I have this secret,

And maybe it is a culmination of a third of a life but

They say "I am so sorry" "I am so sorry" "I am so sorry"

And I say, 

This was a good man and good men don't die.

But he is is still somewhere probably and maybe alternative universes aren't just full of comets and universes that don't really end

Is this what you wanted me to say? All the hours in a warm room and all the time walking up to strangers in the cold,

All the knocks on doors fighting for life and living and life

All the drawings of bridges on little pieces of paper, explaining in six minutes all the secrets of Something More?

Is this what you wanted in my heart and engraved in my brain, deep grooves and firing connections, twisted and formed in the recesses of my mind?

Because, they say, "We are so sorry" and I watch all the sobbing people, with this secret

He is not gone.

Wishing that I could sit with the thing that bubbles
Majesty, or,
The simple kindness that stepping aside in the Street when someone is walking with stride and purpose, and maybe they see that if they stop you in your tracks, there will be no way to continue any kind of trajectory that you had set.

You will be off your game,
You will not be able to get back on the path you've set for yourself so maybe the greatest of kindnesses is just to let me keep going

Say that you didn't see it, when the whole world was burning and you
Organized your tiles in a row to spell a word that probably wasn't in the dictionary
And she says say the word, and I am there.

I don't know what that word is I think, and start thinking of my feet in my shoes and the way the bed presses against my body. My back. My hips.

She wouldn't grab a book, or a painting-- when the house is on fire.
Something to keep her body warm, or photo of someone she loved.

Just the shoes to walk away.

Are you okay, I say.
Your shirt is soft, but too big.
It's the day after my favorite person's funeral,
And I am floating above me watching myself kiss the urn that my uncle carved from a tree in the backyard.
The house that she grew up in, and
That you grew up in.

Grandpas die every day.
Dads don't have to die, I tell him.

I chase him down the hall.
The hotel isn't all that welcoming and
He is skinny.
Fumbling, hiding the brown bag in his jacket,
"I am okay."
And I don't believe him.

I never meant to be a feminist warrior goddess.

But here it is, maybe feminist warrior goddesses are just
Girls, all of them, all of us.

You think you are strong because you don't see girls carrying torches and showing our faces we just look at you, idiots.

We,
Think silently, stop.
And we say softly, stop that now, please.

And we frown at our screens and the white men that cover them
With loud voices, and power they told themselves and us and everyone that they had.

And they said "be afraid" and we were and they shouted
BE AFRAID and we were.

We watch them with their fire and their loud voices demanding
Some sort of payment in fear and wrenching guts for the fear they have of maybe someday not being as relevant as they feel when they are all
Waving their hands and shouting their words demanding the fear of everyone else.

God Help Us All if the big white men aren't always in charge.
(I am sorry big white men with soft voices, but this is who represents you. Pay attention.)

Maybe now we aren't as willing to speak as softly when we say
You aren't that special. You don't scare us, and there are more of us than you and don't underestimate us just because we have always spoken so quietly.

Power isn't bravado.

You scream and shout and demand and sob for us to be afraid.

We whisper truth, and you shrivel up and scurry back into the dark places with your weak hearts and minds.

God Help You All if we decide to use our voices above a whisper.

First code

You would think, I would have written about you earlier. I am sorry. Someone has failed you, little toes. Little fingers.

I watched myself open the car door after it was done, and I know I cried there. I know I drove around Denver and lost an hour. I don’t remember really. The nurse waved at me, and it was raining. Cold rain. I didn’t wear my coat inside that night. It was warm going inside and cold when I left. You should practice self-care. You need to call someone. Your mother. Your girlfriend. A therapist.
I still have Medicaid. I scrolled through a list of therapists. I don’t trust the one at my school, because I don’t trust my school. No one is available.

I was in a small town during the Pulse shooting. No one called. No one from my family called. They moved to my state, but I was alone in the middle of nowhere Colorado with the weight of what this was, what it meant, knowing what we were losing as a country. What we kept losing as people. Knowing what I had lost as me.

I came home, and couldn’t sleep for five days. I woke up at four in the morning and cleaned, and organized. My girlfriend sat on my couch, concerned. Watching as I disrupted my entire house, opening the drawers. Taking everything out. Throwing away bags and bags of things. “Decluttering.” “Purging.” I surrounded myself with pieces of paper organized by titles. “Things I want.” “Things I need.” “Things to buy.” “Things to throw-away.” “Things to do.”
“Things to fix.”

The first thing on my list was “Me” and the second thing was “The United States of America.”

“Why are you doing this?” My girlfriend asked, eyeing the contents of my fridge and my closet and my drawers spread out in piles in my studio apartment.

“I just want to organize. To make my place clean. I want people to feel welcome.”
I want people to feel safe.

I went to my doctor. “I am concerned I may be manic.” She wasn’t sure. She threw out heavy-sounding medications. I knew enough to know I wasn’t willing to be diagnosed based on one event. I knew the side-effects. The blunting. My insurance wouldn’t let me access behavioral health, even if I paid for it. I needed help, but I did not need to be in an emergency room.

I had already been told studying medicine would steal my creativity. Would I let chemicals? I knew and know better. I have studied psychology. I study medicine. I study people. I know those chemicals save lives sometimes.

I went to my mother. “I am concerned, I may be bipolar.” “I know you,” she said. “You are not bipolar.”

I waited, and it went away. There was the nagging flash of memory-- just two months prior, I had held too many pills in my hand for just a little too long before packing a bag and spending the next four days at friends’ houses so I wouldn’t be alone. I can’t access that person now. I couldn’t access that person then, when I had the energy and the racing and the need to fix as much as I could get my hands on to fix.

I am aware, of what to do and not do. What to feel and not feel. The bargains I make with myself. I know not to listen to sad music. I know not to watch sad movies. I am my own gate-keeper for feelings because I know what letting myself feel too much can do to me. I know I feel later.
So I knew, a week ago, I should get help. Preemptively. That I would need help. “I am available on weekends and nights,” I said in messages. To therapists.

“I know I am okay now, but I know I might not be,” I whispered to my girlfriend.

Little fingers. Little toes.

At the hospital a week ago, a baby had a tiny hair wrapped around his toes. His little toes were turning pink and blue and purple, and we inserted a needle between his toes to block the pain before we cut through his toe. And he screamed, and his face scrunched up in pain. My heart squeezed and flip flopped and a course of pain went through my chest and bubbled up from my chest into my throat. I’m sorry little one. He went home.

Three hours later, I watched myself using three of my fingers to pump the blood for a baby who had been shaken, or hit on the head. “One, two. One, two.” Proper technique is two fingers.
He had been fine for several hours. It was a rough intubation, but his oxygen was good. He started to wake up, and flight for life was finally there to take him away.

“Things to fix.”

I should work out. I should be stronger so I can do this longer.

I should paint again. I need to paint.

“One. Two. One. Two.”

This is why we are doing this. So his blood can go throughout his body. This is why even though you can feel ribs cracking, we are doing this. Little fingers.

It's like the finger. We took the finger off so that it would not die and become infected, so the infection didn’t spread to his body. It is just like the finger.

“One. Two. One. Two.”

His heart rate dropped lower, and lower, and lower.

“One. Two. One. Two.”

I watched myself, doing compressions on this little bit. Mom was begging us not to stop. Doctor said to stop, and you were the last one doing compressions, but he was already gone and

The ultrasound said he was gone

And you stopping doesn’t make him more gone than he was before.

Baby had tubes, and the flurry stopped. The doctor braced himself against the counter, breathing for a second.

I’m thirsty. If I’m thirsty, he is thirsty, and he is sad.

I watched myself walk to get a styrofoam cup, and I stole a Sierra Mist from the fridge. I filled it only a third of the way through with ice half is too full and before that it was too empty. Too much ice. Too little ice.

“Things To Buy” My brother graduated and my mom has a birthday. I should spend time and money with them, you never know. We will go to brunch and comedy and horseback riding. You never know, be intentional.

“Things I Want” New shoes so I can look pretty in my dress.

You shouldn’t compare sadnesses. I paid $60,000 to learn that. There is famine in places like Africa. Three month olds come in alive and then they die and there is no music accompanying it, and I have to come back tomorrow and so does that doctor, and we have to be there to get stones out of noses, and make feverish five year olds laugh with us and trust us, and make them feel better.

My best friend moved to Australia. Her car was stolen, she said.

“How are you?” She asks.

Your car got stolen. You will get the insurance money. You are fine.

This isn’t your tragedy. I insist to myself. Don’t be selfish. This isn’t your tragedy, don’t own it like it is yours.

I know my feelings are not convenient. The next day I had to go to compassion training. My feelings  never come at appropriate times. In a room full of strangers, I see myself 10 years ago in the story of how a five year old was dead on arrival in Kenya, and the white young medical student tried CPR again even though CPR had been completed unsuccessfully. “And then they wrapped him in a blanket.”

White with faded blue stripes. Yellow ducklings. My eyes burned and I wanted to scream it out loud, that this thing had happened, and I might have feelings and I might not.

“You didn’t say a word,” my friend Jess said. “At the compassion training. You didn’t talk the whole
time.”

It was an hour. Coping mechanisms: glass of wine, (but not too much they said), and drawing (I should paint again), talking it out.

“Yeah.” I said.
That nurse, who waved at me, as I left the hospital, still won’t stop talking about it.

“Was that your first code?” She asked. “I bawled for days after mine.”

“I have never seen anyone die before.” I paused, knowing I was going to give something away about myself that I was not sure I wanted to. “I had more feelings about the digital block.”

Things to do

I have been cleaning again. My desk was the junk drawer of my life. All the notes, all the things I learned in PA school. Big trash-bags full of notes, stuffed to the brim with binders and illustrations, the chaotic handwriting of a stressed-out student. One pile for loans I have paid off. One pile for my house. One pile of letters loved ones have sent me. One pile for things to complete. Neatly stacked chaotically (but I understand where).

Laundry. All of it.

Cleaning my car. My bathroom. My dog. My body.

“Babe? What is the occasion? Why did you buy white roses?”

Yellow ducklings.

“I buy flowers for myself sometimes. No one else does.” Picking fights.

White with faded blue stripes.

“It’s just kind of weird. People don’t usually just have white roses in their house for no reason.”

Little toes.
Little fingers.

Feminist warrior goddess

We have jungles for minds.
We have countries and continents for hearts and fireflies for fingers,
airplanes for eyes and our mouths are chocolate factories,
our tongues are waterfalls, our breasts volcanoes our breath great tropical storms and our
voices fish tangled in a nylon net.
Our worlds are ant hills, but the breath in our lungs are made of galaxies and oceans and God
knows we will keep breathing with the fury that can inhale and exhale such things. If you ask
our bones to sing be prepared for the spewing from our lungs of moons and sea creatures,
humpback whales and stingrays, coral reefs and Saturn.
You know they say our bodies are commodified but I dare you to contain what we are made of.

15 years of "Losing Weight" as a New Year's Resolution

?
I was hospitalized for three weeks in third grade for a stomach bug turned into a psychological nightmare. I thought I had cancer and did not eat for several months. When I went into my well-child check-up, and to our glee I had lost weight, my mother said, "That's one way to do it!" I knew I had done something right.

114 lbs

Weight in my family is a comfortable topic among women. In sixth grade, I ask my friend Kassie if she has ever weighed more than 120 lbs. She laughs nervously, looks at her sneakers, and grimaces. Kassie is slightly bigger than me. Her mother takes us both shopping and I am surprised that I look good in everything. I am not used to that. Kassie cries in the corner, and her mother glares at me and asks me not to try on the same clothes that Kassie likes. I am surprised, but I agree. Did I do something wrong?

Two months later, my mother tells me Kassie has an eating disorder. "I wish I could have that kind of problem," she laughs. "That takes self-control." I am 11 years old.

120 lbs
I buy new pants. I look cute. My mother and father sit me down and say that I can't wear pants that don't have pockets in the butt because it "draws too much attention to my figure." I have to return them. I am not sure my mother agrees—but we do it anyways.

132 lbs
We go to Aristotle to try on jeans with some of my Christmas money. I will not come out
of the dressing room in the Size 9s. I am mortified. "You are a Size 7," my mother says. She buys the smaller jeans. "These will be something to work for." I am 14 years old.

122lbs
I stop eating breakfast or lunch. I write sad things in my diary about wanting to weigh 99 lbs. "If you have a problem, then why don't you weigh 99 lbs?" my mother asks. The size 7 jeans don’t fit anymore. They are too big.

120 lbs
I go on a school trip to Nigeria. There are plain pieces of white paper tacked on the walls with instructions on how to die well if you are dying from AIDS.

How To Die Well
1. I am sorry.
2. Forgive Me.
3. I forgive you.
4. Thank you.
5. I love you.
6. Goodbye.

I don't think about my weight for three weeks.

160 lbs
"You can eat all the cheese and meat and cream you want! You will still lose weight!" My mother sits me down at the kitchen table with a rotisserie chicken.
She takes a butcher knife and cuts it in half. We eat it. We eat some cheese. We eat some ice-cream.

I work in a small sandwich shop. I have been “good” for several weeks” I make myself a sandwich with wheat bread, turkey, tomato, lettuce. No cheese. I know I am "sabotaging myself." This has to be healthier though, right?

149 lbs*
I feel comfortable at this weight. My tight jeans are just a little bit baggy. I feel pretty. I feel not hungry. I am 18.

My mother and father sit me down to discuss a "serious problem." They are "very concerned" with my weight, and think I need to "get healthier" and "just a little more active." My mother weighs about 200 lbs at this point. I tell them not to worry about it.

My mother takes my little sister shopping for a prom dress. The dress is two sizes too small. Something to work for.

117 lbs
Grad school is stressful. I take my grandmother to watch World War Z. I asked her if she preferred the Pixar film that was out. She wanted to see the zombie movie. I sprung for the 3-D version. Grandma is 82. She wants popcorn and I tell her to buy some. She eats quickly, like she is ashamed, like she is hiding how much she is consuming. "I should not  be eating this," she says, her face flushing from her perceived indulgence. I touch her arm softly, recognizing my mother's shame on my grandmother's face. "If not now Grandma, when?"

?
I am not keeping track of my weight right now. I am happy. I am 24.  I come home for Christmas, and my mom says "I got fat" by way of greeting me. "You are beautiful," I say. And she is beautiful.

?
I come home for my sister's wedding. My sister has purchased a wedding dress two sizes too small. She is thin for her wedding. My mother has not eaten in 20 days in preparation. They do look really beautiful. Happy (right?) I don’t bring my girlfriend to the wedding- she wouldn’t be welcome in Ohio. I drink a little too much at the ceremony, and cry during my toast. My sister laughs to her new husband. I am definitely the heaviest in the wedding party. I have to have my dress let out. I did not purchase a dress too sizes too small, and I have gained some weight. Working out hurts, and I don't like to do it. I have developed a taste for craft beer. I examine a photograph of myself when I was 16 years old. I am struck by how very average I am. I am not as huge as I remember. My arms are a little too thin.

171 lbs
I step on the scale for the first time in over two years. My clothes are tight, and it is uncomfortable. I brought my on-again off-again girlfriend Anna as close to home as I have been with someone I have dated. We make it as far as Cleveland, and social media tells us that my family celebrated New Year’s Eve  together while we stayed at my vaguely homophobic but well-meaning aunt’s house in Milwaukee.

My mother insists it is "weird" that I want to to bring her around my hometown. We have been trying "this" for 2.5 years. I am angry. I pick fights with my girlfriend. My mind picks fights with myself.

My mother doesn't want to talk much about Anna. She is happy to discuss how she is "eating healthy" again.

I eat a doughnut, mozzarella sticks, Arby's roast beef sandwich, and a chocolate shake on the 11 hour car ride home. I joke about how I am "eating my feelings." Anna does not laugh. It is not that funny. For dinner we have ramen. I like pork belly. "Tomorrow I am going to pay for this," I say. My girlfriend grabs my hand. We drive.

January 2, 2016- Goal Weight: 128 lbs*

"I am sorry I got fat," I whisper. I am eating spinach with eggs. Goddamn it, I hate dieting. My sister hasn’t called. My mother hasn’t called.

"You are beautiful," Anna says. I try to believe her.

I buy some new jeans with some of my Christmas money. Two sizes too small. Something to work for.

She says,
I like the way you kiss me in the morning, and it’s been four years, but my heart still swells in my chest and her face flashes in my mind then, now, and someday.
She says,
Don’t go, stay, build a home and a house and a home with me.
I think maybe, but
I also walk around with explosions in my mind and I can’t help but wonder if quieting the storms, saying no to the boats and planes and trains would be the most dishonest thing I have ever done.
Oceans and countries and addresses that you can get to with a map,
Organize, plan, set in order. Make an order.
What if though, I want her, and
I want to run around the house and pull the paintings from the wall until they crash on the ground, and pull out the socks from their drawers and sprinkle them around the lobby like they belonged there?
I organized for maybe a decade. Probably two if we are honest,
Now I feel I have earned the disorder and, when I say,
Let’s get on a plane and not come back until we have mastered a new language and imagined the whole trajectory of another lifetime, and if we do that we can live forever--
Isn't that calm and don't you have me still?
I said, what does it mean that my mind feels most calm when it's all scattered about and we have to trace the distance between socks, and see how they have fallen on the ground, and can't you see beauty in this too?

All of the things we have been taught could make us confident, she is not.

She does not turn her shoulder to the side, shrinking into herself, apologizing with her body for taking up too much room when passing by people that have earned less and are less brilliant than she is, but more male. 

She does not have an easy laugh, she does not meet the eyes of everyone around her and make sure they feel at ease.

She does not run 10ks for charity causes.

How did she earn it? How did she get it? Where does it come from?

Some monsters, are comprised of teeth and hair, bones and bubble gum.
Watching cities collapse and noticing that from afar, nothing like this will happen again (There is beauty to that) Hush.
And some live under your bed. Some in your bed.
Some live safely behind a screen (not me).
Some have voices in their heads, and they whip around, trying to answer them-- (not me) Gasping for air, pleading-- I know my demons, I have new ones, help me.
(She isn't sick. She wants drugs.)
Careful. People with voices have monsters in their chests too, stealing their breaths their breaths their breath.

Masquerading cruelty as protection

You think you will win, because we are getting tired,
And sometimes when we walk, the bones in our ankles crack,
And you push on our back but

Truth

It is not my back. It is not my bones,
But we are still burning down, and
When your bones are on fire, my spirit melts into something I can't recognize.

What is that, swirling thing, doesn't anyone care who is on rafts anymore?

I am a little wary of seeing your face, and
I am a little scared of who you were to me.

The autopsy of Amanda Grey

Lungs

She spent all of these seconds listening. "She was so quiet" they said, and " she had nothing much to say," but what they meant is that no one really asked. If they had,

They would have known, that it isn't every day you meet someone from the farrest of places. It isn't often, you meet someone who has so very much to say. 

She had been to the moon twice, and maybe she was lying because she had at least three moonstones, so she had probably been three times.

She held her breath to prove that since she had been to space she had figured out that on the 17th of each month she didn't need air. 

She would run, and she would run, and it was only a matter of time before she went to the moon and decided not to come back.

Aren't you happy here, though? They asked her and she would say "Neither here nor there" but the greatest mystery is,

What if,

That was far from the question that should have been asked,

And maybe a better question would be "Is there a where that you will be?"

The autopsy of Amanda Grey

Bones

She lived in a home she built from the sky down and,
Her body wondered out loud, "plug me in please," and she shushed it. SHHH. Body.

We are not made of things that can be recharged, and other things were meant to light up with electricity, but you and I, we run out when we do.

And she would nail down boards of her house, chimney and rooftop, and it would be difficult some days, building her house this way. Her knees would get scuffed up.

"Some things take sacrifice," she said to her knees. Matter-of-factly. And she painted the roof. She hammered and splinters stuck in her skin, but, she knew that the house would keep her safe. Someday.

And her lungs quivered, and knew they could not speak to this woman, paint on her cheeks and in her hair, splinters in her flesh, and bruises on her knees.

She hammered and hammered and sawed and built but she still had nowhere to sleep. "It will get done" and the bravest, the bravest of her body, finally spoke and her bones said, "Oh love, this will not do."

The autopsy of Amanda Grey

Bones

She lived in a home she built from the sky down and,
Her body wondered out loud, "plug me in please," and she shushed it. SHHH. Body.

We are not made of things that can be recharged, and other things were meant to light up with electricity, but you and I, we run out when we do.

And she would nail down boards of her house, chimney and rooftop, and it would be difficult some days, building her house this way. Her knees would get scuffed up.

"Some things take sacrifice," she said to her knees. Matter-of-factly. And she painted the roof. She hammered and splinters stuck in her skin, but, she knew that the house would keep her safe. Someday.

And her lungs quivered, and knew they could not speak to this woman, paint on her cheeks and in her hair, splinters in her flesh, and bruises on her knees.

She hammered and hammered and sawed and built but she still had nowhere to sleep. "It will get done" and the bravest, the bravest of her body, finally spoke and her bones said, "Oh love, this will not do."

The autopsy of Amanda Grey

Brain

There is a secret way her brain worked, and you
All wondered why she walked around with her huge yellow headphones on, every day.

We both know, that sometimes the brain misfires and there is a mystical creature in the street,
Scales? Wings?

And she would look past you at the things music created not just in her mind, but on the road. She would flinch as the cars passed, because she developed a fondness of sorts for the way her mind perceived music, and
The things her mind made.

She could some days scoop it up in her pocket, or swallow it whole, or paint a thing that maybe others could see,
Maybe not.

The autopsy Amanda Grey--

Intestines

She was shit. Maybe that isn't a beautiful thing to say. But she would sit reading articles warning against sociopaths and how,

All they did was leave a path of destruction, and 

Like a psycho she thought, well hey at least it's a path, it could have been all brush and bramble, 

And maybe at least now you know what direction to avoid.

Are you the host or graft?

There is a storm, the sky is green the sky doesn't,

Want you to put up your umbrella. 

Some days you walk with me and some days

You trip on invisible cracks in the sidewalk.

Your chalk art is growing into a canyon,

What parts of your body want to revolt?

Maybe lately it is better to be just a little bit wary of 

Whether your body is telling the truth. 

Don't write about the riot,

But, maybe now,
We will write about the extreme protest that is the slipping of your hand into my hand.

I need water and light the way you need magic. The love affair I have with the sea.

there is the moon (I told you it was beautiful)
there is the reflection of it in the street,
there is the rain on your face, and once again I recognize that
I lived, and some days I am proud of that accomplishment.

I need magic, too.
I am impressed by the shoe choices spanning the crowd.
I reign in my mind, focus on counting them, the colors, the formats of footwear, the stones inlaid in them.

I can feel myself watching the patterns, the one-two step to her one-two-three,
The skipping, bouncing, shrinking of all these people. Her face pops into your mind, with her small child. No shoes, but a hell of a lot more intention.

I want to take mine (shoes, not people. distinction.) and hurl them into the water, watch them float a little before sinking, look across at the stranger in the red hat and grin because then at least they will know that I know I'm a little mad.

I don't. I'm mildly disappointed in myself that I don't. It is not a thing people do.

What I do, is remember the feeling. The leaving, the running, the descent into anonymity.

The first breath in a place you don't speak a language, the strangeness of your body not belonging with the other bodies, the possibility and uncertainty and newness of that. The thickness in your lungs.

I've made promises. Sometimes, I revel in what it may mean to just wear a raincoat when it is raining. To stop feeling every sensation as a reminder that the beauty is pervasive, and it is not yours to have but to borrow, and there is work to be done.

If we are all crazy women,
Actually crazy. Minds that tricks us, and minds that allow us to create marvelous sketches of the cracks in the walls of the places we have made home.
If we can with our tongues and mouths and breaths describe to the blindness in us the reasons why everything we have made is valuable,
If we can hear the voices and let them know that our voice is louder though,
And maybe we are altos and sopranos and maybe we whisper but it is ours and it is the one we hear.
If we can, crank up the music and feel the pulses in our limbs, beating and convincing, always persuading us to remember and to capture when it was we allowed ourselves to exhale,
And maybe not hold our breaths just now.
When we, crazy ones, are able to stop chasing and simply enjoy what we have caught,
If we can look at our reflections and hold eye-contact and maybe not be the one to break it first, defiantly warning our reflections that this time they would have to reach through mirrors that are not broken and place palms over our eyes because we are willing to see what we are, and
We will not be looking away first this time. And we will not be bowing our heads to her gaze and our faces are cracked and our eyes are old and we
Pulse, beat, and sketch those cracks because
They are there-- but the walls are strong and we have
Made this home.

The women I love, in all the ways--

They sometimes have a brief pause freeze on their faces.

Maybe they were talking about the future, maybe they were mentioning baby shoes, pink or white, or with those lights that flash when they pound against the dirt.

Maybe they were discussing a song, and how someday they would pick up the guitar, and play away the mosquitos while sitting on uneven blocks of wood.

A far away look, like scanning a memory or a hope of some thing and a wondering-- will this be mine? Do I deserve this joy? Am I able to design my life and maybe then they either look down or away or maybe they still gaze into the fire weighing what their minds will allow them to dream of.

This is the kind of week where I know and I know and I know that there is more than just a little work to be done but
I also feel in the bottom of my spirit that I need rest from the barrage of tragedies and
I need to revel in some lovely things.

I listened to him revived with thoughtfulness in his words, and insight into what he wanted with his life.
I sat alone and wrote and listened to music and I
Drove an hour in the dark to hug my love,
And I sipped coffee with honey and I said goodbye to a dear friend (but I have a dear friend).
I spent the morning with my sister and my brother,
I played fetch with the dog, and her loppy ears and tongue and gangly legs all tired and happy.
I turned off the television, and
I walked, and I walked, and I walked.

Maybe once I would have shamed myself for looking away but
I now know
This is looking in.

This is making sure I can raise my head up out of my bed, this is making sure that when I turn back on the news, I can brace myself with the strength of the things worth fighting for, and whisper "Okay. We keep going."

This is the kind of week where I know and I know and I know that there is more than just a little work to be done but
I also feel in the bottom of my spirit that I need rest from the barrage of tragedies and
I need to revel in some lovely things.

I listened to him revived with thoughtfulness in his words, and insight into what he wanted with his life.
I sat alone and wrote and listened to music and I
Drove an hour in the dark to hug my love,
And I sipped coffee with honey and I said goodbye to a dear friend (but I have a dear friend).
I spent the morning with my sister and my brother,
I played fetch with the dog, and her loppy ears and tongue and gangly legs all tired and happy.
I turned off the television, and
I walked, and I walked, and I walked.

Maybe once I would have shamed myself for looking away but
I now know
This is looking in.

This is making sure I can raise my head up out of my bed, this is making sure that when I turn back on the news, I can brace myself with the strength of the things worth fighting for, and whisper "Okay. We keep going."

On being a nomad part 2

I nip my teeth into the flesh of the peach,

Listening while you tell me about how you are going.

I usually leave, but, as usual

I hurry you along and 

The sweet and sticky juice of the fruit makes its way down my chin

And I nod

And you hug me, you tear up, I laugh you off and let go.

You hold on.

"It is time," and I remember I've said goodbye to you before.

And something in this life I've chosen or the people I've chosen to fill it with, I am always,

Always saying goodbye.

On being a nomad part 1

It starts with a tiny drop of a thought. We brushed our hand accidentally across the old plastic globe in the hotel lobby.

We smelt saffron, and tasted it in a recipe we made.

We heard a poem, a story, saw a photograph,

And then.

We tossed and turned, scheming and scheming. Our hair got tangled from moving our bodies from one side of the other.

We saw the time.

I need to remember how
I used to make myself numb when I needed to,
When I thought I couldn't have a future
Or didn't know how I could live a life that was mine.

Maybe this is worse now, knowing I will make the one I want,
Just not with the one I want it with.

I need to,
Shut it off,
Shut it down,
Let her go
She
Doesn't want me now. And so I need to forget
The love and vision and hope and possibility.

I need to become numb
And stoic
And not hurt any more.

I did this. I did this.
I know it. I did this and I don't get to try again even though now
I am someone worth trying for.

I do a kind thing now
when people speak of heavenly things and God and comfort and religion
and I get quiet,
and I smile softly and nod.
I don't reveal things like just maybe it is much simpler
and maybe God is there and maybe God is not.

I am not an angry atheist who has been disillusioned and is determined to take the whole rest of everyone with him. I do not spout scientific theories and facts, ripping apart by force the carefully constructed faith of villages and small churches, or adolescents in freshman year of philosophy class.

No, it is much more personal. I hope maybe that there is something more. I could believe so.
But the nagging back of my mind suspicion says that maybe there is not.

And really-- if you think about it (which-- is that not how we got here?) if I were to pick between a handful of us (because we are and were always the special ones) getting to live forever, while the rest of us were in pain forever--- would not the choice of nothingness suddenly set whatever soul I have, however temporary, at slightly more rest?

Peaceful and blank and maybe not there anymore.
And yes, I have had a good life in that these words as I type them make me tear just a bit. But wouldn't that maybe be nicer than having everything while everyone else has pain?

Didn't I already get that in life, with the abundant blessings I was given?

I let the people who believe, believe.

Risks

Love, as defined by Robert Heinlein:
"the condition in which the welfare and happiness of another becomes essential to our own."

This definition of love makes me vulnerable.

I have to be careful with people. Generally, in an effort at self-preservation, I find a way to love them without needing their love back. I am surprised, then, when I find reciprocal behavior. I am touched and made somewhat uncomfortable. I know that my friends, my family, certain people love me because it was purposed-- that is what the pact was upon entering the friendship. I am struck by the surprises. What happens if you exceed the limit of people whose lives you can be consistently and constantly entwined with? What if somehow along the way, their happiness and welfare becomes so important to us that it drastically affects our own? I do not like the idea of a temporary fusing of hearts and lives, mostly because I have not found a way to love temporarily.

I was disturbed by a comment from an old teacher of mine.

He hugged me, and thanked me for 'who I was,' and mentioned that I was the 'most complete' person he had ever met.

I was 12 or 13 years old when he was my teacher. I was scared, and lonely, and overwhelmed by how I processed the world. I was too skinny, I was insecure, and I was very, very sad.

Fast forward to now, and I am grateful. But if who I was was someone wonderful then, who am I now?

I have not written a thing
for a moment
and sometimes I am afraid that the magical recipes that brew in my head
will get bored of me always saying, "Not now" and " this is not convenient"
and "I love you but later" and "we will see" and "I should do this other thing because this is not realistic"
and they will scowl
and grimace
and sob
and quietly or turbulently exit my mind.

Much. Like. You.

Violets are crushed in a petri-dish, and liquid is added to them,
you take your pinkie finger and dip it in, smearing the brownish purple liquid on a piece of paper you crushed into a ball
making the art you can with what you have
and your fingers grasp around the edges of the plastic,
it is turning some color you didn’t know existed, and you taste it expecting it to be sweet
but it is bitter
crawl
your elbows scraping the ground, shielding you face from the other faces
they are always looking
and you grimace
where is this enemy? you wonder. where is the enemy we were supposed to have
haggard men-boys and girl-children and steely eyes and
you left
made your chemicals and put them in pouches and let them go from the tops of trees and on the bottoms of planes.
you told your wife, (soft hair, so soft) that you wanted to make her
a perfume and would
name it after the child she lost while you were gone crawling on the grounds and getting your elbows dirty and trying to keep you hands clean.

The sad ones they
see.
How some things are harder to embrace.
Dear one, you are loved, it will get better and I know it is hard to see how. It is hard to see when the dust settles, and you are surrounded by the ways time stretches and suffocates you.
And it is so easy for you to laugh, and I am so jealous sometimes because of the crippling consuming emptiness and sadness and awareness that you do not have.
Why is it so hard for me to be light?
These clothes don’t matter. This body doesn’t matter. We will be gone and everything you are will be gone and what matters? What matters?
Maybe the tree shouldn’t have been eaten from. Maybe it would have been better not to know. Instead of the gasping,
I am always gasping. And it hurts so much.

It’s not that
I am sad or want to be gone or want to have pain.
But I have looked at a length of a belt, and snapped the black leather between my palms, and thought of the agony of waiting to cease to be and watching those you love cease to be and thought maybe I can’t handle this– all the waiting and watching and maybe in some ways it would be calmer to ebb away now on my own time.
my own choice instead of waiting to see when I couldn’t have this and them any more and being oh so sad it is ending instead of being able to be present instead of just watching it end.

I wish I wasn’t aware sometimes
it would be simpler not to be noticing
the way everyone is going about around me like a life is  a thing that doesn’t end like they are
on the track moving and running and I am hoping and hoping

You were it, the treasure that I’ve always searched for, golden beautiful love of mine.
Even if it is one year, maybe two– I can feel wanting your lips more than I’ve wanted any type of honey or mangoes or even water when the air is thick with how much I need. I am suffocated by the extent of my need for you. I can breathe in the ways in which I was clear- ah the clarity! I loved you, dear, I loved you oh. How I did.

hush now, mind and words floating around trying to explain away
the feelings and the way may chest constricts and expands breathing you in, even now.
so much time, and I wait
for your smile and spirit to release me from the way you clutch onto me.
sigh gasp, I know, you don’t want me the way I consume you (oh, how you consume me).

“I like to think of you in that little town,” she said. “Happy and frozen in those photos of you and the sea.”
if I were just a little bit wiser I would have
been troubled so much sooner by this.
It has been a hellish year and
shouldn’t someone who says they wish you were “we” want to at least
know the truth?

My body is a stranger
It unwillingly lumbars from place to place aching all the time under the strain of having to carry itself from the garden back to the concrete and swelter under the heat of airconditioned vents and the keys chattering away on a keyboard.
Sometimes we shut our eyes and there is the burning when the oxygen hits them and every breath is ours and we fought goddamnit for it and sometimes
the only thing I can say I’ve done is made it until I could crawl into my sliver of a bed and move the dog to the right side and, stretch out my muscles and tendons and all the other things the body is and
try and recognize my life as mine and not some distant life that I keep watching happen to some distant girl, like a movie that I have muted on in the background while I
iron my clothes and yours too, and make food for the men in our house (because that is what the women do)
and clean the food scrapes and scraps off of the table and sweep them onto the floor until the boys then step on them, barefoot, crumbs sticking to their toes and
trying to sleep after a long, long day of apologizing
(because that is what the women do).

13. 
    
    I am never raunchy I always
    say the polite thing and make sure the polite feelings
    flicker across my face
    fuck
    I am a deceiver
    I plan it I plan
    the way you will react to my subtleties
    I plan the way you will see me flinch or see the vacant expressions cross my face I plan
    the tiredness and the revolving door slamming in your face
    and the way I shudder away from you or have distance and
    I know if you are smart you will see what I’ve laid out for you
    When really I am just blank and
    the politeness in every fucking day makes me want to
    rip off the heads of magazine people and
    shove their smiles into bottles of empty cola and
    take another shot of whiskey so you can feel like you can finally decode what isn’t there.
    I’m sorry it isn’t and I’d
    try a little harder if I could.

From my insides wretched and writhing, I have been told.
Wretched, writhing creatures and
when I imagine this I think of exploding faiths and dogmas, the way you took my heart and scrambled it, sizzling my mind and interweaving truth and crunchy apples wrought with worms eating the flesh inside and out;
and brie (soggy on the cracker) fatty and savory, melting on the sides of my tongue. Appetite (yes), but
Sopping wet with entrails and telling me that it was caviar (but from the insides again)
How do you disentangle your own morality from the dead and expired bodies lying on the ground, rotting and seeping back into the earth?
In the pictures painted on doors and houses and on the sides of the walls, the lambs were always wholesome and cradled and protected.
This was never the whole truth, was it? How could it have been when the things we take we’ve deemed more precious broken into parts and pieces than as a whole?
How could you not mention the pieces of chipped white paint underneath the nails of those clawing at the images on church doors?
These pieces are needed to construct an entire portrait, yet they are splintered in the fingertips of girls with long hair that hasn’t yet had time to be twisted into braids.

Every bit of me tries to stay in the present even though
I cannot help but race around the time in my head, the pounding maniacal self inside this skull that refuses to be content with the things a life are made of;
and I know of heroin that you are engulfed by pleasure waves streaming through your veins and that is why white women in their mid-thirties berated us to choose wisely and
what was I but someone who could choose.
Gratefulness is always expected of those allowed to be. My issues with God always came down to this, the measure of where my gratefulness should be and where it was and is.
I am only afraid because I never let myself slow down and it is tiring, and now I take sleeping pills to sleep and then I can never quite manage to be awake.

The way you move against me even when I’m not there and you are lost
no, not lost, just
a little unwilling to be found,
shudder, sigh and a lisping fan sputters the honesty we couldn’t
my hand feels for how soft you are, yearns for it, my ribcage melts under the pressure of everything you keep demanding from me
taking more, taking more
and sometimes the games end in sweaty limbs huddled next to each other, hoping the fire in the room won’t singe the eyelashes from our bodies.

Listen.

I have infinite respect for the capacity we have.

Float spit spin twist

fire and chemicals move the beats through you

sing move let down your hair, and 

turn your door knob.

Make an appointment and be on time.

Don't be late.

Make this matter.

Songwriting sessions

She said that only red wine and Spanish

guitars would make her live the way she wanted

and somedays the only ways you could get that one smile

was by reminding her of the day she laid still for hours

or more on that shore

I'd say dance with me, but baby sail with me

salty water on your lips your hands your face

sun gracing those shoulders, lull with me,

sail with me, watch it float away with me

Time for quiet and time to watch us, stop

know this will end and be joyful it began

Let me get that smile

and 

let me remind you of that day at 

sea,

bay, you and me,

dance with me, baby sail with me now

I'm not afraid to ask for a taste

of the sea.

On your lips (sail) your hands (away) your face (with)

me.

It is hard for a loud, bumbling, moving and talking and rushing creature to be bound and gagged and made to be
above all else
silent.

I'm concerned the sad thing is coming back the
hopelessness and duplicity and the this or that you or them them or me
me or nothing.

Walking in a field is not extraordinary but
walking in this field with you,
the pheasant speak and the scratches on my ankle are inconsequential until later tonight, when there are hairline red streaks that itch like hell, and the raised bumps from feasting small insects, delighted and drunk,
and you, plunge your hand into the lake, tadpoles plump and plum color swim with gangly half-formed limbs into the murky algae; the reflection of you, pulling up a fish with rainbow scales, bare hands muddy and cut up and you squeal as the fish makes it out of your hands and into the dirt, gills heaving and make sure we get it home safely,

and the wildflowers can't help but brighten, downy and prickly fauna cling to the hem of my jeans, and this field is no longer a destitute thing, but oh so alive.

Banksy makes art of some sort,
we agree on this,
flowers in place of grenades, the room nods, and we admire the picture of a picture of someone's conversation with

an ally or enemy much stronger than canvas and

(roses, jasmine, lilacs)

you remember in a city somewhere, the powdery makeup of a woman, tapping her keys, her heels, her fingers on the slick glass-- picking petals off the tulip centerpiece at the restaurant, blonde hair, glasses, and

your nephew tumbling with chubby legs up to you with a fistful of crushed yellow dandelions, grinning and drooling and collapsing into your arms, and

the way he showed up, suit, tie, trembling hands and a single rose, and

we have conversations in many ways, I think.

Surprise, sparkle fire brigaid,
rushing to the next one, and still
there is time for someone to paint the engines red;

Feel the matches light up, and anchor your memories to only
the brilliant,
and remember me--

I looked out windows and saw white mares looking through the gauzy curtains,
lying in the fog, looking in and that is when I knew that this was all magic,

We feel it, don't you, think now. Softness on your lips from her lips, can you feel the moment before you touch when you are already there and your

bodies are only the curtains, but past this if you wake up early enough, and the morning is still just a little bit night,

and you see the spark and
you feel the warmth
and if you inhale if you
dare to hold your breath

you might catch the campfire from her veins, the scuttle of little night creatures hiding back in their flowerhouses and

you wonder, at the waking that you never could ache enough to believe. Surprise.

What it is like to hear opera, if you love opera and you don't even know it:

The words might be meaningless, and for someone who loves the interplay of words, this is an odd concept.

It might be playing on a playlist, depending on the sort you surround yourself with. And it catches your attention, with it's small building and bubbling, and

you (grumpily) tell everything else to step aside, this is our trump card. We've found it,

you quiet the dog, you hush your conversation, you turn the fan off.

If you are me, you have a cramped apartment but suddenly the room is so full.

You like this, no maybe,

you find, you

must hear this, and there is a thundering thumping brilliant swelling in your lungs and it starts in your belly and spreads slowly, building and moving through the tips of your fingers and

you are no longer thinking in words but in feelings,

and you remember as a kid your dad had tears in his eyes after a beautiful piece of orchestra,

and you can't help it, you are not crying really but oh! that is not noise, no this is not pop artistry or catchy limericks, this is talent and passion and beauty,

and maybe you have not really ever heard music, not really, until now. 

My knee smacked the ice and I felt the cold liquid seeping through my jeans,
and I cursed,
and a small man with a small bag looked befuddled, and he laughed at loud, patting the place his leg used to be, tipping his cap,

and I flushed knowing he knew I should have a little more eloquence.

I saw you there, chastising me, with those blue eyes.
I breathed in the entire small country in that big continent with that first tired sigh off the plane and then you couldn't watch me have the hope that would drive the rest of my life (just one of them) and
your dusty shoes matched their shoes
and your pale skin matched nothing.

And you shook, and I saw it, and I was home but you were very, very alone because
I knew this was made and you only knew that this was temporary and
what terrible thing to know;

I buzzed and moved with life and! I knew! that you did too. And I played cards in the dust and stirred clay with my hand, and I whispered for you to do this work too and you
spoke with lofty words about how the coins in my hand would break systems if I put them in other hands
and you spoke with the confidence of someone who read and understood words,
and I looked at you and then the boy and I walked away;
(I didn't buy the roses. I didn't buy the roses);

you thought I didn't see you slip him the crumpled bill from your khaki pants and you think I didn't see you confronted with the reality of facing individual suffering,

and you think that I didn't know that you felt the responsibility but you did and I did and sometimes I go to the grocery store to buy bread and butter and there are packets of roses and daffodils and daisies for $9.99 and I know that

of the regrets that will pass over me, when I lie down on a dusty continent and look up, some things will flash through me--
(I should have loved my brother. I should have bought that plane ticket. I shouldn't have hurt that woman. I shouldn't have played games with my words and the way I read you and

I could have paid three cents for that rose.

One day, sometime last year, we spent not a day but a whole slice of life (maybe the most relevant) naked in an ocean
and your hair was curly, and floated like jellyfish luminescent
not quite aware but definitely awake and
I was awake too and
the algae lit up the water and I looked forward and backward into the sea, my feet dragging but not touching the bottom of anything,

but,

my feet were dragging and dear,

it took far too long for me to brush my hand along your side.

Get up, and kick the wasp nest until you have red welts on your toes,
your ankles, your legs,
your stomach. Honey salve, don't you know.

When your father says, no son,
we watched your brother die but we didn't know how to stop it without, moving beyond our frames,

and we built this house on a graveyard but, don't we know how to keep digging, mother,
you are blind but,
you will fold your hands and read the devotional at the table(isn't that where it is supposed to be read).

How do you get up?
Get up!

(Please, I am asking- no begging--
No.
Asking.)

I've seen you laugh and here is the way the music moves me,

I'm

feeling like;

I need to ever. so. carefully. 

pay 

attention.

It's coming it is going and it is now, look out, oh love, look out. We are the graffiti on the sides of trains,

we 

are looking out and we are a blur of color we are the tattoos on the moving vehicle carrying precious cargo to places made by trampling down dirt

and we are curves, and green, and red.

I've seen those eyes make questions out of spray paint and,

I've seen the artistry in profanity,

and the profane in your art.

You hide your voice, like something you are ashamed of, move and move faster.

God if you

can sing,

then sing.

On the mundane becoming the extraordinary

It might have been easier to write when I was younger (old! Getting old!) because the sad things were tragic  and new and devastating; and just as one finds out oh! look! I am living—you also are finding out about the tragic horrible things and hunger, sadness, death and poverty, are all the tropes of the inexperienced. It is sad. People will respond yes?

Then, you get older, and somehow the sadness refuses to leave, and someone says to you, “Sometimes we just need hope. Write about that.”

There are true struggles instead of imagined ones. And they are not so black and white. The world is not constructed of the “good guy” and “the bad guy” and instead it is the homophobic parents whom you actually adore and cannot give up; the unrequited love of a girl with curly hair or a boy who is now living in Sierra Leone but is still dating his long-distance girlfriend in Boston. I think her name is Heather. And the boy has probably contracted Ebola at this point, and the girl wants to marry her girlfriend, and suddenly, you can no longer rely on the pretty and tragic tropes of your youth to make your writing mean something.

No. Now you must understand and figure out a way to live alongside villains, and maybe go to their birthday parties. Now you must figure out how to relate all of your sad poetry about bones and dust to living and breathing creatures who do not have the option to live or perish, but sometimes are just trying to be in between, because the reality is, it is this in between where we all have to reside.
Maybe you had to teach yourself how not to fall apart because it is now not the grandiose that makes or breaks you—it is not a tragic death or an overwhelming romance. It is the semantics, the nuances, the realities of what it is to be human in this world and that, sometimes it is embracing the droll and that sometimes it is making the tragedies known and acknowledged without adding stevia or honey or whatever it is these days that we are supposed to use to sweeten up the bitter.

Life is comprised of individual tragedies. They may not seem like tragedies originally to the naked eye. They may not seem overtly life-shattering. But you and I both know that the pang you have when you look at your daughter and you know that she will someday not be that pudgy 5 year old with the weird affection for vanilla yogurt devastates you. The things we push to the side—the aging, the nursing homes, the fear of not being able to contribute or lose your “gift” whatever it may be. So now—the tragedies are not as “other” as the burning house or the girl that dies when she is 16 of leukemia. They are not things to sob and cry about in the comfort of your bed before you shut the book and log on to your Facebook page or Post Secret or Reddit, or watch the 10’o’clock news.

Somehow, the work and writing that has to be written has at once become more mundane and more confronting. It is the art of controlling the kind of seeping emotion you want your reader to feel. Your writing and style and understanding of what true romance and tragedy and irony are have aged like a wine or a whisky in the cellar of your experience, and something much more frightening and subtle has  emerged.

Your grandmother is 84. She has blue eyes and white hair. Her fear is not death. Her fear is irrelevance and lack of function.  “Katie. I don’t like being here… everyone just seems so… old. And I am not…. at least I don’t think I am.” The quiet sobbing that comes at night or in the shower from her is not of a tragic and abrupt end, but a drawn out lack of participation or piece in the world around her. The “lonely shiver” that comes out of no where—and the little voice in your mind that reminds you of the utter largeness of the universe and the utter smallness of you.
This feeling—the one right now, the developing one that your mind tries to shut down—do you feel it? The subtleness of it, the resistance, the gloom that starts in your belly or chest and makes you feel slightly colder.

Or: the much harder and more difficult and complex combination of words that need to come together to incite some other feeling in your reader. Maybe it isn’t survival, any longer. Maybe it is not that the protagonist lives, because as we have just seen: living or dying sometimes is not the climactic end to our writing any more. Maybe it is hope, and what a lofty order.
You know that you have lived, and lived authentically. You have invested in friendships and maybe saved lives in ways you didn’t know were possible.

10 years ago, you were called to jury duty, and the 16-year-old punk kid who was so inebriated that he clipped a cops car—maybe you were the sole hold-out for his not being charged with “assault of an officer” in court.

The mundane becomes something hopeful. To you it was a three-day trial, a nuisance, and you haven’t looked back. However, because of you and the way you decided to stand-up, he was not given 28 years in a federal prison, and instead he became a counselor for troubled kids. He may not thank you or bow to you and you may not feel the intense joy of a romantic ending or the nicely wrapped conclusion of our cancer patient in remission. However, 5 years later, a kid named James comes to you and tells you the boy you stood up for in court became a man who opened up his home to the homeless. He thanks you, clasping your hand and tells you that this thing you did, this mundane and small and not-life-shattering thing has affected his life entirely.

So now the writing has changed because the experience has changed and you now recognize that the bones you wrote about are not dead dusty things, but smaller clusters of living capillaries and veins and have more nuance now.  It is these clusters that make up what it is to be a living body, muscles and sinew and names and a more complicated realness and, now knowing the back-story,
When a little boy says, “I love you, you are my best friend” to his grandmother in that short story—is that not more real than a romance?

When she says, “I love you too, James,” and reads him the bedtime story, and her eyes perk up, and she holds him closer, and her cheeks turn rosier and flush with purpose, is that not more, somehow?

The sad ones they
see.

How some things are harder to embrace.

Dear one, you are loved, it will get better and I know it is hard to see how. It is hard to see when the dust settles, and you are surrounded by the ways time stretches and suffocates you.

And it is so easy for you to laugh, and I am so jealous sometimes because of the crippling consuming emptiness and sadness and awareness that you do not have.

Why is it so hard for me to be light?

These clothes don’t matter. This body doesn’t matter. We will be gone and everything you are will be gone and what matters? What matters?

Maybe the tree shouldn’t have been eaten from. Maybe it would have been better not to know. Instead of the gasping,

I am always gasping. And it hurts so much.

It’s not that

I am sad or want to be gone or want to have pain.

But I have looked at a length of a belt, and snapped the black leather between my palms, and thought of the agony of waiting to cease to be and watching those you love cease to be and thought maybe I can’t handle this— all the waiting and watching and maybe in some ways it would be calmer to ebb away now on my own time.

my own choice instead of waiting to see when I couldn’t have this and them any more and being oh so sad it is ending instead of being able to be present instead of just watching it end.

I wish I wasn’t aware sometimes

it would be simpler not to be noticing

the way everyone is going about around me like a life is  a thing that doesn’t end like they are

on the track moving and running and I am hoping and hoping

I keep being frozen and waiting

but I gasp, I gasp noticing how we all keep going,

dear friend,

we keep going.

whispering heart you always

try and fool me like a colorblind pup who chases after the same parts of toys thrown in fields for him,

and can only bring back jagged broken bottles

oh why do you sear my gums with your green glass

why do you insist upon

cutting the flesh until I am only a ragged old thing

and I spin and turn upside down for you

exposing my underside and wanting only some affection somehow

maybe it’s time to stop staring and letting it go

You were it, the treasure that I’ve always searched for, golden beautiful love of mine.

Even if it is one year, maybe two— I can feel wanting your lips more than I’ve wanted any type of honey or mangoes or even water when the air is thick with how much I need. I am suffocated by the extent of my need for you. I can breathe in the ways in which I was clear- ah the clarity! I loved you, dear, I loved you oh. How I did.

hush now, mind and words floating around trying to explain away

the feelings and the way may chest constricts and expands breathing you in, even now.

so much time, and I wait

for your smile and spirit to release me from the way you clutch onto me.

sigh gasp, I know, you don’t want me the way I consume you (oh, how you consume me).

"I like to think of you in that little town," she said. "Happy and frozen in those photos of you and the sea."

if I were just a little bit wiser I would have

been troubled so much sooner by this.

It has been a hellish year and

shouldn’t someone who says they wish you were “we” want to at least

know the truth?

My body is a stranger

It unwillingly lumbars from place to place aching all the time under the strain of having to carry itself from the garden back to the concrete and swelter under the heat of airconditioned vents and the keys chattering away on a keyboard.

Sometimes we shut our eyes and there is the burning when the oxygen hits them and every breath is ours and we fought goddamnit for it and sometimes

the only thing I can say I’ve done is made it until I could crawl into my sliver of a bed and move the dog to the right side and, stretch out my muscles and tendons and all the other things the body is and

try and recognize my life as mine and not some distant life that I keep watching happen to some distant girl, like a movie that I have muted on in the background while I 

iron my clothes and yours too, and make food for the men in our house (because that is what the women do)

and clean the food scrapes and scraps off of the table and sweep them onto the floor until the boys then step on them, barefoot, crumbs sticking to their toes and

trying to sleep after a long, long day of apologizing

(because that is what the women do).

 am never raunchy I always

say the polite thing and make sure the polite feelings

flicker across my face

fuck

I am a deceiver

I plan it I plan

the way you will react to my subtleties

I plan the way you will see me flinch or see the vacant expressions cross my face I plan

the tiredness and the revolving door slamming in your face

and the way I shudder away from you or have distance and

I know if you are smart you will see what I’ve laid out for you

When really I am just blank and 

the politeness in every fucking day makes me want to 

rip off the heads of magazine people and

shove their smiles into bottles of empty cola and

take another shot of whiskey so you can feel like you can finally decode what isn’t there.

I’m sorry it isn’t and I’d

try a little harder if I could.