Lost Thoughts

You never say nice things But that night You told me that my skin was soft under your hands and my lips were begging to be kissed Sometimes I wish you hadn’t said anything, sometimes I wish it had been a dream. Because when we woke up in the morning On opposite sides of the bed It was like we’d never touched And you don’t say nice things

i. i crawled across the bathroom floor, my heart tied to one snapped heel, because i’d been taught supplication, not domination. you laughed and stomped on my fingers and i licked blood from the sole of your boot. ii. i grew thorns instead of fingernails and barbed wire instead of a smile. i wrote it all over my body: ‘DO NOT TOUCH ME, I WILL MAKE YOU BLEED.’ ‘I WAS SOFT ONCE, BUT NEVER AGAIN.’ No one noticed until it was too late. iii. him, for instance: soft-lipped, sweet-smiled boy with cool hands and a laugh like breaking clouds. i whittled him down, kissed hellish silence and late-night storms into his skin even after he begged for mercy. he stabbed himself in the neck with his favorite pen, because i’d taught him that the things you love hurt the most. iv. i picked up your bad habits: your bite, your hard eyes, your fingertips that felt like honey and acted like arsenic. should a boy ever drag himself across bloodied linoleum and hold his hands out to me, i won’t hesitate to impale his wrist with the snapped heel i never bothered to fix – i was taught supplication, but now i’ve been taught to kill what loves me the most. v. thank you for taking me apart and putting me back together loud and bloody. i no longer hear my own screams, as the screams of my lovers are louder.

could you write a poem about the end of the world? the United States just dropped a gigantic bomb on afghanistan, and tensions have been rising around the world all week, and it feels like the world is ending. your poetry always comforts me, so i thought hearing a poem from you about it might help me make sense of all of this...😞

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

i. I speak your name into roses. Watch my heart shed its skin like wilting petals. I tell the ocean our whole story. I stuff my mouth full of cherries. Say, this is the taste of love, and I will choke on it.

I told you that I was a storm in the shape of a girl, so you built yourself a boat from scratch and kissed me with lips that made me forget all the shipwrecks I had caused.