Don’t let your love become your mistake. Don’t let your writing eclipse what you are writing about. I know it’s strange coming from me, always claiming to immerse yourself in your writing, to pour yourself onto the page. But in a way it has nothing to do with words and everything to do with life. Writing is a plea for life. Language is a bridge.

5:36 pm  2 notes

I will not get into the nature. It would end up as a letter in a language only we would know. It would become a lament. A question. But I think I should write down the hows, the memories, the spine of who we have become. The past is automatic. Soon the substance will grey, become unquestioned, indiscernable. So I must take note. Once upon a time, they were real, and they were all that was. Before I lose them, I must let them go.

1. We had been searching for so long. We were ready to find whatever it was we were looking for in each other. But we were not the result of giving up.

2. Driving, anywhere. I think I loved him without knowing it. It was just the two of us then. Especially at night. As a goodbye, we’d gaze at the orbs of light as we left the city. I’d look up at the stars until my neck ached. I’d get anxious from the traffic and he’d hold my hand, even when he shouldn’t have.

3. I didn’t want to love. I didn’t want to be loved. I had been hurt and didn’t want to be hurt again.

4. He would bring me flowers when I was sad, and I would press them in my notebook. He wanted, more so than I did, for me to be happy.

5. We biked miles and miles. I relearned my body.

6. We snuck into the art building with a blanket at midnight. We hid in a corridor. We both ended up crying. We admitted to being human in the most human of ways. / “Hurt me. Please. Break my heart,” was the plea. My heart broke.

7. We lay on the sidewalk and watched the moon. The sky was a dome of black velvet, the moon a cut-out circle letting in the light. The whole town slept and the trees held their breath. They exhaled the wind. All light was the absence of darkness. All presence was the absence of something else.

8. We were the ghosts in a ghost town.

9. I could recreate myself and still be me. I told a story, mine, the one I wanted to tell. I guess we’re still figuring out the rest.

There are many others. But these have yet to settle.

12:57 am  9 notes

You have been quiet
for so long,
but never silent.
You have been singing
the longest note in history.
Each day it grows deeper.
It is a root, the one from which
we have all bloomed. I am sorry
they have become impervious
to your song. I am sorry
they have forgotten their roots.
They have also forgotten
their earth. They have
nowhere to stay.
They hang on to branches
because they are tall—
but they break.
They come and they go;
they are ignorant
to the birth of berries
on the bushes down below.
They are deaf
to the rush of the river
because water does not stop.
They bestrew it with twigs
and steal from its bank.
You have been patient
for so long.
I know your quiet
is not the lack
of a voice,
but the most unfaltering
of crescendos. They refuse
to hear what has been there
all along: life.
It is all of you.
It is all of us.
We know we can sing
but we can also shout.
Listen. We have been waiting
for so long. We are strengthened
by redefinition.
Every day we shout louder—
it is still our song.
It always has been.

10:35 pm  3 notes

I think I’m
getting stronger
listen to me
look at me
barefoot and
naked and
scarred.

They laugh at
my knees—bruised and bent
patches of skin like a peach
round and rich
in shades of earth
and the down just as golden
but it’s not allowed.

I think I’m
getting stronger
I want them to
know my shame
how I hate this
body, how the ocean
tortures it, and the trees
and the hands
and the eyes—
they hurt the most.
I want them to
know my pride
how I love this
body, bathed in cosmic waters
and the essence of thistle
drawing blood pooling
around my ankles around
the shell of me
the shell of everything
lined with love
and hate.

You speak of my body
physically, in terms of
muscles and bones and
air and water.

It is all mine.

You want to teach me how
to love my body
but all I can love
when you speak the language
of motion
is yours.

1:27 am  4 notes

She was quiet in love, she
had the kind of heart that knew
we survived on quietness, a sustained
rhythm that does not end. She was broken
by her strength, she was quiet because
she knew you could be both at once. Hold
my hand, she said, she was warm in the way
that saltwater seems warm, but her lips weren’t
like the sea and her fingers were not as strong
as palm trees; they trembled like mimosa pudica
in the sand, she folded into herself at
the approach of my hand, she was like
leaflets or paper, our hearts were both
paper cranes flapping their inky wings,
I think we were torn from the same book, I
think we were both looking for the same
things, I remember telling her not to
worry, we may have seen different
lights but we saw the same sun; and
stars, they know about you, I
tell them every night. You’d
like them, you know, they’re quiet
like you are, they sleep in the day and
sing in their dreams, they sound like
bells when they laugh, the kind that
grow on the bushes by the river we
found, with the green petals—finally
she took my hand, which meant
This is what it is like to miss. She
did not have to speak; I knew she
would have asked why there wasn’t
a word to describe the way
that we existed.

4:54 pm  87 notes

“What is fear?”

    (Shadows created 
    by other shadows
or when love
meets love.
    It is the revolutionary nerve
    of history.
It is opening the door
to an unfamiliar room
    or a forest sound
    that you cannot place.
It is the fevered mind
of the boy next door
and his too-hot lips.
    And the voice of a mother
    from a crack in the window
    summoning in the fireflies 
    is colored something
    like fear.)

I plant a kiss
on your forehead
and whisper,
“It is only the nightmares,”
the lie I must tell
out of my own fear.

I leave your bedroom,
shutting the door
quietly behind me.

There are no goodnights
or goodbyes,

the constant fear
of what has left.

10:42 pm  4 notes

I.
I want a mulberry tree
in my backyard.
Teach me how to weave silk
instead of sentences.
What if a cocoon fell into my tea,
what if the moon into the ocean—
who would unravel?

Pluck a poem like a fig.
Strum a stranger’s heart
and tell me if they
can still hear the notes
hours after you’ve walked away.

I lied.
There are no strings,
only the chains we must make
to survive another day.
Chains of clover
and something like honey.

Imagine
under all that light, skin,
bone,
the staggered steps to my heart,
twigs like wishbones
broken in half.

Imagine
if the senses swapped
and you could see touch.
My body would be streaked
with red and gold,
and in your wrist you’d find
the splinter of moon
that always seems to cut me
but I like the scars.

Please hurt me if I don’t hurt you.
I want the narrative
burned onto my eyelids.
I want the embers remembered.
Teach me how to see pain.

Imagine
if the science that explains why you can’t hear colors
became the science that taught you how.
Listen to my blood;
tonight I am a symphony.

Love is artistic,
a scientific phenomenon,
the framed painting in a museum,
the way in which molecules interact—that is,
invisibly,
wordlessly.
I guess love is colorless.
It is we who taint our bodies.

II.
I like your phrases short—
something about
ever tasting a starfruit
something about pink salt
something about death
which has always been
the password to life.

I like your kisses staccato.
I like your fingers trailing.
“We’re the only ones here
so let’s keep this sun a secret.”
Our sun.
I listen to its wavelength
and if words could kill
I’d be Schrödinger’s cat.

Here is my question:
“Is love liquid?”
It flows and spills,
and I contend that
it intoxicates just as much
as the wine of thistle,
the milk of oleander.

I want to know
the state of the heart,
for now mine seems
a wooden crate of apples
on cobblestone street
calling in the morning.

And here is my note:
“I think you can smell time
on the bellies of stones.”

This is our trying tale.

1:40 am  5 notes

I check on my mother
like flowers between the pages
of old books.
Once every few days
(at first, at least),
a few weeks; they still aren’t pressed,
not yet preserved,
still dewy with some kind of life.
The pages drink it in
slowly.
Still not responding.
Mom, it’s me.
Can you hear me?
but more importantly—
Are you listening?
and even more so—
Will you ever let me know?
Nothing.
I rip a page from the book,
translucent from the blood of petals.
Once every few days.
A few weeks.
Soon I forget—
What book? What page?
What is it that I am looking for?
A green poetry book from Berlin. Page 164.
A rose you received
on your birthday
when your friends still remembered
your birthday,
when someone still remembered
you,
when you still
remembered.
My mother goes to work every morning,
the door slams at 7:03,
the door slams in my dreams,
waking me up,
because I’m still afraid of people
leaving me.
I don’t remember what it is
that I wanted my mother
to tell me.

12:47 am  3 notes

I tell my friend that I’m okay
but he says I don’t have to be.
No, I say,
sharing the first truth
I ever learned about the world:
It has to be okay.
It has to.

In January I mail him a letter
that describes just what it’s like
to yearn to be defined
by a hand mirror
or the kitchen knife,
and how much it hurts.

It, too, ends with being okay
but also with “I’m sorry,”
and “I would change it if I could,”
and my name in script
that doesn’t look quite right.

And on Monday you talk too much
because you received a phone call
from your mother,
but it was really just
white noise
and you want to make up
for all the words you could have said.

So the next day
you write them all down
on paper from a white cedar tree
addressed to your mother
but ending up only as “other”
as you rip it to pieces
and cut your left finger.

That was the second truth
I ever learned: of papercuts
and that paper cuts.

6:54 pm  3 notes

Sand in the folds
of a papery dress
Ocean salt traced
on iliac crests
(a thistly, burnt tongue,
her shoulder: a peach,
a silent Siren
when she sleeps)
Seashell fingertips
in a sea-breath lair
Searching for someone
who isn’t there.

9:23 pm  2 notes

You look like you’ve been sitting in the sun for too long, like lemonade, every angle of you sinking. I sat with you the first time I saw you on that porch, legs dangling over the railing. It was your pedestal, your picture frame. Wooden filigree with peeling white paint. I could have sworn I had seen you before, walking home in the rain, maybe, with that black umbrella shielding your face. But you would have believed me even if I hadn’t. Your face was red from having so much to say but no means to say it. Somehow you knew where to face so the light would never hit your eyelids. I didn’t have to squint to look at you. You were never too much to look at, and by that I mean you were beautiful in a way that I could understand. My footsteps called everything you’d known into question. Up three wooden steps. You looked at me with cloudless eyes, rolling my name on your tongue as I introduced myself. That’s how I remember it, anyway. Like we had been so tired of pretending. Like we weren’t ready to walk away, but we knew that we would, together, just to have a hand to hold. We were always headed in different directions. Your shoulders caught the last drops of sunlight that remained between yesterday and tomorrow. “Do you think you could fall in love with me?” you ask suddenly, the question falling in fragments to the floor. “No,” I reply. “Not now.” “When, then?” “When I know what it is you believe in.” You nod as if you know. You take my hand and stand up. “Until tomorrow?” “Yes. Tomorrow.” The screen door shuts softly behind you. The only sound that remains is that of the tiny winged creatures you can never pinpoint in the dark. Invisible, if only someone would look. I stay for a few minutes, then descend those three wooden steps as if for the first time in years. My hands ache for a pen, for paper cuts on the thin crescents of skin between my fingers. You are always in the back of my mind, so much that I brew too much coffee for myself, that I carry two paperbacks in my bag, just in case. I have yet to figure out what you believe in. But I know it’s there. I know all the words that make you listen, the names that make you unfold your wrists like paper flowers. Believe me. I’ve waited for so many tomorrows, each one bearing something new. Today: You look like you’ve been sitting in the sun for too long, like lemonade.

8:22 am  1 note

Time:

1. You return home to find orange pill bottles in place of crystal perfume ones on the bathroom counter.

2. Your father reads prescriptions, not philosophy.

3. Your Winterhands. (They’re your mother’s, papery, wind-kissed, trembling in your lap).

4. You recite the words like a reflex: “Our father, who art in heaven…” You don’t believe in god. You never understood the words.

5. You make tea just to hold it in your hands.

6. You trace the scars across the length of your skin, each one the first, the last.

7. You know how it ends. But you begin again.

6:14 pm  3 notes

Greenhouse roofs
and fallen trees
Broken glass that lays in sheets
Hands that tremble from the snow
Carbon monoxide for their woes.
The lingering scent of you and I
Something painted in the sky.

1:02 am  1 note

Silence nestled itself between our shoulder blades. I was always one step behind. Remnants of summer, those last beams of 4 o’clock sunlight, reaching down, pointing only at us, only you and me. We didn’t say a word. I had thought about it at night, and if you had asked, I would have said, “You’re the kind of person it’s okay to be sad around.” And you were. Because you were sad, too.

We wore our sadness like a second skin. There were scars where our elbows had brushed, propped on tabletops for nights on end. Reading, writing, words cutting our arms like wild grass, question marks like dew on our skin. I knew it from the moment I saw you, knew it when we emerged from that canopy of leaves, knew it from the way you could never look anyone in the eye.

October was ours—November and December, too. You were the end of the year. A goodbye, a wave of the hand when you had already turned away. Smudged ink on nervous fingertips—gone by tomorrow. Walking with no destination in mind. No beginning. No end.

10:01 pm  5 notes

I don’t know why I do it
because I will never be able to
map your scars
with lines or light,
acrylics or apertures.
And my predecessors have done it so gracefully
that there are no cobwebs
in the corners of rooms,
or dust in the vocal chords
of someone who spent his whole life
saying goodbye,
or even the echo of a single sigh
in a mirrored room,
because everyone in the world
would sigh at once
until the sighs drew nearer and nearer
and held hands in a chorus
and noise would become silence once again.
Like the night I heard the girl across the street
crying so silently, and I listened
until she became the night itself,
until she became my lullaby.
So tell me why I do it
when my antecedents have done it with their eyes closed
as they played their typewriters like pianos
and oh, have I always wanted to love a pianist
to see their fingers curve
against the keys,
to feel their fingers trace
the keys of my spine
and not be able to tell a difference.
Because in a world where noise turns to silence turns to noise,
why should I have to?
And tell me why I can’t throw away your letter
even though I have dreamt of you
trying to keep the words on the page
because you knew I would not write back.
Why can’t I tear it into pieces
when I have pressed my fingertips to its edges
so many times they have wilted like flowers,
and the letters have bled into each other
as if they were never meant to form words
like sorry, or promise, or love.

                                           And that’s why I do it.

7:09 pm  3 notes