Root Beer, Pulled Pork

The clouds brake open as you pour honey into tea

Heavy with expectation

smoke, thick around me, obscuring the view.

This is the place where I layed down my heart for you.

I don’t dare speak too soon

burdensome on the kneeler, my eyes cast above me

I bargained into the empty air.

There is this silence that I can’t contend with

the way my bones settle into the mattress beneath me

Singular yet also a litany- a light at the end of the hall

1.   Linoleum pressed around my skin,

 it’s stickiness, it’s honeyed footprints-- 

an eagerness from the kitchen to my

empty bed, the buzzing [I am unrecognizable]

I press the linoleum back, urging

it’s tenderness, it's laughable grieving.

One thousand days ago, your eyes lingered

staring, all coke-bottle glasses and hair I longed to run my fingers through. A quivering below my breastbone, a chest you used to stare at so.

I remember thinking, “finally, someone finds me more than just fuckable.” 

 don’t you dare forget that you were the greedy one, who pried my chest apart.

Hold me close,

 no- not like that. 

Everytime.

2. Before you I was alive. 

All green eyes and collarbones, scraped knees and shin splints, neck kisses,  the taste of smoke at the back of your throat,

Gold paint dripping from my fingers

a lightness swimming in the dark

3. you never wanted me, 

you wanted what I represented.

I can no longer remember your voice but I do remember the way it feels to be lonely. 

I’m standing alone, feet pressed firmly against cold tile

So I grasp at death like a lover

it’s face in my hands, like your face once was

it hurts so deeply, down at the bottom of where I imagine my heart once was:

it didn’t shatter like glass, no, more like necrosis. It withered away, sloughing off bit by bit, until I was too sick to stand, to get out of bed, and I just hoped it would take me in the night, but it hasn’t yet...

I wake each morning, sifting in the twilight, wrapped in the blanket that no longer smells like you. 

Are you happy now? Did you get everything that you wanted?

I feel like the sky, liable to crack open at any moment and drown everything below, wash it away, scrub it hard, with steel wool and lye and just one hope:

Day comes, I have overstayed my welcome.

outside, I run until my shins are bruised  

my lips chapped, socks damp with blood, or I’ve stopped

thinking about you- whichever comes first.

I only feel God when I am outside.

is it odd to say I only felt God 

when you were inside me or did I mean

when you were holding me or did I mean 

I’ve forgotten the way your body looks 

or that I miss your smell, but that’s gone as well.

How could you possibly think I wanted your hands around my neck

after everything I’d been through, after everything you knew.

time moves impenetrably slow

first came the rain and then the rot

This is the starting line--

weeks ago I would have said a precipice.

This is a gift, not a failure, but not a victory either.

You forgot how to show me that you gave a damn at all.

You forgot how to say I need, I want, I feel. 

instead you made me into a burden, but darling, 

I was not put on this earth to be burdensome. 

When memories of lying beneath you 

Cause already dampened eyes to cry once more

I think of all the nights I wanted you to come to bed

But the flashing screen proved more desirable than me. 

The screen always seemed to be more desirable than me.

Your friends, so kind, but I always hoped you’d find me kinder

I wanted to wake up next to you without feeling like I needed to thank you

for carving out time for me, regardless of consciousness, 

I was not put on this earth to be burdensome.

The precipice was nothing more than the sky reflected on water and

I’ve cried enough for this, for

now I am gone and the memories are just that

like water under a hot sun.

I was much too kind, I gave far too much and all too often. 

Sunlight is handed down in tablespoons, 

hold me under the weight of water, I don’t fight back.

Broken glass, brown sugar and tea: spilled over the counter top,

artificial affection fattened by a dopamine drip.

A pasture of sunflowers stands tall;

they watch me and snicker: 

“What a shame, she’s wilted away.”

I tended to the garden only to light it on fire the very next day.

The rounds of lettuce, the rows of strawberries

swollen with sweetness. 

And it’s not the fact that I am an afterthought.

Well, maybe it is.

My leaving seems so omnipresent and …..

….  at the same time filled with silence

And it’s not that I thought my leaving would help the feeling

That there’s nothing inside me that grows from light

but it’s typical that I’m trapped in this little glass house

Watching the outside bloom into spring

Knowing that I will always feel winter wrap its arms around me

When all I need to do is put on my shoes and step outside

and I cannot because I’m afraid it would make me even sadder to be in a beautiful place

alone

because, I can’t seem to fit into the free moments of others and it’s always something else, someone else, packing that could take place anytime else, an old friend stepping into view in front of me.

And at the end of the day my things will be gone for

dust settles and so do I.

I’ll be driving to the east listening to that song you hate

Under lamplight, under you, under waves

of breath dancing across this quilted flower sky.

The weeping willows watch as I run my

fingers through your hair and trace the border of your chin

like the puckered line between these two worlds

teetering on a tightrope, too calmly, I follow

freckles flying down the bridge of your nose,

I follow them down,

down to the shy, bloated bruises that live

above your collarbone.

The trucks outside sigh and my mind wanders

and I wonder who is walking by our

house,

I’m finally free as you’re slipping away,

and I’m tapping the glass like

soft summer rain but  you’re under our quilt

with some other girl

I love the way you get up in the morning

Swing your feet over the edge of it, the precipice

a mountain of sheets and covers where my scent still resides

but you don’t ever look back

because that would be tragic and full of teary eyes, or is that just me?

I’m not coming up for air--

and I’m not thanking you for saving me either.

Our room is on fire, I’ve left a towel on the radiator again

I am a can filled with kerosene and you are my smiling boy.

I’ve not felt how I’d like to in ages.

I love the freckles scattered across your shoulders

I could have sworn they were angels feathers freshly plucked.

When I count them in the dewy morning and console myself.

No one knows what to say when it’s all a pile of ashes

and the wind picks up

and you and I sit on the curb and watch

(-- much worse than a sunrise--)

our home, scattered across the neighborhood

This was our bed

that was your book

the set of chess is melted together like a disfigured lego set.

It’s gruesome, the look in your eyes

I want to take you to my mother’s house and draw a bath.

I want to wash the smoke out of your hair.

It’s raining now.

The wind blew damp leaves over the front window of my car

but you taught me how to fight

and all I want to do is run into the church

I’m too large for the room.

This feeling makes me cry.

               *

You’re getting caught up in things that don’t matter.

               *

Give me love but not

the hands equipt to receive.

               *

Your words are my war.

               *

where did you hide the pieces of me?

I have to cope with my body.

                *

Commit to change, a quieter morning.

                *

This love is constructed

like steel beams, like containment.

                *

My teeth, carving at your neck like waves spoiled by the tide I climb in and out of you, digging through the musk The drenched leaves and the rawness that winter brings is just enough to chap your lips, just enough to draw a little blood.

Our penniless hands—pricked by pins— mindful of our foreheads pressed together, our lungs emptying out to the dying dusk.

Your heart pummels the wall of flesh inside as if to compete with the pounding blood in my ears—

still pressed together, your body pulls and pushes against mine our little mould— this hallow space, the way your skin looks in the dark, the mashed pulp of our existence—handed down in dollops of paint and spread about.

Fluorescence threatening to burst through seeping under the door, between the floorboards, under our nails rolling like a wave of honey over our sleeping bodies drowning in sweetness, our little time alone—

above, below, and beneath the low hanging branches

soft rain pitter pattering against the bark -- against bare skin

the top, a layer of dampness, a cradle of rain

flittering above, a notion

a thought relentless

closer— closer— begging to be in the middle of it

quickly, quietly, caught in the orbit

connecting like magnets,