the back of the remote and the soft brown surface of the card table brought up to the sofa-sleeper were the most visceral of memories but the more subtle sensations like the smell of cigarettes and the blinking of the alarm clock remind me of the unfinished coloring books and words left unsaid because the relocation isn’t the only thing that fills me with trepidation of seeing you

you’ve forgotten, but i never will, the soup cans and fast food and the soap suds on my arms when i would wash my dolls in the sink, scrubbing their faces clean of the closet dust where they lingered with the melancholy of cheap forgotten toys (they’ve been passed on now to some little girl whose name you can’t pronounce)

my heart lies in the cereal cupboard and in the coils of the greying telephone that’s most likely been ripped from the walls since you left and brought your things with you (you don’t remember all the things you had to leave behind because home is a too-distant memory) and you won’t have to give your zip code for me anymore

i remember sitting on the carpet hiding wrappers in jewelry boxes and balancing checkbooks, piercing fake plastic grapes between my thumb and forefinger while my father burned his childhood and the charcoal embers fell onto the patio with the fake lava rocks and ashes from your cigarettes

i remember the frozen bread you used to keep in the freezer for the ducks and it becomes all too clear that the birds of my childhood have long since been dead

i love the threads of skin that make up your handprint and i love when they weave in careful pressing patterns of (snow? milk?) white on white

l

o

v

e

y

o

unfolding

i don’t know how to write a love poem unless the feelings come from someone else

for them i am able to sing the ballads of flat recorded recollections: blue lights and the rainy afternoons or even the smell of the car that i only rode in once (invitation only; so exclusive)

saying it can’t be defined is a cop-out because surely there are pretty enough words to sweep in a haphazard pile to capture the colors and flutters that surround tout mon corps but it’s my skin that feels the most every touch touch touch from skin to skin (verb)s my (noun) like a (vague and pencil-drawn memory) keep touching never stop

i’ve heard that when confronted with a feeling like this it feels infinite and i can attest to that for why choose words to piece together when between our eyes we can recite the alphabet in countless combinations resting only when our mouths

open