On This Fence

Hey Baby, did it hurt when you fell from my expectations?

My heart has returned and I am determined to love again.

My creative writing professor told me to stop writing about love. I asked him why and he said, “Because you have turned it over and over in your hands, felt every angle, every fault, every inch, every bruise. You have ruined it for yourself.” I spent the next 3 weeks writing about science and space. Stars exploding. Getting sucked into a black hole. How much I wished I could sleep inside of that nothingness without being annihilated. What an exploding star would taste like. If it would make our stomachs glow like fireflies, or tingle and shake like pop rocks under our tongue. My creative writing professor told me that those poems weren’t what he was looking for. He tells me to stop writing about outer space. Stop writing about science. Again, I ask him why. Again, he says, “You have ruined it for yourself.” I spend the next three weeks writing about my mother, how we are told we can’t make homes inside of other human beings, but the foreclosure sign on my mother’s empty womb tells me that women who give birth know a different, more painful truth. My creative writing professor tells me I am both talented and hopeless, that everything I write is both visceral and empty, a walking circus with no animals inside but a beautiful trapeze artist with a broken hip selling popcorn in the entrance-way. He tells me to stop writing about my mother. I don’t ask why. I pick up my books and my notepad and I leave his office with my war stories tucked under my tongue like an exploding star, like the taste of the last person I ever loved, like my mother’s baby thermometer, and I do not look back. We are all writing about our mothers, our lovers, the empty space that we will never be able to breathe in. We are all carrying stones in our pockets and tossing them back and forth in our hands, trying to explain the heaviness and we will never stop writing about love, about black holes, about how quiet it must have been inside the chaos of my mother’s belly, inside the chaos of his arms, inside the chaos of the spaces in every poem I have ever written. None of this is ruined. Do not listen to them when they tell you that it is.

I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because ‘romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘sugary.’ It’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain.

…And the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie. He says that he believes a person can love someone and still be able to murder that person.

Ask any woman & she’ll tell you why Eve bit / into that apple. Why she chose the universe instead / of you.