drag your rat heart out of your chest

you have rough hands. you feel bad about touching her. it doesn’t feel like love when she lets you braid her hair. it feels like pity. your fingers shake, and you swallow back the weight of hope you’ve carried since you were too young to understand what you were hoping for. is this alright? you keep asking. is this alright? does it pull? does it hurt? she’s not patient, and she doesn’t know why you hesitate. her sharp yes only makes it harder to keep your hands steady.

there’s no sentimentality for angels; the entire world is sentiment for them. you don’t know why you, of all people, were chosen.

at night she’s cold, and slips under your blankets. you lie still, heart hammering, even as she twines herself around you like you’re a source of warmth and a poor one at that. you should feel used, or dirty. you feel humbled and honored and wonder what she’d have to say about this if she wasn’t asleep, whether she’d make fun of you for being a fool in love.

so this is what it means to be in love with one of god’s own creatures. not every thing with wings is an angel, she says, her face tilted up to the sun. it makes her throat glow. she looks at the birds and you look at the eyes in the hollow of her collarbone. imagine the fragile flutter of eyelids against your skin.

you’re all human fragile sentimentality and she mocks you relentlessly for it, for the old cloak you wear that’s devoid of warmth and the old flat you keep because your mother died here.

but sometimes i think you’re closer to god than i ever will be, she says. it’s nearly dawn, and you’re shoulder to hip against the night sky. god is wanting. we don’t want. you burn with shame and try to imagine what that’s like. all the years of your life you held your love in and looked away women and didn’t dare name what you felt for fear of god. to be told you're closer to It than someone like her undoes something inside you. the knot falls away and underneath it you’re bitter and hopeless and angry.

it makes you reckless. what if i want you to kiss me? you ask, and revel in the uncomfortable heat of the wrong words clawing their way out of your chest.

she looks at you like you’re magic. hold onto that wanting, she murmurs. it’ll fly you to heaven one day. she slips her hand into yours and you rest your head against your knees. there’s the thin comfort of knowing she won’t hold your desire for her against you but

how long can you want without having? how long can you be all desire and no satiation? if you have to starve to death for ascent you don’t want to ascend. you want her to kiss you. you want someone to want to kiss you.

if after the cities vanish one tries to chase after them if after the cities vanish one tries to become them tries to remake them, one comes up mostly empty.

we do not return home, or go to work. those blue lovers find each other and settle themselves in the dust. a child is lost and found again. a bird, turned up dead, launches itself into the sky. we know where we are going, and where we came from, but not where we are.

in the burnt land of the vanished city trees may grow, though slowly, and grass may grow, though yellow.

we never expect it, no matter how many times it happens. we are in our beds and then we are on the ground. we never learn our lesson, though it is taught to every generation.

the cities may return at nightfall. the people may vanish as the moon rises.

you watched while they dug your lover's grave. your lover handed you roses the morning you killed them. your lover is in the 13th room. your lover is a house that you're haunting.

what do you want me to admit? i miss outsides. i miss saying things out loud. i’m on the other side of a locked door under the church’s gate thinking for crying out loud is this all you’ve got? i should’ve stayed home. i’m much too frightened of your rough hands. i’m disinclined towards soil rock natural beauty.

you can draw water into any shape you think fits if you’re willing to sacrifice the readiness of the metaphor. blunt pencil blue gold blah blah you know the road ahead. i don’t. i’m trying not to know. i wish there was concrete here. bridge under my feet and water below the bridge.

it’s an ocean to love you against, setting sun. salt water. gold sand. it’s what i write about when i love you. but there are plastic bags on the beach, and an abandoned car tire in the water, and the sun’s obscured by chemical fumes. i don’t know why i’m telling you this, i really don’t. i wouldn’t fall in love with you anyway. you’re too good for me.

but i’m tired of ghost rites. i want to be both miraculous and undead. i want a promise like salt flaking off a seagull’s feathers, crunching white and bitter and brighter than the sun.

i’ll let you live with the sound of the exhaust fan, days in and out, broken rhythms light as the air. everything that falls down eventually rises, becomes sweet rain sliding off a bird’s beak into the ocean.

     my mouth smiling,      the sunlight on my face like     your hands,      the blood still wet under my nails.

if there was anymore left of me, I'd give it to you. but I can't kneel  in water,     so it's less a baptism      and more a funeral shroud. 

I'm sorry for the metaphor. I'm sorry about the light in my stomach. i’m      sorry about the way it ended      my death and     your loneliness.

     you can trace the marble planes of the city where     we died some knife     still buried in the steps and glass in your throat from the     shattered window from which i fell

one of those cars rises again, floats into the sky. lands somewhere in the town you grew up in. you can’t name this town, but it glows on maps. glows like your mouth after you insult your family. the hurt in the swimming pool. get on your knees before you fall apart.