I shall withdraw and live
I am good at nothing but my youth
I suffer from perilous boredom, everlasting nighttime, pious family gatherings, head-on collisions with terrified blowflies and moths, daily hot flushes, wine stains on library books
And always I am stalked by an aching deliberation
SISTER
Of you, by you, for you. Thank God, I am obliging. How should I know what incompleteness feels like? When will you answer me? How should I express this to you? Through another handsome letter? By fighting against myself? My soul? Your soul? I couldn’t care less about telling them apart. What I care about is you so long ago, the light coming through your open window and the freckles on the back of your thigh; the sense that life was ending soon and we would meet our fate.
Soul Keeper, You Make Me Powerless
There is an anchor in my bones. It holds me very still
‘Til eventually all Time is quiet, the water is calm, God forgets
How fickle I really am. How being good is insufficient reason
To keep me shackled here. But I have dreams anyway
Of standing atop the Burj Khalifa alone: I draw sharp, ovular breaths
Selfish Girl
If I am being honest, I deserve this. As much as the next person, I deserve the slowest, hardest, vilest death possible, and I deserve you. I deserve the fireplace, the furnace, I deserve the footnotes, I deserve to be reduced to my own faint glow, dimming, dancing, deceiving. There was something there. I was sparkling, spilling out over the horizon. I was golden bliss, in the late afternoon or the lousy morning. Let that be all that I see, when the wheels turn and break. When I am thrown from the foothills of my chariot. Let my last reason be my first, that I love you, and let all things evil and innocent be worth justifying my life over this faint flickering light. Let me forget. Let me learn again, what leaning into flames can feel like, so that with the knowledge I am reborn. As something better, equally worthy, but reformed. A woman reformed. Ash for snow.
Confession
The game is played and I have won, we played nicely for the most part. I have every reason to sleep tonight. I think I shall become the horizon instead. I shall sink out slowly across the world, blurry and brilliant, never to be seen again until tomorrow. Tomorrow, you are your own headache. You are on your own. You are the blizzard, encroaching upon yourself, tender as the rising sun, whom you barely notice through the haze, through spiked mountains, and the millions of lakes which have all frozen over, and the world has suspended its own disbelief. You are on your own, but the world has chosen to love you. Climb out of your cage and let yourself be tamed, surrender to what cannot be sincere without you walking upon sworn enemy territory. I will put my hand against you, my firebreathing dragon, and surrender.
Where Do Your Loyalties Lie?
I saw the architect of your mind was my own
The same world was prying out through the tiny, square possibility of flight
From my childhood, when shoulder blades were wings
Dream Baby Dream
I am a baby, afraid only of falling
And loud noises
But it’s not true
I have a feeling it’s not true anymore
sculptor
I saw your play on Thursday but couldn’t make sense of anything
After I took my seat I grew rabid and weak, while my hands and my feet were elsewhere
Clawing towards some victory so far from the truth
changeling
there you will find me, the changeling changing her clothes
the other one got snapped up in the jaws of transformation, just like that
speaking on all my empty platitudes
but just like every other law-abiding girl, she got caught
that is the point
characterizing my sins
by a multiplication of obsession, of observation
it is a brutal awakening
into a fingertip lunge
cat’s cradle
I remember an embarrassing pause we took
between Tuesday and Wednesday morning, when I was
Washing my hair, scrubbing my scalp
Getting my youth clean for you
say nothing sweet
to be there again afraid
the way i was in the moment, both old and young
afraid of affection and peril
and being topless: a right prude
temptress
it is between your teeth now
souring flesh and sweetening
up your cheeks, the god behind the sky
wants to pry
you open—so you’ll notice it’s whisper
it’s right hand shifting higher on your thigh
stings like a hornet
and have you seen the cherry tree?
the market for reverie is suffering
billow of sunlight, storm of morning
we knew about nothing—it was sweet
and we knew it too, we were bare-foot
duller then, much happier, apparently
it is much easier to kiss if there is no
proof of time passing. pleasure was a clean wound; i could touch yours.
olivia
olivia, i saw you on the stage today
electric breath i saw you bathe
in their viral applause; song&dance
kisses in the air hanging there, all silk fast fame frozen-over
a lake; all tears in spades, moss at the break
of your hairline
memory and language on dreaming
language has a sensibly tense, cosmic relationship with memory. language is the mother of reception, of understanding, or trying to, of gifting and receiving, redefining—thank you, i love you—and memory as the father of just a little more; the root and wreckage of all final humanity, the cost of remembrance, and yet it offers us a garish, secretive loving that only one individual can believe in: you, and your moving, seeing, sensing, being. we believe it anyway.
radiates, vindicates, a hound
iron-rich clay from the monumental motel door-frame you stood in completely naked, stroking the inside of your calf making this noise it was a bristling kiss of a candle on wet wind as it lit, two lips; like that, baby.
winter, what do you want from me?
the publishers, they
like this
kind of
muck
about waiting
pining
being lost
dissection of any body
i imagined
being up against you
the far reaches of you
edges, corners
multifarious beings
disguised
cloaked in skin
of you
i wanted you
to despise me
before hands there was nothing
but it is just me, i am just the lungs
i am just a soft glow in the middle of the night
waking myself up
i am not made of metal i am made of you
i am young and i love to play
i play on my shins, the curve of my foot arched into my bones, nestled completely
living completely