The language of the sky is consumption. The ground—
dreams. I learned silence, then love. Fear. Love, 
again. We learned to read sheet music to appease the gods, 
they spoke to us in staccatos & hail. We forgot
to listen, forgot we had hands. So we walked around fumbling, 
lugging our half-hearted bodies, close-mouthed 
& hungry. Historians & poets alike questioned these linguistics, 
translated etchings into palpitations. I made sense of your language. 
My silent body, clumsy. Slack jaw, songs without 
word. You practiced eulogies. The man in the mirror laughed 
with his tongue out. And me, knowing nothing of my own God 
or how he spoke, made a list of words— I wrote succumb.
Mercy. Crescendo.
             Depravity—
I wrote down fool. I wrote beauty 
and then I opened my mouth 
and swallowed it. 

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I didn’t want to be here— not amongst 
the rabbitbrush & hook-tailed scale. Not
in this dry landscape, blank &
barren. Dust caught between slips 
of teeth, gnawing through barbwire. I walked
into the fields of ash, into the arms of metal grasping 
for light, oil pouring from the stripped earth’s 
open lips. 
 
I kept myself taut with want, hunger 
growing first in the ribs. Penance 
for the body's wrongness. A valve 
surely caulked shut, signals of drought. 

Digging up bones— 
I am an animal first, 
        sometimes.       Muscle, a thing of blood. 
I grieved woman’s filth, its sudden howl
                        of aliveness. 

I thought myself out & into a scene—
a wind outlined mirage. Leaves, vein-winged, 
emerald sky. Lifted my eyes out 
of the dunes & prowled into grasses bleeding 
weeds, sun fertile 
with gold. Austere of shame, naked & 
brazen. Bare-throated, wild, 
swallowing color. Neither empty or full, 
only suspended in dust & 
time. Wide-awake. Singing. Still, 
                                             my body. 

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—and kissing you always, 
how it starts in the middle &
it’s endings unclear. Dinner that night, 
moon’s silver on our bones. Wine & star clusters, 
milk-dark dream. That delft blue plate 
among ash—where did it come from? 
You & i are earth. 
Naked for today. Let the sky dress us. 
Taking a sip from the space you drank—
You know exactly when to kiss me, 
like running a sore thumb 
over my jaw 
of a heart. Forms blurred 
into threads of star, clouds for bodies. Afternoon 
falling into night, smeared into one long open-
mouthed encounter.

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night crawls above sky like a lover’s wingspan, warm breath & cashmere-skinned. fireflies gleaming for fleeting intervals, there and then fading into deep blue, flame-bellied & shy. under the awning of leaf, into the winding intestine of root, spaces to nestle into soil & earth. looking into grasses, wildflowers brimming flesh & gold. I remember being small. I used to see fairies here.

II

was God watching other nights, terrible & restless? ache spilling from mouth over the broken glass, into the fields. my arms couldn’t reach constellations, I dreamed of Saturn & sleep. I wanted to live in someone’s palm.

III

laying beneath the moon, letting light lick our skin. clouds colliding, wisps tangled like bones beneath sheet. spread across the blanket, wine & linen, fig-tinted fingers in my mouth. fruit that drips into our sleeves, red stains on our grinning teeth. belonging to the stars, to ourselves. nymph for the night, dancing with feet pressed to dirt. the blood between us is young, still tender to touch. middle of the world & we are better. I put my head in your lap, ask how do you dream. finally sleep comes like an unremembered thought, familiar & tired-eyed, we sway.

IV

movement from place to place, tracing cities with weight against my hardened spine. I wanted solidity, roots to braid myself within. longed for space to spread my arms. to trade asphalt for weeds, slate for unbounded skies.

V

she walked into the afternoon dust & he was still calling her name. the willows exhaled in sobs, weeping as they fell. come back. even different, reimagined, just come back.

VI

she had this garden when I was young, budding stem pregnant with tomato & vines, hydrangeas unfurling, grasping for air. her nails stained with earth, seeping into the cracks of her palms. lingering smell of rosemary & thyme with each lithe movement. I watched her tend to the greens, sifting through dirt for something else, maybe something more. carry the herbs inside, prepare love spread out on the table. I licked lemon & salt from my fingers, watched her cut & trim & cook. looked into her hands for a tell of the future, a mark that may unravel time.

VII

stream sliced across the open bodies of trees, a blue fissure amongst the viridian green. searching for brown-eyed pebbles, for selkies underwater. flowing over stone, eroding my own skin. hoping for transformation, finding my way back to my own body.

VII

naked feet on the cool kitchen floor, hand anchored to the wooden banister. candlelight & fluttering curtain held by ghost arms. the room exposed to the star-clustered dark. I wake like a child imagining midnight, dreamy-eyed & enamored. how I looked for you, leaned against your warm body. sentimental, the silence of sleeping flowers, sweet insect song. I created this world with calloused hands, traced hot summer nights from index to matter. I held my breath between forest & meadow. drank the sweet air, wandered away from the cruelties of solitude, into the envelope of devotion.

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mildew & steam latched to my legs, pressing red-hot thumbs to thigh. fervorous warmth on bare feet, hot breath, the belly of the earth alive & with an exhale, a small grace.

limbs tired with the season’s damp weight. thick light, head dizzy & mouth full of plums. I string up my heart like sun-wrapped linen. everything has been said of August. the best has already happened.

I’m looking out at fields for my threadbare legs to tread. at pastures with wild mares, bodies hardy, made of muscle & outstretched skin. realizing the fear that comes with freedom, the sight of someone walking into that field, arms to throw myself in. life as one long beautiful & vulgar endeavor. we need extremes to verify our earthliness. love, sex, tears, jealousy, flesh, high heart rates, hail storms, drought, sunburns, youth. to exist at all is to ask for something more, to be sick, blistered & smiling.

a doe behind ribcage of branch, open-mouthed & hungry, cardinals flush against the scene. I turn to you, grinning through amber, quick glitter-pulse. I tell you I want everyday to be like this, sun on my skin, burning from one thing or another.

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if you enjoy & are feeling generous & lovely

In attempt to avoid all shapes,

                 or more accurately avoid resemblance 
to one thing 
         or another, rendered myself
accidentally devoted 
to all things angular.        Jutting 
             limbs of trees, wool-skin 
pierced, curved  
               mouth bleeding wine. 
                                     Something like penance
          beginning at dusk, collected 
in the space
between rib & 
heart.                    Thirst from tongue to bone, 
                 dedication to some absolute 
of beauty. 
         In searching for formlessness,
                       I confess 
to worshipping false gods.
             Mottled knees mulberry with prayer, 
love all divine & crimson hands.
                Skinny night 
pinched through sill & pallid moon, 
                                                      fevered.
I remember lying
in bed, I remember hip hone & 
                clavicle. I remember watching 
the wisteria swell,
         explode from uterus
                             to dirt. Turning off 
                              my bedroom lights, sinking teeth
into dark. 
I will never be your spring harvest. But how I admired
them naked & unabashed. Thinking
               maybe one morning I would wake
with the lights on.

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How extraordinary to have survived
 
               all of my wrongs. I arrived here with nothing 
but myself, the ghost of some 
long lingering
                    forgotten touch. Sad cicada song, 
evening-dark bracing 
for impact. Elm trees in the yard, 
                                              gnarled hearts drinking 
          memory 
like promises.  No coveting ignorance. No negotiations 
in the margins. 

                                        Body’s equilibrium fixed 
                  to hunger. Close my eyes & fall into 
the salt-rimmed  
Ocean air.               I was a girl with long legs,
           muscles quick under thinning 
doeskin. Fist- heart, impetuous & 
waking every afternoon 
                                injured. Agility of wave, 
algae permeated scape, celadon green. 
                                           Tide middle-death. 
Feeding on goldenrod, 
moth-eaten body inseverable 
          from the carnivorous night. 

How extraordinary to know what I am—
        to have always known—
I open my mouth & the wind ties knots
                      inside my throat.

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I turned twenty four yesterday so I no longer throw pity parties. no longer twenty two so I get by on more than fools luck. knuckles on wood, shuffling my deck of spades & queens. a heart for good measure.

July— month of lovers & satin, syrup & flight of doves. late poems & nights unthreading, cerulean dreams of flesh laid bare. fireflies like shavings of dusk, fig-lipped, subtle & sultry goodbyes—

twenty four & now God has me in his mouth. years of sunday school will do this to a girl. I am closer to God than ever, my body made of temporary & lovely things. wax hardens into valleys & marble, this is the oldest I have ever been.

I don’t cry this year. I sip on white lilies & molten silver prayers.

now, I trade my loneliness for things bathed in light. I trade cigarettes for slow, sleepy kisses, my solitude for anything that may feel like love.

maybe somewhere inside of me 
there is still an animal
ripe for violent affections, lapping 
honeyed moonlight like wine 
heaven-sent, drunk & aching 
for anarchy. 

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the angel had come in a dream
shrouded in gossamer, 
perfumed with milkweed & mist.
wingspan like the length 
of a heron’s
kiss
plumed honey. 
there were so many ways my heart
was breaking, 
the angel plucked a single
eyelash 
& warned me of shortcuts 
to love
& the blue-jay wrapped in velvet 
flailing mock-up wings 
could be any 
feathered thing from heaven 
keeping watch 
so now I slice straight through 
the stone breasts 
of plums 
& I smile 
with a hand over my swollen mouth
of a heart.

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no words, no name 
for the sound 
of small mercies, the delicacy of terror. 
ink-stained beneath your touch, bodies 
coiling like smoke 
gathering in the bar, unnerving 
like fingernail to glass.
tug on the leash, you’d call & 
i’d answer. the body 
as a gauge of suffering. skin, a stage to perform
how much one can bear. words muttered in dark 
rooms like animals grasping, learning
how to speak. the thump 
of rabbit feet, small heart 
pounding against rib. 
youyouyouyouyouyou
crush me with your silhouette & 
cure for fragmentation—
possession. 		this is all there is. 
the kitchen table splayed out,
proximities 
made to be consumed. orifice of eye,
i lose myself 
in your skin, create new syllables you run 
your tongue along. there is a language for this—
primal & red, aglow & fertile 
with sound & color,
guttural, blue & streams of silver, 
unthreading gossamer 
to bound our bodies, your cadence 
traveling down my throat 
& into my belly, my womb 
a beating of some ancient 
drum i can’t quite remember. 
our words collide & i ask you to take my bones 
& let me go weak, here take my limbs, take
my form. i wrote a poem for this. 
i’ve done my part. 

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<3

silk against my legs, skirt caught in the breeze. dragged to the lip of shore, the sea heaves its great limbs, forgetting and remembering in each wave. I curl beneath its weight & it spits me out again.

II

I watch sky twirl across ocean & stone. tender lines, rough edges. I used to be a dancer, my body as a vessel. they told me I was sharp & meant my movement. I thought I must be made of teeth.

III

stripped to bone, freckled skin gleamed by stars. undressed and watching clouds swim through sky. you wade into the lake with a blue-eyed boy, a pool of ink at midnight. a baptism—naked throats & light unthreaded as though creatures freshly born. wet tongues writhe. only teeth remain dry. he reaches for your hand & you imagine your head held underwater. belly-up like starfish, laying motionless until morning. until the landscape is blanketed by sun & clothes retake their place. until you drive home in silence & now the lake is only a stain in the distance.

IV

I could become a fisherman. open-handed, falling in love with water. my arms are a net. I try to hold you & instead become a cage.

V

like Venus, birthed from violence & tendrils of foam. wearing a ribbon of algae like a necklace, like a noose. a monster in the outline of a woman.

VI

the back of the pub where you realize you are in love with the wrong person. whisky-curdled breath. you leave, enter into dusk. the wind grasps a fistful of your hair. you let it.

VII

I am almost twenty four. the books on my windowsill are sun-bleached, cicada wings withered. I feel ravaged by age, weathered from some storm I can’t quite recall.

VIII

you told me nothing blue is inherent in nature. I thought of your sea-glass eyes. the taste of love could be salt. I choke on it & spit up bile, hungry for proximity. what is a kiss if not a shared open wound?

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the only birds who can fly forwards, backwards, upside down, any direction the breadth of their wings will permit them. tracing steps through memory, reliving birth & death. movement as a means of recollection. I am trying to go back to a place I cannot feel beneath my hands.

resonance (n.) "prolongation or repetition of sound by reflection, reverberation” 
from resonatia, “an echo” or resonare “resound”

sometimes I remember myself more as an aftershock. the tremor after earth loses its footing. limbs slacken, my breath becomes the outline of another’s.

why I can’t remember how to play chess despite my childhood knowing. why the horses stampede towards me and crush my fingers beneath their marble, why the King orders my head on a golden platter.

why I can’t recall my father’s gait carrying me inside from the car. why, in my dreams, his body is swallowed by an ink-black sky. it blots his face. his eyes used to be blue.

do hummingbirds daydream?

why I remember dust dancing across dashboard in the car with that boy, why I remember how my skin flinched against his touch.

kneel into my dreams, look for clay hummingbirds in silk sheets & beyond windowpane. retrace my steps, I reach into my ribs & am left with fragments and also a great absence. I place both inside my mouth and run my tongue along the metallic taste of things I once had & things I’m better off forgetting. I let them nourish me.

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<3

evenings laced with violet, hands to knot. London was seven years ago. cold seeping through skin, crawling under darkness for warmth. a dozen cities, even more apartments with small kitchens & chipped wooden furniture. parallel branches grasp for timelessness. fragments of places lodged in me & i let them spoil. all the same, yet never that. the angel with porcelain wings on my desk still watches over me. so do my grandmother’s prayers.

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<3

heat wave mid-june. a sky emptied of clouds, gutted by blue. asphalt that ingests the sun & wears its warmth like cellophane. the tremble of wind groping hair, my legs stained red. even the dust holds memory here. 

[10pm]

turning of shade and the night hardens. grooves of flat land beneath my thumb, memorizing empty streets. the car stilled, humidity clinging to glass & heavy air in lungs. the silver gleam of a fox running through silence. strawberry pink moon. a summer spent on beer & prayer. two black birds suspended in air, sticky winged & pried open. the fox & birds both in motion. my animal heart pulsing. someone else’s quiet pressed against mine. i remember winter like it is the place i am from. i can almost say my name again. this is all the world is. sky, empty-palmed. this is all. 

the night is milk-blue and silky. the light in my room is borrowed from the moon. it’s caught in my hair, in my hands. i try to swallow it whole.

II

my splintered bones keep catching up with me. crooked with time, if i move, they bend at the wrong angles. they break.

III

i lay in the whitewash bathtub & watch the soap collect around my legs in tendrils of ivory. it clings to my skin like cashmere along my knees. you stand beside the tub & open the window. nearly rusted shut, pried to dusk. you want to show me the sky & i place wet hands over my eyes. i instead memorize the constellations of my palms, mapping out the dark while you ask isn’t it beautiful. but i can’t see.

i can’t see.

IV

another summer, the heat rolls in waves & happens again & again. even when i forget, when i don’t expect it to. my body takes shape beneath the sun. petals where my hands once reached. distance— i arch towards the blue, reach for warmth. dig my feet into the ground & collect dirt beneath my nails. i could bud & be beautiful. i could be an orchid.

V

twenty two & golden. i’m wearing a silk dress outlined in lace. music thrums in my pulse & my face is streaked with blue & red. i tilt my head back & thrash my limbs. i kiss strangers in the dark. i forget i have a body.

VI

i’m your Thetis. you want to hold me & i slip through your fingers like water.

VII

i don’t smoke anymore but there is an ashtray collecting dust & ember. the street is shrouded in pearly mist, we climb onto the balcony to watch the city below. your face pale & stained with fog, our silence grey. moth-eaten bodies, shadows bare matter. dawn devours us like wet stars eaten by night. falling slanted, shards of crystalized moon, tremendous & fragile. we lift our hands & collect glass in our palms.

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oblique light gleams 
into your sea-glass eye. pink-
mouthed, satin soft. 
pearl studded sky. drinking 
the evening, belly-up & full of stars. 
you turn violet 
against me. shapes transparent
& blurred, unable to tell thigh
from hip. dawn rising in my throat. 
inscribing poems into 
your side. i write lover. i write 
honeysuckle. golden. i write 
surrender. i write a dream 
& i fall into it. 

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a few poems, some old


icarus’s blame 

years later & still, i imagine 
second chances. remember 
how i loved you as a God? 
i was disappointed to find out 
your mortality. merely man 
& flesh has never upheld 
expectations. you gave me 
these wings and lit the match 
yourself— 
i never even left the ground. 
staring into flame and for a moment
falling into idyllic prayer. i reach out & 
red slips through fingertips—
all i wanted was warmth. 
my shoulder blades searing, teeth bared, 
no language left in my mouth 
but a grin. i wanted to be more, 
but there are scorch marks where 
i should have sculpted plumes.  
years later & still, i feel wax 
imprints on my skin in the shape 
of your fists. 

flesh asks to bleed

he looks down at you 
in your eyes & his hands reimagine 
you as soft. in the dark, teeth on teeth 
gnash. he’s all bone— a lean, animal body, 
solid & pressing into your hips like he’s carving 
his name out. you’re made of blood/bleeding/
bleeding out. sliding beneath skirt, he undresses 
you, for a moment almost tender—uncertainty 
tasting of devotion. slipping you out 
of your costume, skin raw against the night.
hands tangled in hair, desire as a dogfight. 
mouth whispering is this what you want? 
the body wants love, 
flesh asks to bleed. 

sunburn

bodies on bodies/fever-mad daytime 
fantasies/waves ripple through 
the fabric of blue/he turns to me/hair kissed 
by sun, golden/and open-mouthed/i'm blistered 
with want.

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I. 

i took you home to see all of my old things in the place i once lived and i told you i used to be beautiful. i woke up and made coffee and you stood there in the kitchen all new and alive and my blood stirred beneath skin and i wanted you to see me naked. i wanted my insides splayed out so that you could see the pulsing thing beneath my ribs, a forest of bone making way for your hands. you’d reach in and feel the grooves of scar, just like you saw the chipped walls of my old bedroom. we laid on forgotten cotton and touch wasn’t close enough, i wanted to dip my fingers into your hair like streams of light. i wanted to look into your sweet pillow eyes and tell you that you're actually the only home i’ve ever known.

II. 

i drink too much coffee 
and like smoking too much 
and staining my gums. 
i like wine on an empty stomach
and running until my soles bleed
and listening to the same song on loop
and loving you in the morning.
and at night i slip into my bed 
and pray fifty times
and when daylight slips through my fingers 
i swallow it whole.
i’ve never known how to love 
anything without leaving 
nail marks in its soft
underbelly

III. 

wine stains on pure cotton/ your tongue on my wounds

drunk& sweet, clumsy love 
spills from 
soft lips

the sound of your laugh 
would bruise me

i now have a buymeacoffee, so if you enjoyed clinking the link would be immensely appreciated! :’) thank you! <3

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