Love is Patient

Poetry is patient

it waits for me

at the end of the world

as I follow my breath

When will this body

no longer be my body?

Where does the light shine

when it shines on itself?

What do you think about

when you think about nothing?

I heard your brother died and

I think

Me too, me too

mine, he did, too

The space in my brain is filled

with mosquitos

that bite my ankles

as I fall asleep

as I try not to panic

while my heart beats so forcibly

that it shakes the bed

Just cover your head with

your arms,

or cover your face with

a pillow,

remember the load bearing walls or

the desks to crouch underneath

I tie old shoes to the bed, I freeze dry

and dehydrate,

I buy earthquake kits

but when the big one comes,

we will probably already be

nowhere to be found

and the poetry will still

be waiting at the end of the world

quietly.

Little Thing V1

I have been thinking a lot

lately

about my youth

about how once someone called me

a fragile little thing,

and how I liked that then

but now I know what they really meant

was that my romanticism

was a sickness,

one that was tender

at all of its corners but

spiraling at its core

and if you split the nucleus

right open

you would have found:

1. shrines to what it was like to truly see you

2. artifacts of loving too many people

in the same space and time

3. monuments built on the notion

that you can't love someone

without using your hands first

4. a lot of things I fought hard to forget

5. contour drawings of your pronated forearm

or one curled hair on the edge of your face

6. everyone I have ever loved melding together

into a universal thing, a universal You

7. everything outside of that running together

like wild horses

8. a storm in which the lightning

repeatedly struck

the dendrites of youth

9. how every time it hit,

the synapses of discovery would weep

at what it was like (see: wholeness, coming home)

to hold you

10. all the pain sitting against my spine

as she became more and more sick,

more and more sick, it shifted and grew

11. (into) infinite loneliness

12. (and into) infinite sorrow

13. all the hormones of growing up

14. the fucked up dance I did where you were not

a partner but a fixture

15. all my nerve splitting me right open

16. the poisonous things that spilled right out:

17. power

18. and control

19. self-righteousness

20. and deceit

21. an audible heartbeat

drowning out every other sound

22. how I thought I knew what It All Meant

23. how I really knew nothing

writing as a question and not as an answer,

writing as an exercise and not as a cure

and

an unrecognizable

ugliness that reached

like cold hands into the

tender warm places and

hollowed them,

picked all the meat from the bone

but

Who I was Then

and

Who I am Now

are not

Who I Have To Be

and I am not a fragile

little thing

anymore

I am not a little thing

anymore

at all

Little Thing V2

I found a love letter to you in a notebook

that I have been using to plan my wedding.

There were a lot of I'm sorry’s and

wondering if you ever still think of me or

if you are lost in the recesses of your own

mind

and time,

and all of the lines it

draws in-between us.

If I could, I would go back

and do blind contour drawings of everyone

I have ever loved

I'd sign and date them, keep them somewhere

safe,

build a museum full of

artifacts dedicated to what it

was like to see them,

relics of how it felt to possess them in

a gaze,

I'd erect monuments to all the

fleeting things lost

through space and time.

Who cares when your birthday was or

what your middle name is,

I want to remember the outline of your

pronated forearm, the

dips and grooves between your knuckles,

the shape your fingernails took,

the curled hair across your face.

But if I am honest,

I do remember those things,

like flashes of lightning in a storm— they penetrate

deep layers in my brain

and light up

the synapses of youth,

make the dendrites of

discovery dance

and weep at what it felt like

(like wholeness, like coming home) to hold you,

with all that pain sitting against my spine,

the discs slipping every time she got more sick

and more sick and more sick,

and my infinite loneliness,

and my infinite sorrow,

all the hormones and

the growing up,

the fucked up dance I did where you

were not a partner

but a fixture,

and the power I felt.

The power I felt.

The control.

All my nerve

splitting me right open,

splitting me in half,

and how poisonous the things

that spilled right out of me,

the current that coarsed right through me,

like an audible heartbeat drowning out

all other sounds,

gasping for air and sucking it out of

you,

drowning and taking you under,

flailing and

I thought I knew what It All Meant,

but I knew nothing

I took everything but I knew

no thing.

I'm Only a Good Writer if I'm Writing About You

Time is a messy lover,

unable to be drawn in a straight line

and no matter how hard I try to

recall its gifts in order,

my thoughts bend like light through water

and in its reflection,

there is my bedroom walls painted purple,

poetry scribbled on the closet doors,

a thousand secrets blooming

from the worn-down carpet,

you reading me poetry books

from another country

your voice hanging on the pronunciation

of foreign words

and a foreign world

in which you want me

to be the mirror,

to craft the words right into you,

right into what it means to be you,

right into what it means to be you

passing through me,

and what it means to be me,

holding onto you,

into what it means to be me,

reflecting you back to yourself,

into what it means to be me,

having loved you,

but I, too, am a messy lover,

distorting the memories until

they can no longer hold their shape,

and no matter how badly

I want to write poems that say

I thought you were beautiful or

something was alive here once or

I think of you fondly or

it all existed or

none of it did

the light changes its direction

and in its reflection it becomes

clearer that the words

are crafted line break

by line

break

not to hold a mirror up to you,

but so that I can more clearly

see me.

There Should Be More Sidewalk Art Always

the streets here are lined with trees but

there's nobody outside and it's so quiet

that if you listen,

you can hear the wind as it moves through them,

the soft rustle of the leaves

like the sound bodies used to make

when they brushed up against one another,

back when we could still touch,

back when we talked about space and

it was still personal,

back when it still belonged to us,

but now we're scared

and i cross the street to avoid figures still out of focus in the distance,

and still

i'm alone,

holding my breath,

reading signs posted in windows,

all the ways we find to say that

we're still here

without having to make a sound,

and i'm still here,

too,

thinking about the collective conscious

slowly unwinding like a knotted ball,

rubbing my clean, dry hands,

reading stories about people on ventilators,

being reminded of things i fight so hard to forget,

my chest tightening

at the thought

of how many more people have those memories now,

new knots in the ball that cannot be unwound,

goodbyes over cell phone screens,

goodbyes through static,

at least i got to touch your hair,

at least i got to write you a letter

for the ICU nurses to read over your still body,

but now there is no more time

for ceremony,

there is no more space

for letters,

there are no more words

to describe the depth of the loss,

there are just cardboard boxes left on the porch,

there are just cardboard boxes left on the side walk,

with fruit picked from my neighbors trees,

olive branches,

and a lot of sidewalk art,

a lot of messages written in chalk,

a lot of ways to say

we're still here

without having to open our mouths.

Pretty

We are in your mother’s kitchen

and she is teaching me how to soak dishes,

the suds blooming onto my pink fingertips,

my blood running hot just below the surface.

We are at your mother’s dinner table

and fork down—

metal on glass—

food half-chewed—

she looks up from her plate

just to tell me that I’m pretty.

As if she hadn’t seen me

a hundred times before,

as if she was just now

seeing me for the first time.

Me,

with my womanhood

like the flesh of a peach

hiding right below the surface.

Me,

with skin so ripe

you could leave dents in it,

and when you peeled it back,

I’d be all hips and breasts,

all soft, and

sweet, and wet,

and shining.

Me,

who taught you how to kiss

and where to put your tongue,

how to bite the lower lip,

how to move from the mouth to the throat,

how to move down further

and still.

Me,

who could feel the pathways in my brain

contracting and

then expanding and then

splitting wide open

anytime your tongue danced around mine.

Me,

who once called our intimacy

“mind fucking”.

Me,

who did the minding

and then the fucking

but never in that order.

Me,

who would pick juvenile metaphors

out of my teeth

to read them out loud to you in the dark,

just to feel the vibrations in my own voice.

Me,

with all of my nerve.

Me,

with all of my lies.

Me,

who didn’t know how to go forward

without going backward first.

Me,

who broke it all apart.

Me,

who couldn’t put it back together.

Me,

who didn’t even know how to clean a dirty dish.

Me,

the pretty one.

I Must Have Been a Girl

As a girl

I laid flat on the ground

and sucked in my stomach

until my ribs showed through

so I could feel thin,

so I could feel transparent.

As a girl

I kept a rubber band around my wrist

that I would snap against my skin

anytime I felt hungry

so I could feel in control,

so I could feel disciplined.

As a girl

I cut off all my long blonde hair

until it was so short

you could hardly see it

so that men in trucks at stoplights

would stop making wet slobbering sounds at me

with their mouths

so I could disappear,

so I could be non-existent.

I wanted to be as small

as I felt

so that no one would notice.

I wanted to be as small

as I felt

so that I could stop taking up space.

I must have been a girl though still

because nothing would stop them

Once, four men got out of the truck

when the wet slobbering sounds weren’t enough

and tried to catch me on foot

I must have been a girl though still

because I laughed at my escape

hid in my room for days,

covered up my small body and

stopped going outside in the dark

I must have been a girl though still

because it felt like I was the one

who got away

with something.

About Now

I imagine telling my therapist

about the imaginary conversations

I have with myself.

About how the past

sits in my throat

like a dense,

coarse knot.

About how on some days,

it unwinds and flattens itself

so it can pass through the outer layers

of my skin

and crawl out into the present

like ivy curling up

the slopes of an old building.

About how the thoughts

seem like a mixture

of water, dirt and grass —

about how they harden,

about how they come together,

about how they last.

About how they form themselves

into archways

around a pewter birdbath

lazily left in the yard,

about how you’re standing there,

pigeon-toed

your messy hair strewn about your face.

About how you are a ghost

at home in his house.

About the ghost,

the home,

the house.

About a poem entitled

I’M NEVER GOING TO THERAPY AGAIN

but about how

I hope that they did.

About how the person at the grocery store

notices when I’ve changed my hair color

and about how I think

he must be thinking of someone else

because currently

I’m just a shadow

of myself

About how as a kid

I wrote lines of poetry like:

“we are who we are and the past

cannot change us”

and

“it won’t change us”

About how wrong I was

about everything then

and about everything

since.

I Love You, You Love Me

I. An Expiration

The sky looks like a bouquet of lilacs

have been set on fire.

Did you know

you were seeing your last

sunset when you saw it?

I imagine your smooth skin lit up an

apricot orange

and burrowed within it

a sense

of what is not

and what is never

to come.

II. A True Story

A man woke up from a coma

after twelve years

because he hated

what had been playing on the television

in the ICU

and he just could not

take it anymore.

III. A Resurrection

I dreamt that you clawed your way

out of your grave

because you were furious

that we had let you go

too soon.

I told Craig about it but

when I said it I realized how sad it had sounded

coming out of my mouth.

I worried that it worried him.

It wasn't sad, I tried to explain,

it was miraculous.

You were mad but you were.

IV. A Decision

On the airplane to see you,

I told a girl that you used to flirt with

that you had been intubated.

In that moment she said that she knew

but I didn't.

There we were,

both of us cast into darkness.

But your darkness was just blackness,

emptiness,

quiet cortexes with no movement,

no hope for recovery, there would be

no coming back from this,

no speech, no autonomy,

no agency, no

life that you would have wanted to live.

V. A Thought

The television was just too quiet.

VI. A Follow-Up Thought

You liked what was playing and so you stayed.

2

At first, your memories consumed me. They held me tightly. So tightly that sometimes I couldn’t breathe without wailing. I would flinch in pain when they were around me. I would close my eyes and I would see the tubes in your chest, the unnatural bright lights of the ICU, the IVs in your arms, my hand in your hair. I would close my eyes and that would be in my mind on a loop. Your memories shrouded in the silence that was so vast and absolute. You lying there. So familiar but so unrecognizable still. Our other brother encouraging me to talk to you, suggesting that maybe you could still hear me somehow. But I didn’t. Because I couldn’t. The memory of not being able to. Not being able to. Not being able to.

As the months went on, your memories left me alone a bit. Sometimes they would leak into my dreams and it would be the worst kind of pain. Worse than the other kind. Like you were still so present in my mind that you had to fight your way out in my sleep. And there, in my sleep, I would talk to you and say all the things I couldn’t say before. Or worse, I would save you. We were playing a game with each other, your memories and I. One where I would think that I had won right before waking up but instead, the entire thing would become a reality once more. One that I had no chance of escaping.

Now it has been years and the pain has not softened. Your memories leave me alone more and more and more and more. When will I completely lose you? It is my greatest fear. When will I not be able to remember what you sounded like? I can’t breathe at the thought. When will I not be able to know how you would have felt about something? When will I give up the silly notion that you might be watching me somehow? When will I stop wondering if you would be proud of me? When will I completely accept that I will never see you again. Never. Never. Not ever again. I can’t and I won’t and I refuse to and it keeps you here with me, in the only ways I have left.