#poetrycat

I can hear the wind howl in my ear, the crackling of the fire, the sound of my breathing, and my heart beating.

I stand still, the rain falling on my face, my blood running cold.

A speck of my past lightens my heart, a memory of a smile.

I remember his laugh and the way his body moved; The taste of his lips, the feeling of his skin.

In my head, he’s in the rain, a ghost, a memory of his hands in my hair.

He was so warm and heavy.

I lift my face, frozen, burning, and numb.

Staring into the sky and the clouds overhead, I cry.

You don’t know me anymore,

but I’m still here

in the corner of your mind,

a lamp you turn off and on

whenever you please.

You left me in silence, with thin, thin skin

and cracked lips that tasted like iron

and salt.

The sound of my car

escaping your street like a long-ago train,

still rings in my ears.

You say you regret what you’ve done to me,

but I’ve been broken in places you’ve never seen.

If I was already cracked, already estranged-

What is left of me?

The night falls,

and the world is nothing but a room.

Light strays into the darkness

and gets lost.

I know what it’s like to go missing, too.

I could love you from the bone-deep

familiarity of childhood, from the startled

adventure of adolescence, I could love you

with all the joy and grief of womanhood.

Without turning away, without losing my place.

I could love you.

I’ve been loved

by men who’ve shown me how a heart can break

and still be lucky.

I’m lucky to have had the time

to be silent with you,

to feel your heart beating with mine.

Lucky to have you disappear,

to learn how I will go on,

and find myself still intact.

Lucky to have answered your silence,

your absence,

with my own.

I’m the echo of a canyon

that’s been emptied of its rock, its rivers

without water. I’m nothing to the plants

that need me to live.

Some people arrive, like guests,

and stay longer than welcome.

Without a hint of grievance,

they leave, taking with them a part of you.

They leave behind their scent

in the places they’ve inhabited.

You realize you can’t live without them,

and their absence makes you want to die.

The moonlight pours through the blinds and penetrates the air like a sharpened blade.

My frosty fingers gently reach for the window, sliding the glass to reveal a winter breeze.

The luminescent moon touches my face and caresses my cheeks like a lost lover.

I take a deep breath, and my cold hands stroke the beds’ woolen blankets.

I am pulled back into the safety and comfort of slumber, and I remind myself I will be okay.

You taste like a lover I haven’t forgotten.

Your kiss sweet, yet not at all cloying.

The lingering traces of your lips left the faintest of scents,

only a whisper that fills my nose for a moment

before evaporating into nothing.

You’re taller than me, and my head rests in the crook of your neck

like a flower in a book,

and butterflies make my stomach their home.

I’m weightless for a moment, my feet supported by nothing at all.

I want to bury every moment with you in a diary,

but my fingers fumble as they try to keep up, and I’m left staring at an empty page.

I want to hold onto you and never let you go, but you’ve already flown far away.

You were once so close to me, and now, like so much else, you’re forever out of reach.

Leaving was a small thing,

a settling of the dust.

The single most abstract thing

I had ever done.

In that abstraction, I yearned for freedom.

But now I see that freedom

just means the ability to go anywhere

and still know that I’m loved.

I can’t taste the salt of my tears,

but I acknowledge them as my own.

Like I don’t need to see the moon

to know it’s full,

or to know that there’s a spoonful of light

sifting through the clouds over the bay.

I can tell from the heaviness of my eyes

that it’s time for bed.

I look out the window in my bedroom and stare above.

I try to imagine what it must be like to be a cloud,

dense as wool and shaped like cotton candy,

slipping between the stars.

What I wouldn’t give to be just another patch of darkness,

to fade into the sky.

But I can feel my body impounding me,

dragging me back to bed,

where I’ll sleep alone and wake up alone, too.

The sky changes colors like mood rings, each one

a testament to the pain of being seventeen.

Not a single tear,

but a continuous flow that runs down my face.

I catch it on my tongue,

and swallow it.

Without warning, the tide rolls in

and, for once, I don’t run for high ground.

I let the waves of sadness drown me,

and pull me under until I can’t breathe.

Until all I can feel is the cold of the world in its final moments,

and all I can see are my own dead eyes staring back at me.

And still, they’re beautiful.

The light blue irises in the murky depths of my own opaqueness.

The long eyelashes

that brush against my cheeks,

as I sink deeper into the sea.

The way the saltwater numbs

my lips, my face, and then my limbs.

Until I’m only waves,

and I become an extension of this world

that wants me to be something else.

we kissed to the beat of

voices in our heads

that said

this is forever, this is all there is

we ran off, away from the streetlights

into a pitch-black oasis

where we could see all of the stars

the way we wanted to then,

when we were seventeen again.

When girls go to museums

with their fathers,

they don’t turn to the paintings and ask them,

“Why is that man so upset?”

or

“When will he be okay?”

Because good girls don’t tell their fathers

that they are in mourning, too.

Or that they also wonder when they will be okay.

Because girls don’t think of their fathers

as men who have lived with their own private sorrows, fears, or loneliness.

Young girls don’t see the paintings’ beauty

or the artists’ ability to represent the human face and form.

They just see themselves,

a mirror that reflects their sadness.

Good girls don’t ask

what made their fathers so sad,

why they are so distant,

why they, too, are so alone.

The boy in the old photograph

Is not the boy in the old photograph

I see you growing up

from the inside out

I see your beauty collide with your demons

and I’ll always wonder what it felt like

your body crashing against the pavement

with poison in your veins, leaving lost hope

scattered all over the sidewalk

a part of your past

holds you

under

and you’re so exhausted

you don’t even know how to move

you just sit there and stare, your mouth open

you think this is the most exhilarating feeling

and it’s not

it’s not

We’re sobs punctuated

by unspoken words

we whisper in our sleep.

We wake up in empty beds with

full-throated cries,

but that’s when

we’re whole.

We eat our hearts out with closed eyes

and can’t find our way back

to those moments when we were open-eyed and on the cliff

when we could’ve gone over,

could’ve taken the leap; but didn’t.

I’ve had my fair share

of secret lovers and furtive trysts,

and I’ve seen the dream die.

I’ve seen it die more times than I can count.

The first is always the hardest,

but it gets easier.

And the thing about love affairs,

is they have a way of dying, but sometimes

they have a way of waking up one day

and coming back to life.

I’m starting to understand that the body is just a map that can’t be read

and that the heart,

like a compass,

points all over the place.

I guess that’s why I’m here now,

to try to figure out what we lost.

But it’s like looking at a road map in the dark.

And all these nights alone,

they’ve turned into another kind of map,

an ocean chart of words that take you nowhere.

Time,

is both everything,

and nothing

all at once.

and

you can love someone

with everything in you

and the universe will still whisper

“not quite yet, darling”

Lifetime after

misguided lifetime,

I find myself

rediscovering the same path

I first paved

at seventeen.

Comfortable,

forgiving and

exhilarating.

Forever,

my most intimate place.

Something about

this time

made my bones feel different

as if they sat inside me

a little lighter,

and held me together

a little tighter.

Sweet sister,

you’ve known me longer

than anyone.

Intertwined yet-

visibly divided,

we’d been on different planets

while under one roof.

A puddle of sweat

forms just above my lip

instead of salt, I taste dirt

and while my heart was beating fast,

I had to beg my mind to catch up

I take a breath,

run a bath.

As I undress,

I watch myself

examining all the new places

that have now been touched

and suddenly

someone new appeared before me

I am constantly in a state of metamorphosis-

Transforming between me with you,

and me without.

But like the joints that ache within my hands,

you flare up at the most arbitrary moments.

Negligent to the damage

then pretending to banish me to oblivion,

as if I was ever easy to forget.

I try to forget you too,

until that ache in my hands extends to the rest of me

and becomes too painful to ignore.

I could play pretend

like my parents

and theirs before them,

and who would know any different?

I can fuel the facade they’ve illustrated

and paint the presence of our ancestors

each curse carefully intertwined with the next.

I could relive tradition-

and point the finger at my offspring

as a scapegoat for my misery

but when all you show is ignorance,

it will linger

long after you’ve gone

Suppressing emotions

has grown concerningly easy.

However,

when it comes to you,

I feel everything

all at once

A storm is happening in my bedroom

She is vicious and violent

Removing her costume,

while the room is silent.

When I lost you

I pushed aside a part of myself

that no longer felt safe.

I created a new girl,

one who didn’t overstay her welcome

This girl knew distance,

and how to only show just enough

and never too much.

A girl who built herself into a corner,

because being backed into one

can’t be so uncomfortable

if you’ve made it your home.

Sobs traveled through empty halls,

and I listened from my bed.

Unable to make out lost words

I Inched down the staircase,

until I could see the keeper of the cries.

In the distance, she collapsed.

Cradling her head in her hands

knees locked firmly beneath her,

she reached for him,

screaming

“please don’t leave me”.