203. On New Year's Eve:

I will not see you
and I will be particularly
beautiful.

I am still the sort of woman
who wants to shout
out confessions into the air.

I will unleash
all of my galaxies. Turn men
into dust.

There is no more shell
of a girl. Nothing fragile
to find here.

202.

There you are in my yard
without your shoes. This is the fourth time
since Tuesday. The sky turns pink
and I have lost my voice
somewhere between Hawthorne and Pleasant.
Everything is turning into itself.
I love you. I think I could love you.
Limbs fall onto the lawn. You erupt
and I am tired of cowards.
It had been simple: You swimming in my sheets,
you swimming inside of me. Beautiful
is like any another clumsy word
in the English language, but my god,
the things I would do to hear you say it
again.

201. Secret.

If you find something beneath the metal
and carefully placed mechanisms.
If you see me as more than volatile and vigilant.
Please do not take away my hardness.

200.

I cut my hair and watch it fall into the sink.
Ten years ago, this would have been something else
and in the morning I would pull on long sleeves
and not tell anybody.

I apologize to my body for not loving it
correctly. It has been good to me.
If I love you now, will you forgive who I was?
It does not know how to answer me.

If I could step out my door and be lost
in the birch trees. If they could tell me what I deserve.
But the world has many languages,
and I am a poor translator.

It is not time yet. I leave in my sleep,
and it is turquoise skies and endless fields
of flora that I can not name. When I am gone,
let me go.

199. Tomorrow.

We blame the magnets in our bodies.
The ones that ask me to take you home,
the ones that weigh our abdomens down
and have us dragging ourselves
across the ground.
Something must be scolded
for this trouble. We wait for sunlight
to burst through our stomachs
and make us feel like human beings again.
My eyes get so wide
that my pupils try to swallow you
whole. If only you didn't bring romance
into it. I could have been content
with hands in my hair, teeth on my neck,
without the snow and stars.

198. Haiku: For all of the beautiful words I could say about you.

They could not compare
to your skin on mine, or the
motion of your breath.

197.

In an airport with stale air,
I do not know how to write you.

Last night
I was in one of the few east coast cities
where I do not know a soul.
I ordered food that made me sick
and did not sleep enough.

Still, I am more at home
in the cabin of a plane, in living
out of a backpack on a hotel room floor.

Sometimes I try to throw myself back
into New England. But you're there
and that's no good either.

This is what happens when
there's a flaw in the system,
metal scraping against metal, sparks flying
into all the wrong corners.

I would like to not have to beg you.
I want the things
I cannot seem to wrap words around.

You are at a Christmas party.
You are drunk at a Christmas party.
I am ten states away
dreaming about being with you,
dreaming about not being with you.

Call me in the middle of the night.
Please,
confess anything.