[he burns my journal...]

he burns my journal in his mouth, his head a pot-
bellied stove where memory goes to die. swallowed
by flame, all recollection of the past year turns
to oily, ashen fragments. they stick to my dried
twig hands, black and gray leaves. my mother
said never trust anyone who came out of the birth
canal the wrong way. the hemispheres of his skull
pushed up against each other, miniature earth-
quake. what made his mother name him so, why
that arrangement of letters? so many curves to
learn when writing first names, following the line
to the end of the page. spit out the charred bits
of my adolescence with sharp-shocked hands on me,
fingers fitting perfectly between the slats of my ribs.
he touches my elbow with his hand and my hymen
immediately breaks in ecstasy. i smear blood across
his television eyes. he leaves: footprints of static,
a pile of ash.

[i am the many-faceted...]

i am the many-faceted diamond of your insomnia
and i cut away at the basalt of your head to find
lava on the inside. deer leap out, covered in soot.
a flock of birds with wings aflame. the first sign
is always the animals. the ancient turtle that strains
to move quickly, quicker, legs lifting against the weight
of memory. the squirrels with tails like tiny burning
brush fires. your head is erupting, spewing forth
your past in blackened char, your present molten
rock. you destroy with no intention of recreating.
the animals will never return. you will wake light
as pumice, empty in the sunlight.

[for what it's worth...]

for what it’s worth, i tried to limit my lying to you
to about twice a day and never before we were
to eat dinner together. nice tie, i said,
fingers crossed behind my back, so it wouldn’t
count. you said something gracious about my
dress and we sat, opening the bottle of wine
i love red wine, i said, corkscrew in my fist.
i snuck a cigarette out back, then sprayed myself
with the perfume of lust so you wouldn’t notice
the stench of vice. but sometimes i underestimated.
when you said you liked my mother’s lasanga,
i traded it with silence about the shirt you wore
to my sister’s wedding. when you asked me
did you? i kissed you a maybe but it was always
a let-down. but i never lied with my hands.
or when i had my lips against your skin, ghost
murmurs against tattoos blue, green, on the heels
of empty breath. i lied to you about the color
of your eyes and you almost, almost believed me.

[he was a marching band...]

he was a marching band cymbal crasher
and the sound carried through the rain like
an echo reverberating off the small of a back,
her back, as she turned in the sluice to look
at him and then ran, squeezing through
the gap in the fence to reach the street,
up piermont ave across kinderkamack and down
again to the gazebo scrawled with penises and
hearts and dates and SD + [someone's
name crossed out] 4EVA and she climbed
up into the top, knees locked around a beam
of wood and she could still hear him laughing
like a trumpet brilling and she prayed
that the gods of sound would make her
deaf forever in that drenching torrent
of textbook molecules that now soaked her
skin and she shivered to remember something
warm and wet where there was now only cold.
she was an agoraphobic within her own heart,
listening to the beat of percussive want from
the inside, putting her hands against the shadows
on the walls, and he was the blood clot she needed
to stop the bleeding from her ears, he was the
blood clot that would eventually kill her.
in the morning they found an outline of her body
in rust, and they could not distinguish between
the rain and the tears, the blood rimming the edge
of a dissonant cymbal.

[somewhere between recognition...]

for shawn.

somewhere between recognition and acceptance
i sought to realign myself without further repentance
the universe had become accustomed to my grievances
but i have not grown used to life’s severances
even the stars, after a while, become repetitive
but lying next to you is my heart’s calming sedative
and when you call me yours gravity ceases to exist
and though the stars die their light continues to persist
i see them above the ocean inside your eyes
as we go to sleep together beneath these spinning skies.

[i never mistook you...]

for shawn.

i never mistook you, but i miss taking you
to the edge of a murmur, rolling over the
precipice of sleep, lotus-eyed and dreaming.
we were young once. while you were dancing
in dark basements i was breaking into other
boys’ hearts, armed with nothing but
a flashlight and a roving hand. but now we
are here, and i think it strange that i never
noticed the bags under your eyes like
shadowed ocean floor. i want to lay awake
next to you just to see what you say in your
sleep, if your subconscious can speak
the glyphs written upon my heart,
if it will be more than just a murmur.

untitled.

i. freeze

we were snow-blind with gray frost-bitten tongues
i tried to drown you in a frozen sea
but the ice was too thick so we lay there
unable to say what we really meant
(i wanted you to tell me you loved me)

ii. thaw

i pushed you under the icy water
held you until you said what i wanted
your blood pumped thickly and clogged up your veins
your tears were lumps of ice that could not speak
my heart was so hot it melted glaciers.

[our love was a dwindling myth...]

our love was a dwindling myth
passed down by tired mouths
and the time for snipped threads
was fast approaching. hearts
like signal fires lit the way
even though we knew we
couldn’t hide. leaving gifts
of broken watches for the gods,
we kissed gently but not without
urgency as the scissor blades
flashed. we were mostly frayed ends
anyway. i would have slipped
you a pomegranate seed if i
thought it would make you stay.

[we met at the horizon...]

for shawn.

we met at the horizon–i said hello and you got
me a chair. your eyes were marbled with cloud,
the sky’s denim, and i kissed your eyelids with
my butterfly mouth and although we knew that
at any moment the sea might rise to swallow
us up, we were not afraid. i emptied the sand
from my mouth so i could better tell you how
much i love you, and we left the line between
sea and sky a rumpled bedsheet.

boreas falls in love with a fire nymph

the north wind blows through my chiming mouth
and frost-webbed lungs fill and and empty and fill
again. oh bringer of winter, let me rise to meet you
with my hands of flame and embrace to create
an ocean, shallow in some parts where twelve
horses might ford, deeper in others where even
zephyrs might drown. on a coast of ice you will
breathe through me, your eyes frozen radiance,
our hearts a twist of elemental incandescence.