I am a lover without a lover. I am lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself.

“there is only me and you and the thing that is trying to swallow us. in every version of the story there is a fire: here, burning clothes in the backyard. here, throwing matches at the home i don’t live in anymore. again and the highway between our bodies, gone. on the train, a man tells you he is an angel and jumps off the platform. over the screaming, you tell me you’re starting to think there really is a god, like capital g God. like something that isn’t here to hurt us, just to watch us hurt. honey, you just want something to blame besides yourself. i get it, i’m tired too but is there any room for safety between the disaster of our bodies? if there is a light then i am going to swallow it. if there is a god then i’m going to make him cry.”

“Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don’t guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With girls, it’s total vulnerability from the beginning. Our skin is bare and soft. We love with claws and teeth and the blood is just proof of how much. It’s feral. And it’s relentless.”

It could be nice. we take some time off, stand in the same place, face different directions, & walk.   & walk slow in straight lines around the earth’s waist.   & won’t it be love when I see you again. a new city, the same smile.

I think of what it means to have survived this long.

For a moment during our phone call as it was snowing, as I realized the extent of our sorrow, I knew that I loved you so much it was like I was practically crying out: Here is the location of the soul I have cared for, and here is the source of all beauty and love, but how heavy, how painful, how heavy, how painful.

Don’t even give my tombstone a name, just tell them I was soft. Tell them I offered every bone in my body like it was the shirt off my back; tell them you could count the different shoes that marched over my heart and it never mattered. I welcomed them forward, ‘come here, I don’t mind. Stay as long as you need.’   Tell them I stayed gentle, like smooth petals just born from the spring, that I stayed so tender, any war couldn’t touch me. I wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable, to pretend that being strong didn’t mean being scared. Take what you need from me, I still have parts to spare.

goosefire girl— wild. hungry. every poem I’ve written is a burning. did you think you could run from me? my matchstick blaze and your apple core. I eat you open-hearted under the noon sky. did you think you could be free of me? I birthed these hands, pulled out these veins. singlehandedly I built the mirror maze in your mind— did you think I wouldn’t catch up? crossbow loaded gun cocked ready aim fire did you think I was too far away? did you think we were two entities, separate and whole? did you think you could live if I wasn’t swallowing you cold? I’ve told you— infinite.

i am lost, a fog within me