7 summers ago i met a girl with mercury in her eyes.

i fell for the way she tipped her head up when it rained, & the sharp cut of her jaw baring the milky slope of her throat.

the first time i pressed my lips to the pink tulip slip of her mouth, i could taste her heartbeat.

i kissed her again on rooftops & in graveyards, lapping up the pulse throbbing in the warm gullies of her wrists.

the following spring, her skin was frigid & slippery as a fish when they pulled her body up from the bottom of the lake.

i sank my teeth into the ridge of her clavicle chasing the wet thrum of her breath again.

yet all i got was silence pooling in my diaphragm.

february went brittle & gray. i slept with the lights on & kept my jaw clenched.

(you'd have to break my teeth open before you could get anything else out of me.)

sometimes i think you're the reason that my hands won't stop shaking, & why i sit here with a churning stomach & a metal tang inside my mouth like a bullet or a knife.

in march, the volcano in my chest threatened to erupt.

i stretched out in a patch of sunlight & wondered how much skin i'd have to scorch to rid myself of your touch.

in april i thought about your hands & how i should have cut them off when i had the chance.

there is no grandeur in the recesses of her unconscious

lost in the confines of a sunken fortress, she does not sense the sun-drenched landscapes or the pacific sprays

there is immutable silence; the tiara on her brow, a parchment with a poem, coiled with a ribbon and fallen from her hand

she is dressed in taffeta and does not dream of escape nor will she ever

five bottles of apple wine 9 P.M. two of us in your tundra wheels shit stained, expired license  cop with a flashlight at the window  "what a nice pig" from the passenger seat "shut up" from the driver

blueberry pancakes & coffee  11. P.M. cold comforting porcelain  vomiting bright red 12 step rooms for years accusing my addiction every time 

remembering the wardrobe key, 2. A.M. parting wool coats  tongue to lamppost beaver under the snow i think ran from you because i could

last night, in a meadow in a dream, i shoved my hand through your head and pulled away with a strip of film between my fingers.

your eyes slid shut as i held up panels of you in living color to the light, like i was searching for a watermark with your name on it.

i saw hotel rooms, old mountains, lincoln log cabins places you and i have never been.

the last negative was just my face looking lost in a way that said “help me” and i was almost sick to see it.

sick to see you seeing me that way.

i dropped the film on the ground in pure disgust.

you opened your eyes then, and i saw them recording me and i saw that your mouth was a microphone.

“what’s wrong?” you crackled, your voice thick with late night screen porch radio static and my own lenses flickered behind my skull.

“there’s been a technical error” i said, “my mind is made of celluloid, and you just lit a match.”

i'm all scrumpled up & stuffed in the side left pocket of your lucky tracky bs. between those odd socks & handkerchiefs & neck frills & perchance a tea towel. rescue me before you set the cycle or i'll drown

as i'm heating my snack in a timed microwave and browsing the web on a laptop computer, i think of the efforts my grandmother gave and wonder how modern day living would suit her

she would keep fires burning preparing three meals no electric appliances, no running water while her husband had labored all day in the fields, yet together they planted two sons and a daughter

raised my mother on faith in a sharecropper's home, they instilled in their children the value of prayer no need for TV nor a light bulb or phone, just a family's singing that filled the night air

it has often been said life was simpler back then i suspect my grandmother might challenge that view, but she says she'd be willing to do it again just to see what became of the crop her love grew

the easy slip into nostalgia at a certain age, morning breaks like a thumb through the skin of a tangerine. the wind is a towel dried on a line, no shirt, no socks, no worries unless you count patches of sand spurs. the night stretches for miles, the sun a long fly ball you could catch and be back in time to take a bath & floss your teeth. beat the speed of light by closing your eyes before the switch is flipped, & wake in bug bitten patterns again, to the dawn chorus

often, when i dream i am in my mother's house.

barefoot on the cold linoleum, sunlight dappling the yellow walls, purple clover sprouting in the backyard.

my father died in that house.

we don't talk about it much- it is the family secret, the shell and the kernel, the phantom in the crypt.

the silence shrouds us every may.

last night, i was back in that house standing at the bay window watching the fireflies light up the grass as my father walked up the path.

all the words i could not say for the past twelve years were ripped out of my chest as he put his key in the lock and turned the knob.

"don't worry," my mother said to me, "he's just visiting."

i'd like to leave this world better than i found it, but the pressure of being young and good got to my head and all i do now is hate myself and scribble useless thoughts into my notebooks. my greatest fear used to be snakes and spiders slithering out of the bathtub drain, and i’m still not completely sure that that fear is unfounded, but now my greatest fear is dying and not having anyone remember my name. so i will pretend that things are simple, and that my word vomit has some sort of indescribable power and that i'm not afraid of snakes, i will shout my thoughts into the void and pretend that someone is going to be thinking of me for longer than a second or two.

you can feel it on the way home. the potholes don't shake you. she hits the curb, you don't flinch.

the rosary on the rearview mirror falls to the dash. you think of that abandoned barn off of route 30. it'd be a good place to paint them. someone cuts her off. she slams on the brakes.

they cut their hair recently. it suits them. she asks you a question that you don't hear. they tell you that you're their favorite person. you wish you were more. she turns up the ac. it's 97 degrees outside.

they played with your hand during breakfast. you tried so hard to be normal about it. they always look for you first.

she turns onto your street. you wonder if it'd be too much to make them a playlist. their name matches yours. would it be too much to point that out? that we're two halves of a whole? they felt the same way that you do at some point. you wonder if they still do.

you get out of her car and stumble to the door. punch in the code. let the dog out. fall apart in the black hole of your bedroom floor. you think about them.

it's all muscle memory by now.

i think of you more than you know.

i'm not good with words, i cannot capture sentimentality like you do, with butterflies and swans and flowers, tender and budding. i cannot paint watercolors like your monet masterpieces, nor linger long for conversations. or letters. i do apologize about the lack of letters.

it's been more than a decade. i remember when you were happier, when your eyes didn't cause you so much grief. i remember when time was kinder and age didn't matter, didn't comb edges with blades of steel, when spring wasn't just a flood.

puddles so wide it's easy to drown in longing, in a yesterday bright with yellow. there were daffodils on your windowsills. a serenade of sonnets you composed after too much wine and not enough sleep. i am still waiting to read them.

darling, it's 8 AM and i want you to know you're missed and loved. there are many here who have not forgotten your kindness or how the river ripples as you glide by.

your favorite rom com will tell you all about the art of letting go. so I’ll spare myself the details with this friendly reminder: the rain doesn’t stop in a monsoon. the icecaps are still melting, no matter how many bottles you recycle. and lest you forget your mother likes her tea lukewarm and the daffodils on her bedside alive. don’t give me those side eyes as if the scarf you lent me isn’t already feeding the hungry moths. this time of the year, everyone’s desperate. some for food, some for company. some like myself, just want a bowl of ramen full of sodium and fat eating to keep myself warm. not because it’s my favorite broth, the one you have on the stove for 24 hours. not because it’s full of daikon even though you hate daikon. just because of the sticky note you left on the caraway reminding me to stay away from bad love.

i wrote my best poems before i met you. i guess it could be said that fantasy always sounds more romantic, more certain, more convinced in the nuance of what makes happiness pink more than blue. do you remember? i wrote melancholia like it was my best friend. i wrote of birds in vignettes that were an extended metaphor of loving someone enough to let them go. why would your cold hands have clung to mine when the words from your lips couldn't convince me of neither stars nor moons? love should do at least that. there should be fireflies in cemeteries and rainbows behind every cumulonimbus. once upon a time, i wrote to you during peak rush hour and the conductor on the J train wept tears he didn't know he had. strangers smiled with sad eyes as if they couldn't believe i would give you a coveted verb when you gave me nothing but adjectives, small and unnecessary... ah, that was how i felt. one day, i'll burn the sea and scrape all the seashells from the shore and then, maybe then the winter wind will blow away your footprints to make room for better poems.

in hindsight the smell of cashmere, the color maroon, even the frayed ends reminded me of you. things had been unraveling one christmas at a time, until there was nothing but nettles, bones and bloody shoes under the mistletoe.