If loneliness and lust had a baby, I would name it regret, sibling to loss.

roll the dice 

like a boy

who knows

how to play,

who knows 

how to lose,

to land in 

your arms 

like a fool, 

(whose fool?) 

at the end 

of a night

that didn't 

include you. 

i don't know 

how you became 

the relief i feel 

when i bite my bottom lip,

like a fool,

i become 

yours. 

there's a life

where i lose

endlessly 

because i want 

more

than the world can 

offer 

to a girl

who doesn't know 

what she has. 

There's this saying,

about women who want too much,

(do I want too much?) 

and I wonder,

what could I become

if I play the whore? 

Yes,

this wrongness 

is an undoing

and a longing

like grief uncaged. 

It's a splitting

of my body 

into all the parts 

that make me. 

It's my eyes rolling

into the back of my head

because I want you to tell me

how much you need me. 

I want you to touch me 

like you just want to feel

how soft my fingers are 

in dark closets 

where nothing exists. 

no one can tell me that friendship exists in open, bright spaces when my best friends kiss and tell in the dark.

I twice ended things with boys 

who texted me 

flirtatiously. 

I stayed up late to tell them things with my thumbs

that my lips would never taste. 

I carried myself like a vessel 

for their satisfaction. 

Late nights in closets 

and I thought I had friendship 

perfected. 

I wanted so badly 

to be wanted

that I would crash endlessly 

upon their shores. 

These boys,

who told me stories 

about what it was like 

to be wanted. 

i carved a hole in my heart and stuffed it with the things you love.

what would it mean to be in love with you

when you are almost thirty-five... 

like falling again into breathlessness

and an ache that feels like the home 

you made when you were twenty-three. 

how does a world form? 

what magic is left in the spaces you filled? 

where do you sleep?

what do you dream? 

when you learned how to be a mirror 

at thirteen, 

I wonder if you stopped to think about where

your interests would live. 

if you were to find yourself in the backyard, 

I wonder if she would have them. 

She is nine, and five, and four. 

She likes dirt and writing and 

feeling safe... 

whatever that means. 

At almost thirty-five, 

I become you. 

I forget what it's like to feel safe

inside. 

stopping my heart means something like a love song played in reverse (an ache in prelude)

Tell me I'm loved 

as if mapping out

the figure of a swan. 

Within her parts, 

there are daggers 

and ellipses;

the kind that linger,

and hunger,

and hunt. 

What would it be like to be a bird, 

I wonder. 

At the end of the day, 

I'm a thousand miles away 

and a breath apart. 

the watchful

I never think about her. 

She is an introduction to a fairytale 

that no one reads

except, at one time, 

her devoted mother. 

I never choose to think about her. 

Eighteen and older than the world. 

Eighteen and a heart made to break. 

She loved joy 

and hated when others disappointed her. 

Now I wonder what she would think 

of me, of this, of the little moments 

that make a life. 

Her eyes would shine, maybe, 

watchful for a time when she might dissect how her world became so small. 

This girl, scrutiny her bedmate, 

she would think she knows me, 

but my secrets are my own. 

I could invite her in

but I'm scared she'd break me

with her joy.

if this means war

What if I don't know how to heal you? 

Will the pit in my stomach turn into expectations that tear me apart? 

And I want your eyes on me 

so that I can feel seen

even when you are trembling,

even when I am an earthquake. 

I thought I could hide my heart 

in the folds of science, 

like art and jealousy;

like laughing at nothing. 

Am I allowed to find myself pathetic? 

Sometimes I think it would be nice

to know fear's name, 

to address her by it, 

so she knows not to borrow mine. 

On pointed toes, reaching up feels like falling

Here in the little silence

your bones are medicine like methadone

for heroin. And I break,

and wander,

and land solidly in your wake. 

Hoarfrost and keyboard strokes 

look the same when the sun is low. 

I want to be punished 

and glorified. 

And I wonder if this feeling 

will ever betray me;

this feeling, the one that I planted solidly

in my chest. 

There's a part of me 

that wants to know 

what it would be like 

to be the villian. 

Give me a name like terror 

and call me yours. 

In truth, I am a white lie 

that you tell yourself at night

to romanticize the discomfort

that grows inside. 

I wish I knew how to satisfy you. 

I want you to take me

over and over

until the roof of my mouth

is painted with you. 

Until I give in

completely. 

And can fucking breathe again. 

here, a hollow house

I had a dream of pulling sticks from my mouth, then

A whole pencil. 

I woke up heaving. 

And wanting. 

When disgust seduces desire 

and the universe cracks open,

my body floods with the electricity 

of old and new wounds. 

Lately I've been holding your anger 

in pockets of my kidneys, 

against the walls of my uterus, 

and down through my tailbone. 

I release your rage in little doses

that appear as:

emptying the trash,

folding the blankets,

becoming my grandmother. 

when your face is brokered by shadow, you disappear.

maybe i no longer know who you are. 

this feeling is tranquil

like lower case letters

on a birth certificate. 

i thought i wanted to know you

until i had lost breath. 

But here i am.

And there you are. 

there's something that feels petty 

in all this pleasure. 

when fear is not enough to hold me, I rise like the tide to kiss the moon

Her fears are kernels of sand

breaking apart and landing in an ocean

wide and bright and dark all at once. 

When surrender feels like tall trees and extending wide and open into an 

endless earth,

it seems impossible to be uprooted. 

And then the earth shakes. 

She is saved by diamonds and caverns, 

full forests and storms

until the wind blows. 

There's this assumption that what sinks cannot fly.

But they would be wrong. 

Wings are just shoulders 

for men made of crushed up salt and stone. 

When you think you're falling,

become the sky. 

survival means forgetting

Here 

I am lost to time. 

Where the dread lives 

in hoarfrost and kettles. 

This feeling is a denouement. 

Once a blackbird alighting on a fence post, 

now a flighty thing with wings 

like charcoal across the snow. 

So much has been given to time. 

And forever will be. 

tightrope wire walker crossing the sea

I don't know how to miss you.

The thought is salt water:

cold where it meets my eyelids;

rough against my shins 

as I brace against the tide. 

I have this idea 

of an alternate universe. 

I haven't let myself linger there 

for fear of a collapse,

like Alice,

down and down and down and 

never stopping

until the amphetamines whisper, 

"let's go home together." 

As if I could be yours and mine 

at the same time. 

As if I could play at being the most wanted person in the universe. 

As if everyone loved me. 

As if I was finally a creature 

made to be adored.

Darling, the pedestal I put you on

is the one I've never reached. 

I wonder what it would be like

to love you from such a height. 

on pointed toes

everything else remains

a distraction 

until we meet. 

the rain, the snow, the placid summer air

is not as kind as your arms 

as they pull me up 

against your chest. 

i thought in "never"

before this year. 

now, I think of you 

and rest in the salt water 

of your skin

as the day drips down your neck

and I am completely overcome.

the way you look at me

when the light is low. 

this. forever. 

The skull amongst the trees

How could you leave? 

The wind brings the sound of coyotes

and later,

you find the vertebrae in the deep brush. 

There is a softer side to you;

It's like leaning back fully into a chair

and feeling the weight press back, 

just enough

so you know that it's there. 

Later, I will wonder how you survive. 

I learn about how you are living

and I am suddenly pinned to my kitchen floor. 

Undo the balustrade and forgo support. 

As we trudge through the snow, 

I wonder. 

Who will be our spine, 

if you go? 

Form and space: Lyrical, staccato, chaos, waltz & stillness.

Here in this space 

I am a woman.

I command worlds. 

A creature

unwilling to bend

to the demands 

of sheet music.

Instead,

a lyrical birthright;

a tempest;

the rain. 

She sees herself in the mirror 

and knows. Just. Knows. 

Knows that her limbs 

are pieces of heaven. 

Fragments of a time 

when she was so young

she could not possibly 

remember. 

But her body does. 

Here, somehow. 

The beat, the rhythm. 

The floor moving as she 

jumps and stomps

again and again. 

A form and space 

to fall apart. 

A birthing. 

A splitting in two,

Doe-like and dear. 

I'll hold you

a little closer 

when the music starts

to let you go

more and more

in the staccato.