I aspire to write anything 
worse than the sun. 
It threatens
to drive me to the nearest gas station,
refill my heart to overflow,
leave small expanses behind. 

I don't strive for perfection 
(only brutal honesty).

Had I understood I would've throw you a line, 
hauled you a try at living,
given you two hands. 

Maybe I don't know what it's like to vow 
my life away 
or to talk without "but" attached to the end of my nose
but I've had thousands of horrible chances.

I'm sacred of myself when I pay for hypotheticals online
and leave with locked doors in my wake. 
I'm contradictory.
Hypocritical. 

We're all in convalenscene
(surely, it's not my fault). 

There is sunshine this morning. 
It warps the frost on the window,
melts frozen feathers into my palm, 
dampens the folded cuff of my coat. 
I'm not waiting for anyone. 

This morning there is music resonating
down the hallway at school. 
Someone stands in the center of a room to my right,
mouth open,
dancing with words,
smiling only half as wide as me. 

There's ink on my wrist,
blued from writing late into the night 
when my bare feet refused to walk
in the solitary dark to the cold sink down the hall, 
wash my hands
with frothy soap under endless water. 

I wish for a fleeting second I could light a tall candle,
sit criss crossed on my bedroom floor, 
watch the wax tip into the tilting Earth
as I suffocate the gap between night and day. 

Instead, I press my head down, 
will myself to burn the memory
of the dancing figure 

He's there, on the corner.
The kind of boy who looks
at you like the sun. 

But you belong
to warm winter rain,
the kind that buries people under raincoats
and smells waxy, like summer stars. 
He should know by now,
you told him that night,
when hands smelled like apples
and the sky wouldn't let go of its daylight. 

After a while, he'll remember what it's like to have rain
as only a friend, grow tired 
of damp hair and falling
asleep to thunderstorms.
He'll move to a place
like the Atacama,
where you have to dig
ten feet to find me. 

I survive on pretending. 
I don't notice 
the empty seat on the bus; 
the faraway sound of lonely 
through my foggy bedroom window. 

I'm acquainted
with everything related to the dark, 
and nothing with his hands. 

I pinch myself in the hall
to keep from looking. Or crying. 
Or both. 

I forget half of myself
under the bed
and am reduced, instead, 
to writing in the backs of books. 

I'm smothering myself,
muffled. 

He is the thief
behind the broken glass
on the bathroom floor. 
 

Write a poem they said, write a poem about the way you wake up, the way the sun is yours at midnight. Write about the small sliver of a soap moon in the corner of the bathtub. The early morning breeze, the open window, his honey lips, the haying field beyond the brook we’re used to calling ours. This is it, the moment we realize we no longer belong only to ourselves. Now, we’re belonging to the steamy stovetop, the old clock, dirty feet, flat tires, homemade ice cream, leaky rain boots, kitchen twine, crumpled letters, beeswax, darned toes, heart patches, hand-drawn maps, warm chocolate, wind-blown linens, winter mud, the city I forget, the hands I never hold, a silent car on a frozen dirt road, finger kissing, apple shining, rock throwing, universe finding, memory collecting, cutting shavings of stolen hair onto the tile floor. The moon is not theirs and neither are we.

Are we leaving soon?
Sometimes questions come too frequently.
We’re breathing dust
like we used to breathe the world, and don’t care either way.

We have our faces pressed
to the window and let our noses freeze.
There will be another day-
I’ll forget again.

He loses his couch on the street
to an old lady who doesn’t know how to sit
on the edge of the universe,
or even where to find such a thing as stars.

He tells her to look up.
She looks down.

The corner is an open alleyway,
pouring people onto the pavement,
dancing in their pajamas,
unwillingly waking to an uncontrollable reality,
cautious of the crosswalks
and not enough because there’s road kill in the winter,
and ice, also.

Ideas are like tears,
the way we drip them on each other.
Thought bad but not quite.
Lonely but doesn’t realize it yet.