that love them still?

Separate them into neat piles of yesterday, now, and tomorrow.

When friendship, even, feels like my heart and my lungs and my stomach screaming to escape to them in quiet mornings.

I imagine what it would be like to lie

coated in your breath.

I know you can’t either,

in the lapses of sound

where we’ve tried to build homes

and failed,

apart.

Begging,

to let your leg move that much closer

to let the feelings slip through my teeth

into your heart.

“I don’t believe it was a fluke

that I saw you first.”

And I don’t believe my insides were wrong

when they hurled against my ribs

echoes of a

You stuck around in my thoughts

Somewhere deep in two memories I am learning to ride a bike and my hair is being pulled into curlers

and I feel it most, I think, in my scalp. My mother's fingers. Pulling, pulling, long seconds of pulling.

The air smells like summer, probably, or maybe fall.

The grass is green, and my brothers are young, too.

Overdeveloped and flashing together, the light screaming through the trees.

I miss the love of this place.

When the air felt like

a fall of graceless mercies,

a hymn to my broken.

In your resentment lies the truth of

a miracle

you refuse to look in the eye.

And for it you are not beautiful.

But to me,

you are beautiful, still,

You stuck around in my thoughts