Breathing Poetry

You will be out with friends when the news of her existence will be accidentally spilled all over your bar stool. Respond calmly as if it was only a change in weather, a punch line you saw coming. After your fourth shot of cheap liquor, leave the image of him kissing another woman in the toilet. In the morning, her name will be in every headline: car crash, robbery, flood. When he calls you, ignore the hundreds of ropes untangling themselves in your stomach. You are the best friend again. He invites you over for dinner and you say yes too easily. Remind yourself this isn’t special, it’s only dinner, everyone has to eat. When he greets you at the door, do not think for one second you are the reason he wore cologne tonight. In his kitchen, he will hand-feed you a piece of red pepper. His laugh will be low and warm and it will make you feel like candlelight. Do not think this is special. Do not count on your fingers the number of freckles you could kiss too easily. Try to think of pilot lights and olive oil, not everything you have every loved about him, or it will suddenly feel boiling and possible and so close. You will find her bobby pins laying innocently on his bathroom sink. Her bobby pins. They look like the wiry legs of spiders, splinters of her undressing in his bed. Do not say anything. Think of stealing them, wearing them home in your hair. When he hugs you goodbye, let him kiss you on the forehead. Settle for target practice. At home, you will picture her across town pressing her fingers into his back like wet cement. You will wonder if she looks like you, if you are two bedrooms in the same house. Did he fall for her features like rearranged furniture? When he kisses her, does she taste like wet paint? You will want to call him. You will go as far as holding the phone in your hand, imagine telling him unimaginable things like you are always ticking inside of me and I dream of you more often than I don’t. My body is a dead language and you pronounce each word perfectly. Do not call him. Fall asleep to the hum of the VCR. She must make him happy. She must be She must be his favorite place in Minneapolis. You are a souvenir shop, where he goes to remember how much people miss him when he is gone.

I thought you only dated white girls

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.

1) I still have to learn how to love without staining my hands from the blood of the people I loved, scarred from the broken edges of my skin. Smile. Until your cheekbones get stuck in your own lies. Smile. Until your lips curve on their own with every sorry. Smile. 2) It’s been sixteen years since my parents married and my mother is still making space for my father’s habits. Shrinking herself so that his voice can occupy more room. Throwing off her pieces to fix his mistakes into her ribs, making amends with his fist and the angry syllables, which roll down his tongue. 3) I’m my father’s clone and my mother’s failed lesson in history. My fingers picked my father’s tendency of running. Run. Before they know you aren’t healing. Run. Before they realize you never intended to stay. Run. Before they realize you never were worth loving. 4) I’m sitting next to him in an empty room and spoke twice each time. Each sentence began with the words “sorry for interrupting,” we were alone though. And he laughs and keeps his giant hands on mine and says your mother taught you well and I clench my wine glass praying I won’t break it. 5) My mother wears her engagement ring like ropes tying her to a monster she once loved and my father still isn’t sure if he ever loved her. 6) I’ve spent my entire existence loving boys with mouths like oceans tasting sea water with every kiss while they mistook my hands for band aids, expecting them to heal their wounds but my fingers have only learnt to cut through the people I love the most. 7) I notice how my mother’s heart drops to her stomach clogging her voice in her throat whenever she speaks about love and I can’t help but wonder if I too will fall in love with a man who kisses and kills me at the same time. 8) My father always talks in screams and my mother always responds in tears. Cacophony ringing in her ears like the ghost from the night she said yes to his proposal but regret always tastes bitter and she isn’t good at confessing. 9) Boys search for hand me down hearts between my broken ribs, extending their hands like a ladder to take out what’s left of me and I never seem to stop them. I warn them my ribs are made of leftover chalk and my heart is already burned in ashes. They still search and find nothing.

He saw the notebooks piled up, messy edges and pages sticking out. He asked me if I liked to write, and I said yes. But the truth is, I only write when I’m sad. I wish I didn’t have to write at all in the first place.

To me, home was never a place; it was a feeling. It was the way the people I loved said my name.

Count Me Out

Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.