Disaster

There was a river inside of you

and I wanted

to cause a drought.

I wanted to put each other to sleep

with all the different ways

we learned to say

“I’m sorry.”

Stop asking me why—

everything was a mistake.

Here is one I wanted to continue making:

finding your body in the pitch black with my teeth.

Watching you lick your hands clean.

Don’t ask why.

There aren’t enough ways to defend myself

against all the things

that I shouldn’t have done.

If this is what we meant by “being stupid”,

we should have said: “asking to suffer.”

I didn’t mean to

but you already do.

If this is how you will stay

then this is how

I will keep you.

Here:

I wanted to feel the hair on your ears

firing my synaptic terminals

and turning all the lights on

in my brain.

You want to dream about me?

I want to dream about you, too.

But I already do.

Here:

I miss seeing you by your mailbox

in your pajamas at six p.m.

Your palms sweating,

your forehead sweating,

your entire body sweating.

I miss your eyelashes

on the inside of my thighs.

I don’t know why.

If this was a choice

then I don’t know if I made the right one.

I don’t know if I ever do.

Here:

come back to me.

Does this make you feel more real?

Here:

I wanted to tell you about your rail thin arms

and how I miss the way

that they were long enough

to completely wrap themselves around me.

Here:

I got used to it.

Here:

I want you to fall asleep inside of me.

Here:

I miss your mouth.

All I have are these words.

I don’t know why.

Here, here, here.

Best

I won’t ever hear the word “disaster” again without thinking of you. But not because you are one. But because you made me— Is it weird to miss your broken sentences, your incomplete thoughts? I pretended to know you through an absence of language instead of an over-exhausted familiarity with one. I liked the confusion. But you’re gone now so I find myself writing your incomplete sentences into my own mind. I gave you the last secret that I had left. You didn’t mind it—it wasn’t all bad. Now if anyone ever asks me for my secrets, I can tell them who has them. They don’t belong to me anymore. This is what happened without you around: I cried in the doorway before making it into my house. Then I cried on my mother’s front porch in the dark until the neighbor turned on all of her lights. I knew she was listening but I couldn’t forget your one uneven eyebrow. I couldn’t forget the sharpness of your elbows. How they bruised my thighs. This is what is happening with you not around: I want to say, I’m not alright, either, but I probably never was. I don’t wake up covered in sweat. I don’t forget where I am, where I have been. My lips are bruised from being inside of someone else’s mouth. I speak in full sentences. I think about syntax. I think about what I had wanted to forget. I know you’re reading this and it’s making you feel worse. I didn’t ask you to. We wanted to distract ourselves from ourselves with each other and you gave up first. I sleep next to poetry books every night. There with me, in my bed. It helps me to forget that you were there once, too. They write themselves to you: they are all sorry, every single word of them. I want that secret back but I won’t ask for it. I always knew I gave too much of myself away. This is what’s happening with you not around: I’m sorry that I idealized you into stone, into dust, into memory. I told you that I had a bad habit of that but you held my hand anyway. Make me videos of the inside of your brain when I climbed the rungs of your spine like a ladder. When I got lost inside of the space between your words, the space between your bedroom door and mine, the space between your teeth. Tell me you’re okay even though you don’t mean it. I’ll romanticize the rest. It’s what I do

1937 - Forever

We are who we are and time, it doesn’t change us. You would think me funny if you knew about the secret rituals I had before sleep or the tiny pinholes in my heart, god my heart, that grow bigger and bigger with time but won’t change me.

Can’t change me.

Last night before falling, I thought about the length of your fingernails, how many chairs there were at the dining room table, the feel of the bricks outside against my palms, what time you would usually go to sleep, the tips of your hair, the latch on the gate that led into the roses, the roses, the shed on the side of your house that used to terrify me, the color of the carpet in the garage, where you kept the toilet paper, how you pronounced your “s’” and your “r’s”, where your tongue sat when you slept, maybe in the back of your throat or maybe right up against your teeth (like me), and the sister you had that died at birth, and her name, and your parent’s names, and your children’s children’s names and your real life proximity to me when it was a real life.

Me and you, that’s what I like to think about.

But that’s when the holes start getting bigger. And I can feel them, sometimes relieved that I can feel and breathe and move and think and love and cry and hurt. The other day when someone asked me if you’d approve of something, I had no idea what to say back because they applied this here now to this there then and I felt like a little kid, like when I bite the insides of my cheeks as I think, and I just stared blankly.

Oh how we can force things to exist if we want them badly enough. Please do not get discouraged because I want you badly enough but I can’t bend time or dig graves or go back back back. Sometimes I keep myself up at night thinking of all of those small things I would change though. What small things they must have been to cause bigger things, like small holes that make big holes and small steps that finally end somewhere but I don’t want to end here. Not here. Thinking, some sort of unhappiness somewhere in my belly, not fighting! Not remembering but not forgetting. Instead thinking every night about my secrets and how many coat hooks were drilled into the wall and when did you take those down? And what was in the closet in-between the living room and the kitchen? And which switch turned on the fan (that also terrified me) in the hallway? And what year were you born? And will these details ever change me or am I still fighting time? Am I still losing?

I Hope You're Doing Well

I’m making love

to ghosts,

letting them invade me

like a small army:

flattening a complicated

but unwanted

territory.

Mud dried in the impressions

on the bottom of their boots,

as they stomp all over me,

as they take refuge

in the dark creases

near the corner of my eyes.

I feed them pound cake

made out of the beaten pieces

of my own heart,

as I pretend

to no end

that they are you.

I am making love

to ghosts,

while I can taste the smell

of you breathing.

I take the air that has already circulated

throughout your entire body,

as it drips

like small drops of sap

from the exposed limb of a tree root,

as it becomes a bulbous

expression

of my love

for you:

one that I can trap

in my mouth,

one that lets me swallow you

whole.

I pretend you still exist here beside me.

I’m making love

to ghosts,

as I have let

a brigade of men

colonize

the small country

of my skin,

as it sweats sweet

while you are on top of me,

as I write myself to sleep.

Expression

becomes something I do now

with the door wide open,

with all of the lights on.

As I’m making love

to ghosts,

I think about

the last time I actually saw you,

as I am making love

to ghosts, as I

start to enjoy it,

as I

brush the hair off of the forehead

of my favorite

muse,

as I am making love

to ghosts,

as my muse

becomes the shadow

of the person

that was once

you.

As I’m making love

to ghosts,

I fall asleep

with all of the windows

in my house open,

I surrender

to the idea of you

haunting me

forever.

I let the sunlight flood the room

and it turns everything red

when I shut my eyes.

As I’m making love

to ghosts,

I muffle their cries

and instead,

listen to the crows

crying outside

and wonder if they too

are crying for you?

Trans-Atlantic

If your heart was a sea, you would have let me drown in it.

Sunday

I meant one drink

but maybe you knew

that’s not what I really meant

maybe you knew that I meant

make me a fixture in your life

again.

I don’t care what you do with me,

where you put me

you can have me any way that

you would want me:

spine hung crooked on the bathroom wall

at least so I can watch you undone

in the morning

or

folded neatly in your dresser drawer

at least so I can still smell

you living

I meant one drink

but maybe you knew

that’s not what what I really

meant

maybe

you never even wrote me back

so I could just

mourn the loss of losing you

again

and again

and again

so I could just

let the loss fall heavy

into an empty glass

I don’t care what you do with me,

where you put me, you can have

me any way

that you would want me:

even if

that means never wanting

me again

even if that means

we still can’t be friends

even if

that means I am incapable of

ever accepting that this is the end—

you could have me

could have

me

could

have.

Old Moon

Somewhere between the

three dots that form the arrow,

where the red earth pigments

next to the

iron oxide

somewhere between the

wheat and the whittle,

lies the rind with the bark

still inside.

Somewhere between the

river and the saltation,

where the pulp

is carried upward

towards the sky

lies your spine

in the shape of a crescent,

a half-moon drawn

in a soft curved line.

Carried Out to the Sea

Everything is quiet now, the sound of my own breathing becomes a low malicious hum. In my mind, you still exist in the strangest of places. The places where time no longer exists, where the entire universe is one fluid movement carrying everything out to the sea.

The memories I have of you now exist only as a feeling: the feeling of reading poetry to you out loud in the dark while my hands were sweating, the feeling of making love to you in the middle of the forest without a single sound, the feeling of telling you that I no longer loved you.

The feeling of losing you, how for months I would find myself on the five-south quietly crying— feeling lost in the truest sense. The feeling of waking up inside of someone else’s life, wondering where the person I had been with you for so many years had gone. And I think of those tiny little slips in time, where for a second I felt like I could reach out and touch that person again but it would all disappear as suddenly as it had came.

Your ghost still haunts me, he still finds me in my sleep, I still wake up crying for you.

Trinidad OR It All Ends in the Same Place

There is a day in late summer,

alone in an ocean with all

of my fingers wrapped tightly

around the curls in your hair.

There is a bright shirt strewn across

a foggy beach, our bodies wet

and everything damp from the salt

in the air.

There is a dream kept soft on my tongue,

an insistence in your voice and your

round face beaming bright

like the light from the moon.

There is my memory kept still like a spectrum

that ranges from all of the things

impossible to forget to

wanting to keep seeing you.

OR

When the distance is now

so immeasurable

that the cracks

in the floorboards

become shifted plates

where only the Earth

shines through.

When the hole in my heart

becomes so big

that it is no longer a wound

but slowly a crater,

a surface so vast

that it reminds me of

the surface of the moon.

When time stops being a straight line

and becomes a fold in a cortex,

a jagged ridge

that runs a spectrum of

needing to forget and

wanting to stay close to you.

The Synapse & The Gait

A cross-section micrograph

of a nerve cell

looks like a distant photograph

of the surface

of the moon

with craters dug deep into its body

and it makes me feel closer to you.

Like in the evening,

when I dream of the woman you love now

and her dark red hair

as it falls softly across her face

and your heavy hands

as they lift up slowly

to move it all away.

Like the way that

you used to touch me

as if every moment

was carefully thought out

but you have forgotten me

and I have forgotten how

to feel the warmth of the morning

as it stretches up east

over the mountains

to meet the sky—

Half-way through a hallway

there is an image

of you and of I

kneeling beneath a tree

in back of my mother’s old house

when we used to try so hard

to reach the bottom,

we would try so hard

to find any way out.

AND WHEN I FINALLY LEFT YOU,

I felt everything

escape me

as if it were all a river

running into an ocean

and I tried so hard

I tried so hard

to stop it,

but there were no windows

no doors

no seams

that you had left open.

But I can still hear

the sound of your laughter,

the punctuated noise

of your gait.

I AM STILL HAUNTED by

all of the things I have given you

by all of the love that it would take

to find my way back there

into that small selfish place

where I keep you breathing

along with all of the other desolate

parts of myself—

the parts that

were always the ones

that were worth

leaving.