I’ll write us into a book and I’ll title it in a blank leather-bound cover with our initials scrawled in the corner like dandy lion promises.

I know forever is too big for human mouths and that the stones under my shoes in the creek know more about love than my peach skin (half-crafted from star-dust and deep sea sediments) (half forged from spring-dew grass).

I know that.

I want to tell you I have tasted forever in your lips.

Forever is smooth like glass marbles in a stream or chair tea steamed in almond milk. Smoother like your thumb over my pebble cheeks.

I make forever from our goodnights and goodmornings and the dog-eared pages between each sun-cycle.

I’ll write us into a book with a blank leather bound cover secretly titled “an approximation of forevers.”

I’ll be the preface and you can be the denouement.

Weave the day with me like thick wool and tinsel. I’ll use thick needles so we can see the light dance through like stained glass or rainbow prisms. We can make a scarf or a square for a quilt we can sew for the next month and never finish. I’ll sew us finger less gloves so we feel our thumbs can brush when we walk and hold hands near the creek. Weave the day with me like french braids and Challah bread.

Weave the day with me– and we’ll make this life a loom from the bent branches elbows and craned necks of sycamores– from held hands and pillow creases– from the holes in bagels and cherry tomatoes– from burnt coffee tongues and the sigh of door hinges–

One needle in each out our hands–

Weave the day with me like thick wool and

mornings.

I’ve spent the last six years of my life cleaning up after aftermaths.

1.I am sea-side town who still sees stained wood on the sides of the store-fronts from the last tsunami– with the broken pier that everyone remembers. With the missing Ferris wheel. I don’t eat funnel cake– I taste it with my nostrils and the slick oil of dough tendrils on my fingers. I’m force-fed and I replace one form of confinement with another. I loved my anorexia so much I turned it into a boy.

I’ve spent the last six years of my life cleaning up after aftermaths.

2. I am the sand castle whose form is a flat memory of aspiring architects who have to rebuild after the high tides– my turrets turned to toadstools and the pink sea shell somewhere in the surf. A boy in blue-red swim trunks stomped the southernmost wall in the spirit of the conquistador blood in his ankles. Anorexia liked to sculpt my like a sudden wave and he liked to mold me like a sand dune. He told me what to wear so I knew there was nothing beautiful about a skeleton-girl in jeans– told me my shorts were too long. Said that he wanted to tear open the wrapping paper of pink frilly lingerie on the body frame of fourteen year old girl who was a coat wrack.

3. He was the boy in the blue-red swim trunks. He broke in the walls of my sedimentary fortress. He told me I like to be thinned out– that that’s what we all wanted. Told me that wrists were made for squirming and that if I didn’t cry that something in this transaction had gone wrong. He forgot to kiss me and when he did he consumed me like all the food I had ever neglected to eat out of fear. Anorexia never covered my lips with salty hands– I’ve spent the last six years writing my rapist in the corners of poetry and I don’t want to write about it anymore but he always comes back. I never told my mother and I still remember how my friend in high school said that regret wasn’t rape honey– Hands on wrists still make me flinch. I still move my head sometimes and think of how he pulled my hair like a riptide– like a sand dune– like tsunami– like the stained lines on the store fronts. I can rebuild but only in new design– I’ll find an new spiral pink shell for my castle. I took anorexia back because hunger tastes better than pressure on shoulders. I’d rather eat nightlights and hang my hands from the coat wrack.

I’ve spent the last six years of my life cleaning up after aftermaths.

 

One morning I will awaken. I will awaken in the simultaneous lighting of the street lamps at dusk outside my window– a thousand eyes thrust open like stars.

I will awaken in an altar candle– wick thick with finger slick white oils– pull the string between my fingers and the thread in my lips like an envelope seal– seal

me shut in the supped palms of a chestnut scorched by the swift crackling flames in the broken knuckles of pine trees. I am dry enough for kindling.

I will awaken.

I vow to awaken.

I will awaken once I trace the constellations in the street lamps– I’ll sleep walk into the avenue– grasp embers from red-truck headlights– wake up in collision.

Everything is patient and quiet in adoration. We hold the cross in white cloth. Violent like a sunset I will awaken.

For the love of a bird watcher

For the love of a bird watcher I listen to warbles & count wood-pecker’s Morris-Code-clicks trying to make out their mumbled sweet nothings. I can hear that tinsel and mirror that flickers in his pupils.

For the love of a bird watcher I think about migrating south for the winter to Florida in a V-shaped pattern I make out of scarves when I leave the door unlocked in  the morning.

For the love of a bird watcher I use my pen as binoculars. Count everyone’s goose feathers and they molt– For the love of a bird watcher I perch in my desk like a blue bird (not a blue jay) and wait to be seen like a smudged pastel drawing of the skyline.

For the love of a bird watcher I jot down everyone’s calls, their lamenting songs, their forced chirps, and the rate of their wing beats resonating in my irises.

For the love of a bird watcher I use his fingers and cloud-wandering visage as a compass and wait for my Latin name

Amica mea

I opened my front door

like the lid of a can of peas–

I hesitated to get cut on the frame’s edges.

I left with feet wet from the mush water

and my purple coat

wrapping me up

like a cranberry granola bar.

I thought about how many people

I have been.

I wanted to know

if I love you with the same

blood as the day before–

If there is any part of

me written in the sidewalk.

I think about

what stories they will remember

at my funeral.

They’ll piece each anecdote together to

form a collage of an almost-woman

who was never anything more

than breath pouring into

the cold morning.

I love too many parts

of you that I think a list

would be too much to write

so I’ll just say that

when I open canned peas

I think about the curve

of the corner of your lips

and when I walk in the

melting snow

I wonder equally where you’re

going

and where your breath

fades in to the cold.

 

Don’t let me forget that I am the combination of infinite potentials–

Days don’t  have have to burn me like a wick–

I am wax sculptures.

I am the uncharted territories of my thumb prints.

Get lost in my finger labyrinths with me.

We’ll eat biscuits with my centaurs.

We’ll take the same wrong path twice and imagine

our old foot prints belonged to other travelers.

At night we’ll set up camp on my ring finger.

We’ll make promises and marshmallows.

We can get lost in our same foot prints

in the morning

again.

We remember what warm chocolate chip cookies

tasted like when we were 7. That was when

we didn’t know to measure flavor by calories.

My friend asked me yesterday is women are ever

happy with food or their bodies and I told her

I couldn’t think of someone.

We don’t even know if we like salad.

We feel waist bands like bridles or choke holds.

The magazines teach us to bake cookies

for other people– cup them in our

palms and taste them with manicures.

Hiss curses at our own taste buds–

pretend out tongues are daffodils.

We learn all the ways we can put ourselves

into boxes with measurements.

We think about warm melting

chocolate chips when we eat special K

bars pretending that women don’t like

the taste of food over 100 calories.

We are taught young that whether

kissing or consuming that our lips were

made only to sin against us.

What was Eve’s sin

but eating and falling in love

with the sugary fruit

she could never taste without

Adam’s guilt

and her own

protruding rib

that was his own.

 

 

Loving you unfurls like cream cheese spread. Like marmalade on the dark toast with the seed-dotted crust. It’s pen clicks and the profiles of our faces. I love how we can lay together like puzzle pieces. we drew in the silt. There was never a full picture– never a full puzzle for us to fall into. We make our own illustration from warmth and quiet breath. I wrote a map for us this morning between our clasped hands. I don’t know where it goes but I know it’s in the oscillating distance of our orbits. Call me Despina and I’ll call you Neptune. I’m sorry about the constellations I’ve found in you– but only because I never wrote them down. You wear Orion’s belt like a crown. I write you poems as a cartographer. Let’s build a mountain range upside down in the ocean. Right on the fault line. We can leave hand prints in the magma and tell Triton we’ll put everything back where we found it.

 

I’m wondering

what I would become if the snow

never stopped–

if God decided to flood the earth again–

only this time in white.

I’m wondering if I could learn

to live from the windowsill.

I think maybe we would

make nations of

our door steps.

We could to let

each day warm like a

tea kettle and whistle

like the birds that long ago

flew to a planet without

winters.

We would have families.

We would play poker

with dimes because would

would have forgotten

what they were used for.

Our children would ask

if God loved the earth

why did he pack it in white.

We would explain that he

was just packing us in safe

like dolls– but really we

would try to remember what

grass looked like.

We would think about how

the sun felt on our freckles.

We would look up at the ceiling

at night and try to approximate the

stars.