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At night, we play trivia for two.

I take titles of trains that passed us for good reason.

Seats we never sat in.

At one point, I watched the sun splinter into shards 

of stained-glass gold

that dribbled from the clouds into my lawn,

when it was my lawn.

I watched dew droop from the loose arms

of the tallest blue spruce in my yard,

when it was my yard.

All the while I wondered where you were.

I questioned your capability 

of sending the moon around the sun again.

I challenged the galaxies that grew between us.

and watched the wide sky, and the dust that dances 

where stars have been.

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In my dreams it becomes more and more clear: a reaching, a wanting to be loved, to be touched. Wanting be touched in a pure way, to be the focus of a clean sense of affection, to feel a liking warm and bubbling in my belly, through my toes, to want the knowing of being cared for, to feel the comfort like feather-filled blankets.

Wanting love to rush in like warm bath water, to fill me up. I am dreaming of shy boys who let me learn to love them like a dog loves its master: It just does, just because. Dreaming of love from people I know, know well. Dreaming of a touch feeling new and tingly, like a hundred wings of butterflies. 

I am trying to be touched again. Trying to feel the fullness rising in my lower center, to feel bubbles almost, almost, almost, boiling.

There are reasons why I think some ways, but I do not always know them. Why the men with hints of gray like tops of mountains. Why the men with fault lines on their faces. Why the urge to inch close only under the presumption that I am and will always be far away. (Because they aren’t you.)

Why the home go. Why the family spread. 

Driving I see a crow the color of coal gliding in the milky sky. Wings are wide, then still. Body slowly falls to the side.

There is a shift in my center. 

At Sarah’s house on the day after Christmas we talk about horoscopes in the living room. I act like I do not know or care as much about them as I do. 

I am an earth creature, and I like to be grounded. Still I try to settle into my New Home. I do the dishes in the morning so I hear my mother, like I used to wake up and listen through the wall to to her humming, ceramics clinking. She had already risen.

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auction

i listened to the man talk about how everything was going, going, going once, twice, three times, and you were there, holding that sign up, so far gone that when the man asked how to pronounce your name i fell silent, because all i could hear was someone else saying it while the two of you  moved, moved, moved, and we both kept bidding. 

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you bound me a book, told me i bleed in the ink of the words i write

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November 9th, 2016

Rose this morning and saw red 

caked between my thighs. 

You woman, you, 

my body tells me.

This is why you bleed, 

my country says.

All I hear is she.

The serpent’s tongue. 

The stale hate on their breath.

Disguise over

distaste over

distrust over

disgust.

Put tired feet to unfinished pavement

still soft like molasses, laid by the hands 

of the real working class.

What has come and gone

will come next.

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Here I am, lying sideways on my striped green couch in the living room. Close my eyes and see you walking toward me, pushing through pulsating bodies. The corners of your mouth lift into a soft smile as you raise your hand in a hesitant wave, still moving forward. My eyes lock onto yours. 

I can smell the beer in my hand, the air of beer in the room. You and me and everyone around us, we’re all standing in the sweetest bath of soft magenta. Still the brightest glow in here is the green in your eyes, pouring into mine for the briefest and longest moment. When one of us looks away from the other, I can’t remember who first, the music crashes into my ears again. Everything is set back in motion. I turn around to face my friends, shut my eyes and smile. I feel you doing the same across the dance floor. 

We show each other how we can share the same stage again. How we move in new company. We’re careful not to come too close. The water in which we once swam has burst its tank and flooded everything around it. We swim with hesitation in this new sea, don’t come too close when we find one another. The next song comes on. The crowd buries you. I sway and keeping smiling.

Ryan tells me about two types of artists during our second trip to Fiume. We’ve seen four movies now. His eyes are green too, a different kind of green, deeper and darker and grassy with a soft olive lining. I can’t stop staring at them. I try to picture coming closer to him, feeling the stubble of his face on mine. I can’t. It’s still the same with him as it is with everyone else. I keep thinking about you. So this time I don’t try to stop. I picture you until you leave my mind, and then I focus on him. What he’s saying now draws me in. He’s telling me about two types of artists. Something about Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. He’s smart, and he knows more about people than I ever will. The bar is rotating its music selection between old-timey jazz and punk songs again. The smell of Ethiopian food wafts upstairs. These artists he speaks of: one produces outstanding work in persistent, feverish bursts from a young age and then, like a flame, might extinguish. Bob Dylan. The other, a slow burner, always fermenting, only creating when he feels he’s ready, and even then everything he does has an unfinished air. Leonard Cohen. 

What have I made of us? What have you?

Open my eyes as I lie on the couch sideways, belly rumbling from a full meal, something I allow myself less of these days. 

I wonder if I’m trying to shed what we became the same way I try to shave the stubborn flesh from my arms, so that when I look in the mirror at 5 p.m., when the sunlight is cast harshly through our bathroom window, I like what I see. The me that used to be. The skinny. The me with you. 

Still these age lines will creep across my face, these shadows will darken. This skin will ripen. 

Close my eyes and see you again, this time talking to some beauty near the door of the bar. I notice you’re wearing the green flannel I gave you as I walk by you on my way out, feel the brief urge to reach out and touch. Later I’ll lie in my bed and think of the time you ripped my shirt open and moved on top of me, with the odd fusion of sadness and anger and lust that accompanies wilted love, and only because I begged you to.

For now I stay on the green couch in my apartment, roused from my descent to sleep by the distant wails of sirens. I unfurl and stand up, walk to my room to grab my notebook to write this down. 

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Clench my hands and hide my face under the sheets before bed at night. Wait for the dreams to take hold. Get out of bed and walk over to the string of purple lights. Lie in bed and stare at the lights. Close my eyes. Find another world, one in which I cannot grasp anything or anyone, least of all myself. 

The night prior I saw horses running at each other like madmen, pasty foam in their red mouths. They snapped each other’s legs. They broke each others bones the way you snap twigs under feet. Like you don’t even mean to, it’s just so easy. Appendages dangling like the arms of broken umbrellas, disfigured by the wind. Bent in unnatural angles. Positions that evoke immediate unease. The viciousness. Staring at them, panicking, being told it won’t stop. It won’t stop. 

Makes me think of the deer again. 

Then today Wynter and I are driving and we see two white mares, running in crazed laps in a small pen. Circles and circles and circles, white mane blowing madly, legs moving with a furious grace. The one was kicking the air. I pull over and think of my dream.

That night we are lucky to see the sun setting over Lake Atsion.

Then afterward a deer jumps in front of my car. I slam on the breaks. My forehead sweats. My palms sweat. 

I cannot figure out why my dreams are scaring me, what some part of me has to tell the rest of me. 

Tonight I break him the news. He is upset. I wonder how my emotions changed so quickly, how just a few weeks ago I was sure it was right. What changed? Me or him?

It’s all getting tangled, tangled. I think of the man falling apart underneath me again, in a previous dream. Now there are many, many men. They are crawling toward me with bones broken like the horses. Like dolls with missing parts. I am holding pieces of them in my hands, but I don’t know how they got there. 

Only one boy holds something of mine. I want it back, but I will never get it. I can talk to him in my dream or I can talk to him in person. It makes no difference. I will never get it. And it does not matter whether or not he wants it. Or that he doesn’t, I know he doesn’t. I will never get it back. I will feel it die. 

Blonde boys, blonde boys.

Sweating before bed at night. Again.

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stretch me out like dough. limbs like butter,  dollup. run to and fro.

try to make me say i want to keep you for my own.

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See you there standing there Think I'll let you let you in

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Think of you before bed at night. Salty blonde hair soft through my fingers in the morning sheets. Our warmth cocooned between the soft blue comforters. Furnaces in our bellies and fire under our skin. Wrapped over and over you.

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It's two a.m. and the coffee cup is still on my dresser. I don't think the coffee cup is ever coming off of my dresser. 

I don't know how we got here. I only know that the bristles on the back of his neck won't budge, that my fur is coming out in clumps, that I sit in the tub and watch soft tumbleweeds soak and swirl down the drain. 

 We carry each other, he said, like backpacks. 

I am lighter. My bones stack up 

like this 

like this 

on top of each other. But my collarbone is bruised. The skin on my shoulders is rubbed raw. And I know now that some plants can't share the same soil. 

This time he's the gardener.

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8/12

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8/11 back in the city

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8/9