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.

196. Homosassa.

Everything about this place is warmer
and I do not know what to do
with my voice.

In Massachusetts,
people are afraid to talk about my father.
His name slips out at the dinner table
and everyone stares
into their lasagna.

He does not ask about me.
I am told he was here
a few days before I arrived, but my blood
is so far away from his blood,
that my body cannot feel the remnants
of his presence.

I am not five years old
and I no longer know how to be tied
to people. I leave
everyone.

195.

Love is a sneaky little vampire
that knows more language than words
yet does not hear no.
Sorry for being vulnerable,
I guess. Sorry for leaving
my shoes at your house,
sorry for kissing you again
and again, sorry for the birthday wishes.

In New Hampshire,
birds would smash into our living room
window, and I would bury their tiny bodies
in flowers from the backyard.
Now, if a thing dies,
all I can do is miss it. There is nothing pretty
to cover it up with.

This must be what comes afterwards.
When the bed turns cold and there is space
everywhere. I am pregnant with my solitude,
it is the warmest thing I know.
I would prefer the before.
When it was mischief and fucking
and we hadn't introduced the word maybe
into our dialogue.

Yes, I would want you,
but only if you were as brave as the bird,
as kind as the wildflowers. Capable
of being more human
than not.

194.

I.

One day I met an animal
and I happened to have a steak in my hand.
He followed me around for weeks,
sometimes whimpering, sometimes gnawing
at my wrists, and then he learned how to speak
with a human voice and I thought he sounded beautiful
and I gave it to him. Not that I particularly care
about steak anyway, but now
I don't know what to do with my hands.


II.

I did not mean to turn back
into a monster.


III.

On names:

A.) If you call me the right name
I will want to fall in love with you.

B.) I do not dream about people
before I meet them.
I say hello and later say,
"accident." It is easier to not give
a name to the things that happen to me.

193.

This time they ask me
what I am going to do
with my lungs. I'm tired
and I spend too much time writing
about what I do or do not
deserve. Here:

1.) You are in a suit
and I barely recognize you.
2.) You are ripples and waves,
more than I dare try to count.
3.) And, like most nights, I try my best
to go home alone.

Other men sing to me.
I would much rather be on my floor
listening to you read the newspaper.

So I'm trying to attach
a meaning to this. I'd like to find out
if you are the electricity
or the cathedral. You see,
I could run my vulnerability
through my fingers for days.
Is it shameful
that I wish to know your paper bones?

Tell me about the color you turn
when you consider joy.
I woke up missing you again.
You are not what I want
to think about in the moments
between everything else.

192. Encyclopedia.

I.

I do not like December very much.
There is no blood to guide me home
so instead, I try not to drown in the pine.

I think that I am not gentle
enough to be with anybody.


II.

We lived together,
once. Now, this is so far away
I cannot even say
if I still love him. My memory tells me
that we had twelve seasons
together. But memory
is all there is.

191. The rest.

My name
could make a home
in your mouth.
We are lost, then found,
and lost again.