inked wishes

I think that love poems are really powerful when they’re written by people who aren’t in love. Almost as if to say:Look how much I can hurt without anyone’s help. Look how full of no one I can be without collapsing. This love poem is proof that I know how to carry a torch. This love poem is proof that I’ve had the dream with a king-sized bed in it. This love poem is screaming out an open window, is screaming into my pillow. I know what I’m capable of.

I have never been a lonely god but when he kissed my mouth I could relate to the creation of a varied terrain like Braille under my foot I cannot say for sure where this is going.

Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice?

I’m in love with my anger / my war-won body / tense and vicious.

So maybe this time, love doesn’t kick down the door— doesn’t rattle the windows or plant weeds in the flower garden. Maybe you can’t smell the smoke because, for once, nothing is burning. Maybe this love is all the things those loves wanted to be when they grew up. Maybe you spent all that time running so that you’d know how to hang up your coat when you were ready.

Sometimes a bird sings in my chest. I hold my breath. I squeeze your throat.

1. I miss the sound of your voice. Is it okay to say that? 2. Is it also okay to say that I feel like I’m drowning? Both in overdramatic metaphors and in the absence of you? I feel like every day without you in it may as well have been spent at the bottom of my bathtub. I can’t hear anything. I can’t breathe right. 3. It took me a whole week to realize I was getting sick. I thought this is just what it must feel like to not be kissing you. 4. I hate that you stopped reading my poems. 5. I’m having a lot of trouble kicking the BIG sads. I keep forgetting to eat. I spend too much time in the shower. I organize my shampoo bottles and knock them all over. I use every kind of soap that I own and I still don’t feel clean. 6. I’m not gonna ask you to stay. I just want to.

I said I’d never write another poem about you, but everything is a metaphor for the way that we left each other. Birds flying south for the winter. Rivers running to the sea. The moon stuck struggling in its orbit and never really going anywhere at all. The other day a coworker asked me how you’ve been and I thought that he was joking. It took me a full minute to put it together. I’ve gotten so good about not flinching at the sound of your name that people don’t know I’d still throw myself mouth-open into the ocean for the chance to drown somewhere you might see it.

i.  yesterday i slept in a shirt you gave me and pretended it didn’t mean anything, like i didn’t stay up half the night thinking about how it’s the closest i’ll get to your skin again. ii.  there are soft spots in between all the hurt, moments where i forget, fuzzy patches of lightness where there still is a version of me that doesn’t flinch at the sound of your name.  iii. these words are heavy in my hands. it’s the first time i’ve been glad you don’t care much for poetry. i wonder if the next girl you love will have ink in her veins like i did. i wonder how willing she’ll be to bleed for you. i wonder a lot of things. iv.  i got my wisdom teeth out the first tuesday without you. i’m the kind of tender that hurts to the touch. my tongue keeps finding its way back to the scar tissue. my mouth still tastes like all the things i’ve lost.

didn’t know this could taste so sour, the backs of your knees against  the foot of my bed for the last time.