inked coffees

what if she knew, that perhaps, after all, her daughter is a spitting image yet with a different frame cracked and peeling

that at night tongues akin to hers aim to submerge a conscious belonging, one that will forever be undone

what if they knew, that she no longer grasps solidity that too many words fill her gums, her tongue pierced with needles laced with novacane and imposter syndrome

she glides through roads too familiar, with faces overcome with acceptance

i ignore the heart palpitations, or perhaps find rebirth in the uneven thumps.

i want the sea again, salt saturated in my ribcage. 

there are moments i believe we are just faking it, and we are continuing, our teeth are hurting and our limbs are numb, but these lies must protect us.

you sent me tracks today, and i couldn’t help it. i imagined the singer was you, melancholy twinged and lonesome. singing of someone he needed but knew was  unreachable. 

i cried. i felt it so deep within my cells i wanted to die. all i can thnk of now is our moment on my sofa, your hands trembling and tears painting our knees.

whispering about all the artists you studied, the cubism, the modernism, the terms still like milk on my tongue. 

remembering my ear on your shoulder, our fingers itching for each other, for the knowledge, for the evening where we would create our own expressionism. 

i wanted to sit down on the floor of the Chicago Art Institute, somewhere among the Modern Art section,  and cry,

for i was all alone, with this art. art that usually, always, made me pensive, but smile. 

You were quaking in my drink, seeping in between veins as I swallowed you up. I want to say more than anything that I did not miss you. But you were present and too relevant to ignore. 

The men with beards were you. The men sliding their hands between legs were you. The bartenders with swollen eyes and light hands were you. Everyone was you. 

And I drank and drank and drank. Maybe to forget it all. Maybe to remember it all. 

Simply tied up in one another, your legs like yarn on top of my own. I remember these words you uttered, three years later. Now that our love is diminished, they play over and over like the snow outside my window refusing to leave.

And now I remember the moments where I fought like I was going into battle with nothing but my skin and my pulsating heart. 

I remember the night you told me you no longer wanted me, and how those words were full of plasticity and I refused to believe you. Remember how I bought a plane ticket, rushed to your feet, so desperate, so earning for you? And did you really want to leave me? No. You grabbed my hand in the airport, placed your fingers onto my neck.

Now I am sitting in my empty apartment, one untainted, unshaped by you, wondering how for so many years you refused to ‘fight’ for me. I bundled up my being into a duffel bag and dropped it in your palms. I wrote letters confessing thoughts I always thought were best kept in my skull. For five years you only had words. ‘Aren’t those enough?’ 

The only time you wrote me letters was our first year.

‘I don’t want to fight for you.’ I remember my teeth gnawing into my tongue, tasting nothing but aluminum.

remember how only one month ago we were in each other’s bellies. how you felt, warm and swollen on my tongue. 

you said you loved me.

and we were so high i thought for a moment, your hands were my hands, and kissing you was the only thing i could ever, ever do again.

now it’s evaporated on the slick sidewalks and i don’t know where my feet are supposed to be.

   are you this sad too? 

food is nothing more than cardboard cutouts, and to swallow is to remind me of your sticky surrenders, so instead i am to eject.

my own skins appears as if a stranger. the parts you kissed, you pressed with your brief fingers, i wish i could cut them all off.

instead i am pretending that i am made of metal, and my smiles are practiced and  sweet.

with these stepping stones over blue-green waters, i would have run to you, with my bruised thighs and shaky ribs, i would have collapsed into your frame.