I still send secrets through your ribcage
Prison my pieces with your heart
You safeguard my sense where you left me
Empty-handed by the water, tangled madly in gray.
I still send secrets through your ribcage
Prison my pieces with your heart
You safeguard my sense where you left me
Empty-handed by the water, tangled madly in gray.
I wish that I could remember those sunrises without you.
The sandy grit of shattered shells imprinting on my thighs, leaving puckered empty hollows, begging my body to remember the slow violence of their brokenness.
The blood orange sun flowing forth from indigo seas like a baby’s crowning head.
Some painful birth, or a canvas flowering beneath a brush plucked from a box of paints, and I wonder if there is even a difference.
The coffee is cold by the time you pull yourself out.
Enough time for me to fall soundly asleep to the hush-a-bye curling songs of water and shores.
If you wait long enough, warmth will fade from just about anything.
But as lucky as a greening copper penny gummed to the sidewalk,
Light always seems to find tomorrow.
We let the wildflowers grow
Lace in soft mountain air
Sipping wine on the wooden swing
You leapt and laughed
Brassy brightness in old oak arms
Clinging to the creaking cicada songs
Auspicious and alight
Do you remember what happened next?
Palming and praying
Over bodies of broken bark
Perfect in growth and fractures
You were not so far away.
Light freckling in branches and breezes
Do you know how to pray?
This is how I say amen -
One foot in front of the other.
Steadily straying towards
Divergent threads parsing snowy pines
I saw the hearth
I saw the peak
I chose to climb
That’s what I love most about art. There is truth with no answers. It’s all in the seeking.
Where silence excavates each exhalation
I touch these canyon walls
Breathe in the echoes and earth
Speak aloud the goodbye I've already said
Strength was something I had earned
In carefully measured doses
Medicine for a maker
Warming my insides until sundown arrived
I wasn't still because I couldn't keep up
I was only still learning why you spend your whole life running away
When you never turned around
I matched your pace cross the compass rose and ran
Your mirror is already breaking babe,
and your love's light is just the same -
A halfhearted reflection from a waning crescent moon,
When I deserve the sun.
- Your pace isn't peace and neither is she.
Tomorrow is the first place I fell.
Hand me storied stitches in tangles of yesterdays
Brittle frays with bitten ends
Arrange this graveyard in families of forevers
Nothing but names to remember us by
The laughter isn't lost on me
In these silken seams that shouldn't be
Unhinge infallible from its rust-ransomed frame
Easy come and easier go
Faith was a slip knot tied round my waist
The farther I felt, the tighter the twist
Weave wild and wonder at the monsters I made
As you split me to shattered, I sang
The littlest lullaby I could remember
Between the scorch-earth sting
Of your ignition triggers and my thundering resolve
Grasp my gasp in a white knuckled fist
Today the floor I hit taught me to stand.
Abacus rings on the maples
Wishing years would just unwind
Sweet world and sun tea
Growing one in kind
I don't know who you are but you feel familiar
I would like to memorize each movement
Fold them into hazy happy days
Let them grow wild and slow in my palms with each melded moment
I don't know who you are but the space between us is lined with light
There is something here beaconing my footfalls forward
Coax me in and draw me close,
I want to fathom this flutter could be more than I've felt
It's nice to meet you.
The middle of nowhere is the center of joy
Climb the stairs on an honest day
Reach the roof and sit to stare
For just a little while, for just us two
The junipers and sagebrush mill about
Their soft sounds weaving canopies
Around the twinkle of crickets and birdsong
The sharp smell of soil, a circle of arms
Your warmth and these sunbeams soaking into my skin
Kiss the places I forgot to love today
The wild meadows and the whispering mountains
Draw each drop of caution clean from my blood
Simmering summer sunsets
Radiant and reckless
I’ll find myself here, lost in your gaze
You draw me in outside of the lines
I’ll find a flower from each field of forever
Softly sew their sweet stems
The petals of each pasture are butterfly wings
Far more fearless than fragile.
Take me to your hiding place
Where warm honey softly turns in trees
We are a golden grove of autumn aspen
Our braided roots some ancient arterial atlas
Trace these tributaries till you touch
Where sun spills sweet over me
The forests we have shouldered
Will alight in a daze of ardent reverie
When I hand you the light in my eyes
Will you hear each word I have whispered to yours?
Touch the gravity of always and old oak arms and dizzy tiger lily prayers
Here, we know this one by heart.
If tomorrow is a place I hope the sun shines sweet and gold
That your hands on my skin are as warm as the light
And your eyes are kind and bright and shining with love
If this house is a home
Let it be ours
I would like to hold your hand in the hallway
Any hallway
This polished tile, locker-laidened corridor of junior high school
The Louvre or the Taj Mahal
I would just like to hold your hand
Kiss you on the cheek
Or the lips if we’re feeling really gutsy
Wear your hoodie
Your baseball hat indoors
Backwards
Tipped to the side
Let’s slow dance
In the tarp-covered gymnasium, your hands on my shoulders, mine on your waist
Because we don’t know how to slow dance
I want to let you steal my sketchbook as if it wasn’t the one thing I wanted most in the world
To tell you how frustrated I am with the boy that I love when that boy is really you and all that I want is so desperately for you to heed your own advice
Touch my hand under the armrest of a movie theater seat
Because making out is so seventies or so high school or so grownup or so gross or so…
Touch my hand
Because I know the static electricity that will pass between us could ricochet off the moon,
I want to wait to really know you.
You are far too precious to hold before we know what we are worth.
Before we understand the gravity of letting go and dismiss the mere suggestion of that idea as lunacy
I want to go to the third floor of a building, the restricted area
The basement, the roof
Shout in the library
Be late for class
Miss the bell
I mean bus, I mean train.
I want to love
How they always told us not to love in the student handbook,
the right way.
I missed a lot of bells, busses, and trains, to reach you,
I was late for a lot more than class
Late to say “I love you” to all the wrong hearts
But that hesitancy was all just the pause between the prayer and the amen
Waiting.
For here,
for you,
and now.
I will love the way your flannels feel against my summer skin, hiding me from the window’s soft breeze
The way I gently pull your glasses from where they’ve slipped on the bridge of your nose, after you’ve fallen asleep on the sofa to the drone of NPR
The way you bring me coffee in bed on lazy Sundays, just enough cream to turn it the color of my childhood room’s walls
How I will make dinner with you, sipping white wine and kissing by the counter
Our little breakfast table with the yellow cotton cover, and the mason jar of wildflowers I refuse to let go stale
Our bookshelf full of creaky bookshop treasures
The way you will dip me upside down, Dirty Dancing style, as you kiss me hello after work
How you won’t mind my incessant singing as if no one can hear
I will love the sunlight bathing our window seat in the bedroom
The old record player’s putter when the vinyl is through
Our trips to the market and the bouquet you slip into the basket while I’m counting coupons
The way our dog’s feet will pad softly across our aching wooden floors
The box of old letters in our dresser drawer, from times both oceans and little living rooms apart
The mingling of our handwriting on our grocery list by the fridge
How you still send me a postcard every time you travel
The way I will pull all of the covers to my side every night in my sleep, but how you will forgive me time and time again
I will love kissing your shoulders, running my lips over the freckles sprinkled on the nape of your neck
Our bathtub with the clawed feet and my organic lilac soap that you refuse to admit you use
My Hunter boots towering over your loafers beside the door
The tree house we’ll build together in the old oak tree and the nights we’ll spend there, counting falling stars
I will love Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong—dancing barefoot across the kitchen, my cheek to your shoulder
The farmer’s stand on the corner of the street, and the carton of strawberries that won’t make it the walk home
Christmastime strolling the avenues with breathy snow drifts settling in our hair, Vince Guaraldi flavoring every moment and our little tree with the crooked star
The chalkboard by the door where I’ll leave you sweet thoughts
Our jar of pennies for a rainy day
The sound your keys make in the door when you return home
The notes you slip into my work-bag while I’m in the shower
I will love the quiet rain stuttering against the bedroom window on soft nights, while jazz pours from the speakers in the corner
The whistle of the kettle, two cups waiting nearby
The way you drift off with a book draped across your chest
Our collection of photographs, scattered across every surface in mismatched frames
How your beard will turn my chin rosy, but I’ll keep on kissing you
Pressing our palms together and watching your fingers fold over mine
I will love the sweet strum of your guitar from the den as I sit down to write
The way your eyes light up when you laugh
The way I light up when you laugh
Our wicker basket of laundry after doing the wash, our linens tangled together
The bouquet of dried lavender from the fields near our home, hung over the stove
The night in the middle of winter when we built a castle of quilts and cushions
My grandfather’s apron that I’ll wear as I cook, and your banter of domesticity that will earn you a light-hearted swing from the wooden spoon in my hand
My little green seedlings growing by our open window, waiting to be planted in the window box on the balcony
I will love the days when we get into the car with a map, a collection of music, and a camera—setting off with an undetermined location in mind
I will,
love,
You.
I used to watch stars and wait for them to fall
But that isn’t how the world works,
or the sky.
Between your lines I write
Wartime letters begging you to stay
Morse code movements, still tap dancing love
Counting knots in my belay
And I’m so scared to play that song
I miss the floor beneath my feet
While my ears ring with church bells
You sound lonely in my sleep
That silver shine river takes us and
Here we’re soft as water
Prayers and stories to be found
You, are yesterday’s daughter