I want a boy to cook me Sunday breakfast in an apron and I know this isn’t unrealistic because my friend from work posted a picture of her boyfriend cooking in an apron and HE’S THE MANLIEST GUY I’VE EVER MET anyway this is my new dream
It’s not important
You are not here
When words collide
When tempers flare
When I hear music that reminds me
Of a snowy night
I spent cradled in your arms
I ache for
Not you but something
Similar
Does that surprise you?
It’s not important
But when I find myself
Alone
I am taken back to the night
I looked down an empty stairwell
And for the first time in my life
And only for a second
Wished for the courage
To jump
One time I partied so hard I threw up on a Saturday night and woke up before 8 am the next day for job training and if that’s not dedication and willpower I’m not sure what is
I thought I could love you
I thought I could have you
But now you can’t love me
Or have me
At all
To Every Boy I’ll Never Meet:
I want to be
Ethereal
An expression of myself
A silhouette behind curtains
Blonde hair in the breeze
A flash of red at a party
The passing scent of rose
I don’t want you
To touch me
When you look at me and wonder
“Who is she?”
I want to be gone
Before you find out
KL
Softly
I woke up with a question on my lips,
My mouth dry and my hair tangled,
I could only think of you.
And it’s not honest; it’s not pure,
Like holy water in the gutter,
Soaked in sin.
I asked God for a favor and what He handed me was you,
Silver platter, fattened and glowing with the apple in your mouth,
And I thanked Him while He washed his hands.
God doesn’t owe me any favors but he does owe me an explanation,
Or at least a coin toss.
Heads or tails, the winner goes home with nothing
And the loser doesn’t go home at all.
Soothe my lips with yours,
The lips that speak your name into the pillow,
Softly.
Hold my knees that shake and clatter,
Warm my hands so cold with doubt.
Whisper to me,
Softly.
Ask me to choose you.
If it wasn’t for Plan B I could have been pregnant. If I was a year younger I could have been pregnant. So much respect for the American government for making it available to girls of any age without a prescription. This is called common sense. This is called saving lives.
It has been thirty days since I last saw your face and the skin on mine is clearer than before we met. I count the fading red spots in the mirror and wonder if the acne left with you or despite you. When you took my makeup off the night I was too drunk to talk you told me that each spot stood for someone I had helped by allowing them to sleep their troubles away inside my body like a remedy, my body like a temple. When I took my makeup off the night I was not supposed to stay you stroked my cheeks like silk and wondered at the places on my skin where someone else’s pain had not yet touched.
There exist five stages of grief but grief never begins as a choice. Grief is easy to plot. Pain is relative. There exist no five stages of healing but a wound heals in three and maybe that’s enough.
1. Inflammation occurs immediately after the skin is broken, the vessels narrowing, the blood clotting, inflammation is the three vodka bottles in the dresser and the fourth one under your bed. Inflammation is I’m never loving anyone new again so help me God as you build a wall taller than your head made of bricks heavier than your heart. As the blood is clotting the cells are fighting to keep the area neutralized, disinfected, like a good friend holding your bleached hair away from your mouth as you puke in the toilet. Inflammation is screaming and sobbing and temper tantrums and fists thrown at the Universe like rocks through a window and it’s not pretty or pure but it’s necessary, and it hurts, goddamn it hurts but without it you’d keep bleeding forever.
2. After three days the wound is in a state of limbo called proliferation. Capillaries supply oxygen. New skin cells grow and begin repairing the damage. Only this new skin is different. It’s weaker than you remember and it looks different, too. You don’t recognize this new skin in the mirror and when you take off your bra and compare the size of one breast to the other you can’t remember if they’d always been so off. All you really can remember is his hands on your body and how to hold a cigarette in the rain without having to ask for another. There’s an aching in your legs and in between them too and you look forward to sleeping as soon as you wake up. Your skin breathes and grows but it’s like there’s too much of it for you. It’s like it’ll swallow you whole.
3. After two weeks cells begin the process of maturation. This can last up to two years; most minor wounds heal in thirty days. Skin returns back to its original color and boy, it is stronger now. It knows better now than to go to a party with strangers and it always remembers to call home. Maturation means growing up. It means not every poem has to be about him although it will be, still, because nothing has ever made you feel as much. There’s a scar on your face where he used to be and you run your fingers over it like it’s braille. Like it’ll tell you something you don’t already know.
After a wound heals the skin around it becomes 70% stronger than it was before. It doesn’t stay up all night crying anymore and it doesn’t hold its breath for someone who has long exhaled his. In one year the human body will shed eight pounds of its own skin. It hangs suspended like a ghost in sunlight beams in front of windows. It coats picture frames and collects under the couch in dust bunnies. Someday when a new lover is vacuuming the recesses of my heart he’ll disturb a corner where your dust has settled. He could clean out every crevice and you’d still be there, in my bones like marrow, in my lungs like arsenic. When he asks if I think about you often I will shake my head. I don’t have to think. I feel you with every breath I take.
