I think of you thinking of me. I listen to girls outside on my street corner, laughing empty into the night. Each sound they make bounces off of the concrete and gets tangled in my ears. I don’t owe you anything, I remind myself. In my head, on repeat, there’s a line of poetry that goes: “what better way to hold your hair, what better way?” And then I’m thinking of all of the better ways. Then I am thinking of what better way to have held your hands or your hair or your voice or your sorrow or your moods or your attention or your bedroom door or your laughter. I don’t want to keep wondering, do you understand? It’s useless. There was no better way. There was only one way and when that way wasn’t enough then there was no way. The way destroyed itself simply by being. It destroyed itself in a way that I can’t, in a way that I refuse to. There was no better way because I am only one way– this way. And I don’t owe you anything for it, I constantly have to tell myself. Anything.
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.