Words left unsaid

i am trying to learn how to unhinge my ribs

to unstitch the threads that have tied my stomach into knots

sewed unseamly

will I ever be able to be belly-up again?

plush and soft and worn so thin 

you could see right through me

to unfold

to lay smooth 

over the creases 

--I never ironed anything out.

.

I think about trusting 

the machinery of your mouth

to run over my seams--

tongue needling my parts together,

whole body whirring-- 

foreign motions 

that belong oceans away

in some sweaty factory

or in guilty back-alleys 

of our own cities

-far away-

still so close to home.

.

I don’t have any shirt-sleeve story of fire

no coat-rack forced secrets

my body only folds silent

lays still 

creased

between the sheets

I have cut two holes for eyes

I can fly sometimes

late at night

I wonder if anyone will ever know

how soft I am

cramped jam-packed to bursting, 

all wild hair-

wild eyes-

dark corners- 

all curves.

  these are dangerous spaces.

full of wicked women

witches

brujas

voodoo mamas

who didn’t play nice.

  this is for all the women left wanting--

awake and wondering

hysterical

itching

itching

itching

  these are waking nightmares

soaked bedsheets

wet with our excesses

we sweat

we sob

we so sorry

  this is for all the apologies lost

to raised voices

to shrinking into small spaces

smaller 

smallest

wicked magic of shrinking heads

violent men

disappearing women

a black magic dance

made as ordinary

as Tuesday mornings,

stovetop soup pots,

spilled milk.

  It’s nothing to cry over.

  what do you do when you’ve got the devil inside of you?

when night reaches up her arms to take you,

when you want to do everything but resist,

wishing for cool dirt,

wet leaves,

the stink of rotting plants

twining into hair that hasn’t been brushed for days,

over skin that is too pale 

too soft

too weak--

some days you dream of sinking

think of burning

always bleeding

  this is for the lady smokers

the drinkers

the bar fighters

the rotten eggs

toothy

bitten

bruised

  always bleeding

  we are all brujas.

sisters

wolf women

daughters of the moon

we howl

we hurt

we have to sit up straight

  we are always bleeding.

  we are always living

in madness

in attics

in these cramped

kinky

curvy

constructed 

corners--

  --our bodies

I can’t stop writing about sex.

I write wandering hands into the margins of my notes

scribbled fingers, authored mouths, penned tongues 

licking up and down the length of college ruled lines

--my lust is not linear.

Hysteria

--the condition made famous by Freud and his theories  

on the ways the weight of an empty womb 

could suffocate a woman.

Symptoms include:

aching uterus 

grinding teeth

shortness of breath

I can’t stop writing about sex.

In the 19th century whole texts were written by men 

on the mysteries of women--

they spoke of wetness,

of the wells of women’s bodies

books dedicated to the science of finding cracks 

in the walls of already bursting levees.

Leaking women,

spilling over 

achy concrete,

trying to hold back these choppy waters

--oceans charted only by witchcraft 

or midwives

(wise ones).

Young women

were said to have an excess of blood.

Veins stretched with the weight of too much,

--coursing coronaries, aching arteries--

ripe with bodily fluids,

just waiting to overflow.

My capillaries are clenched hands

arms

fingers

wrapped in a choke hold around my quaking bones

pulsing life, 

pulsing lust, Lust, LUST

to the beat of my 

biological clock 

(set four time zones too slow).

I don’t want to have sex.

At least--not when I feel so brittle and unlovely 

underneath all this waterbed flesh and blood.

All too pliant to bely the dangerously rusting joints

of my lumberjack limbs

--if I only had a heart.

For now I stand Tin Man Lonely

wishing for somebody to

--Want Me--

(but don’t touch me)

caress me, lie next to me, 

if only metaphorically, marginally.

You see, I don’t know how to live outside of the subjunctive.

Because when I arch my back my vertebrae crack into pleasurable changes of posture

as my knees groan--cranky in protest.

I live in a constantly conflicted body.

This is the madness that comes of wanting the thing you fear the most.

Lusting after a lack of control, 

the prospect of vulnerability

--terrifying--

you shouldn’t want this so much,

ladies don’t get this wet, 

they keep their thighs closed,

don’t pant like dogs at the first suggestion of mating season

...so why am I short of breath so often.

Why does my tongue dry out 

and my vision tunnel and--

is sweating this much normal?

I can’t stop writing about sex

long enough to let myself go.

I mean, it’s almost

Upon the discovery of the Higgs Boson:

  Fourth of July, Twenty Twelve.

  Alone.

  I looked down at my feet on the bathroom tile

and wonder about relativity

and weight

and how I should probably cut my toenails soon.

  They say that Einstein had his greatest breakthroughs

while shaving,

but my legs are unshorn forests

and I have yet to take a singe physics class.

  Six men. And some change.

  Isn’t that always the case.

  Simulating the bang of the impetus of our existence

failures beyond count

for forty years they sent

particles crashing into each other 

just missing the mark.

  Some call it, the God Particle.

  On the mount olympus of physicists,

they dismiss the sensationalist name,

under the pretense that the key to unlocking the nature of the universe

is hardly cause for comparison to the Almighty.

  Back in the bathroom I hold the womb-weight of my stomach 

sweaty with summer heat,

already sagging 

un-filled,

empty,

heavy.

  Maybe it’s not procreation that spurs our species forward

but the need to see ourselves in someone else

that keeps us running into each other

our atoms colliding over and over

so that we can study the meaning of our mass--

  Human lives are heavy.

  I read on the internet today that

over 6 million facebook accounts belong to dead people.

Empty profiles of secondhand projections 

of lives once lived.

The “such a shame” -- “if only” -- “happy birthday”s

making the living feel less lonely.

  We can never measure the mass of the imagined.

  The value of the potential energy

manifested

transferred

in the moment of letting go--

  The imagined connections

miniature explosions

(mimicries of creation)

that happen in the containment of train stations--

of bus rides--

  We are endlessly colliding without touching. 

  These men have dedicated their lives to high-frequency collisions.

To searching for explanations

for cosmic inflation,

for symmetry of forces and fields,

for fate.

  The bathroom tile by my feet is littered with dead skin cells

sloughed off in the casualty of another shower,

I look into the mirror

(objects are closer than they appear)

and realize in this ceramic-lined version of reality

The night I held you for the first time,

  I was all arm hairs,

heart valves,

and nerves;

skin alive with anticipation

and that feeling right before submersion. 

  My breath caught in my throat--

my stomach clenched--

my body braced itself.

  If I’d only known.

  When I felt you in my hands that first time

I felt the thrill of it in my gut,

felt the pull of knowing I would have to come back to you,

before our time was up. 

  When I ran my fingers down your spine

(copyright 1971)

I wondered why I had waited this long to read you

I wondered whose hands had been there before mine.

  Your smell made no hesitation to make a home for itself in my head,

old pages settling right next to backyard dirt, 

sunflower seeds, 

and her skin at 3am.

  I opened you for the first time,

carefully,

slowly,

and it seemed like we both sighed

your pages cracking

dust settling

--you were bound so tight--

mystifying.

  The air felt thick with

words hovering like holy scripture

never meant to be recited in church.

  I remember.

  Those first sentences

so foreign

-The Story of O-

-Emmanuelle-

-Anaïs Nin-

pages yellowed and wise in their old age

filled my brain like incense at midnight mass

masking and revealing equally

as your words

undressed women

outlined men

caressed bodies

in motion

immortal

living just under my fingertips.

  You were tucked away

just out of sight but always visible,

teasing,

jacket on,

binding hinting at our double life.

  Those three bookshelves you called your own

so easily became my altar

my sanctuary

I would pray there

during every late-night meeting

every empty-house weekday,

I kneeled

and opened

and turned 

page after page

over and over.

  This was 

--written beauty

--written sex

translated from the original French:

Erotic Literature.

  You will always be my first love,

soft and worn

lying loud 

between silent sheets,

in stolen hours

on my knees

you were my secret

but I never thought of you as obscene.

  You were the perfume that was too old for me,

that dress that fit a little too right

you were the deep end,

the water’s edge--

consuming you

was every bit as thrilling

as waiting

I ran out into the street

10

I looked up at the stars and spun in circles

trying to be all world

imitating orbit

propelled by my own centrifugal force 

9

I couldn’t stand to make eye contact with him

so scared he would take anything more than mere existence

as invitation

8

split-second decision to flee

7

running with time at my back

all consuming

all count-down

no finale

6

I didn’t want to touch him

because I was consumed with the need

to be wanted 3000 miles east

5

my friends

glowing and grinning wide with -so much-

arms out-stretched--into--smiles

meant for so many someones

this is growing up

4

this is growing up

3

all countdown

no finale

2

I stood alone in the middle of the street

looking up at silent trees

banging pots and pans of leaves

all whisper

so replete

1

this is growing up

alone

imploding

in the middle of old hometown streets.

The day I fell out of love with you,

I cried in the bathroom during class,

I smiled at a stranger,

I saw the inside of a shop whose window used to be pure mirror,

suddenly turned to watery glass.

I took off my jacket

that I had brought along just in case.

I wrote three letters

to loved ones

who were so utterly not you.

I sang out loud alone in my apartment

--but that’s nothing new.

The day I fell out of love with you

I felt like I was stepping out of shoes

that had long been untied

that I had only kept on out of fear

of walking on my bare feet.

The hardwood felt just like it used to.

The stairs did not.

The day I fell out of love with you

I wore a shirt with too few buttons,

I stood barely moving in heavy traffic,

I walked for so many blocks

talking through a problem 

that was so easily fixed.

The day I fell out of love with you

was a Tuesday.

How terribly true

and very usual

On Thursday,

I told him that I can hold in one hand the number of people I have kissed. 

I know all but one of their names.

  The Argentine apartment was cold in a shade of indecisive grey.

Without raising his head from the flat cushion 

between his body and the wood slats,

he looked at me and said he’s been fucked by so many men,

he can’t hold on to anything anymore,

let alone an amount of empty numbers balled up in an overflowing fist.

It’s easier to forget if you never go about remembering to begin with.

The problem I have is living.

Living outside of memory,

walking out of the pools of the past,

and climbing back onto dry land.

Amphibian breathing comes too easy for me.

I’ve been drip drying for a while now,

trying to shake off the echoes of the words we shared

the muscle memory aches that can’t un-cramp 

from the shapes our bodies made next to each other.

I have perfected the preterite. 

Back in Buenos Aires

Juan sighs, 

resigned Spanish slipping through the cracks

in his 

present

perfect

tense:

If you hold an empty glass up to a wall,

you can better hear the happenings on the other side;

something about the emptiness amplifies

the sound that fills the other room

to the brim.

When you speak, 

I imagine the empty cups of my ears spilling over,

I am running out of room to put the words that have splashed over me,

I hate to think of the sentences that have slipped through my fingers,

and dried in different shapes of varied significance on the hardwood floor.

This is the sound of forgetting.

I have tried using entire sets of empty glassware

to get the sound of your belly laugh back,

even tried using the space held in plates and bowls 

to bring your “I love you”s into the room of the present, 

where I sit (lonely) now.

Soon I’ll move on to seashells,

try to decode the repeated crashing of sound waves

--of white noise--

try to translate them into your intended meanings.

Or maybe, I’ll pour the contents of my inner ears completely out,

until they are the empty inverse of the conch shells themselves.

I would fill the soft pink insides of every seashell I could find

with the echoes of the blood pumping through my brain

that has spun around in too many concentric circles,

thinking, rethinking, over-thinking what you mean to me. 

I would leave the ocean-borne receptacles scattered around 

the miles of California beaches--

little sound bites of unrequited love laying in the unsuspecting sand.

Young couples, curious kids, and old widows

would pick them up while getting “Away From It All”,

they would hold them to their ears, 

-empty cups filling with my waves of sound-

and they will say sadly, or excitedly, or as soft as the breeze:

She fell asleep in my arms last night.

“You can cuddle me if you want”

My form folded against hers,

                                  our two bodies,

                                                 four knees

                                                           bent in echoes of the other.

She shook off consciousness

with the aftershocks of her seismic activity during the day.

She is the epicenter of my shifting surface--

the origin of the scraping of my tectonic plates,

her twitches ricochet tidal waves of lust,

tsunamis of confusion in the comfort of her touch.

She dances into sleep,

muscles shaking on the strings of some greater marianettier than me.

I want to tug at her strings better than this two-bit, two-am puppeteer.

I imagine what my arms, my hands

--now wrapped around her sleeping form--

could do to make her twitch to a different tempo,

how I could make her breathing rise and fall much more rapidly--

How I could make her moan in quarter time.

I like to think that I would know all the moves,

but I know that I would most likely fall into following her lead,

her hands so much more sure than mine,

my inexperience catching on the ragged edges of my breath 

coming too fast,

(if only) in the present tense.

Back on earth, we are spooning in the middle of my spinning 

cinema-reel alternate realities,

surrounding our bed with my weak what-if fantasies.

I bore holes into the back of her perfect neck

wishing I could disappear into sleep cycles as easily as she.

But for now my mind is stuck spinning re-runs

unlikely ever to make it to the big screen,

or the red carpet of my mouth.

God knows I’ve written enough scripts to cover my bedroom 

two times five times ten times over

and over filling imaginary mouths

with black and white skeletons of the forever unsaid.

I bury their bones in silence because

I’m afraid that when I tear the tape from my lips

my words will slip out as mangled as unbound feet

wrapped from the age of three,

limping and wrinkled,

clumsy in their attempts to form sentences,

each word

-shaky-

and unused to following the others in line.

The truth is, she shook me to my bones.

Seismic sounds made my ear drums shift like plate tectonics 

leaving deafening questions ringing in the un-worded silence:

Whose fault-lines are more volatile?

Whose body will buckle first under this tectonic tension?

And if our fault lines do eventually grind dextrally against each other, 

--will the whole Earth move?

Or will we only be able to feel our foundations shaken at the epicenter 

of what we’ve imagined to be a dance of entire continents?

You can measure the magnitude of an earthquake, 

but I keep drawing blanks when trying to define 

exactly what this is.

I know the facts of our correspondence,

        I can count the number of days I have thought of her,

                I can measure the weight of her body between my arms.

She fell asleep in my bed last night.

My mouth

               said

                        so

                              much

You will never be the bread

you will never be the knife

and there is no way, no how, that you could ever be the wine. 

And I want to get things straight. Just so you know,

I will never be the sound of rain on the roof

or the moon in the trees.

I will never be any kind of nuts laid out on your table.

I hope Billy Collins never conjures me in two-dimensional metaphors for you.

In my dreams, I would have you breathe me out of the pages

of Neruda or Marquez or saucy Sor Juana.

Softer, heavier, stickier words that make your hair frizzy just from listening.

I want to grow inside of orange tree verses,

to sweat magical realism you could swim through,

and I want to recorrer through your mind like retruécanos 

that twist around on themselves to make truth out of contradictions.

Neruda was terrified by the sea,

but his Chilean cottage on the rocks inspired pages out of him that we still repeat.

Maybe that is the beginning of true poetry:

living every day with the beating of volatile fear on your doorstep,

looking out into the fray, and seeing beauty.

I want to become grey-sea-spray terrible and lovely someday.

I will never be the sea.

My love, if you must think of me metaphorically,

I would have you read my living form into 

-artichokes-

Little flowers with sharp shells growing hearts right out of the earth--

not even Pablo's poetry could do them justice.

But regardless--

when alcachofas dance through the corneas of your mind,

I want you to think of me, young, and green, and hardened on the outside,

only you will know the feeling of my soft underbelly

or the vulnerability of the skin just below my breasts.

I am not a vegetable preparing for battle.

Neruda must have never seen artichokes growing in the wild.

There they bloom in blues and purples that cover their hearts in bruised colors

more vibrant than the human body could ever be.

They sigh open the pain of having a soft heart in the too-light language of feathery petals,

quickly folding themselves over until they are protected,

and only those who are in the know and motivated

will patiently pry open every shell-like petal, 

sucking the softness off,

savoring the sweetness of a promised heart in pieces.

This is the best sacrifice.

At our feast of fibrous greens,

we will sit at the dinner table, two aztec priests,

holding the hearts of our victims in our hands,

the gold our empire was destroyed for,

dripping from our fingers

down our arms

in rivulets of heated fat.

We will lick everything up.

Desperate for rain and the knowledge

that we will live to love another day.

So. When you think of artichokes, my lover,

I want you to crave me--and bowls full of butter.

Because dipping fingers into liquid gold,

slurping up heart offerings for gods long forgotten,

is the heresy and the beauty

that Neruda missed in his portrayal of the only vegetable you can both bite into and kiss.

He must never have used the soft section of heart

to paint golden gluttonous pleasure on his lover’s laughing face.

I can only hope Sor Juana saw something to be admired in the beautiful prickly plants,

that García Márquez recognized the metaphor in their soft-hearted misanthropy.

I hope you are never moved to write a litany

to all my household souls.

I have no intention of becoming the moon in the trees,

nor the sound of rain on the roof.

You and I are far too human and 

much less far-fetched to pretend to be all that.

We are just two pairs of lips,

four hands, four arms,

two stomachs,

four eyes,

and two steaming,

boiled,

artichoke

hearts.

I impulsively save ticket stubs

text messages

edges of napkin-folded messages in bottles

fragments of my time here on earth

proof of the past and my presence in ink and paper

-- don’t forget me.

Footprints in snow fascinate me,

tire tracks and bursting trash bags,

the dead skin of our exfoliated

eroded comings and goings.

I paste the black and white skeletons of conversations to my bedroom walls

to stall the stale sound of silence

around my settling bones.

The echoes of my former selves

lie pressed between the soft sarcophagus sheets

of journals,

coming back to me in the familiar form

of pillow marks on my groggy morning cheek,

controlled explosions of former feelings

I revisit like exhibits in museums,

their possible meanings distantly contemplated

under cold marble ceilings

sealing my subconscious 

in the security of tupperware treasure chests shoved under beds.

What if I came unglued?

What if -- I threw away all of my past paper selves

and focused on the truth 

in this moment--

                     I want you.

in this moment--

                     show me some proof

of a life lived without receipts,

without old IDs, old pictures of a younger me,

without the imprinted, handwritten testaments of living heartbeats,

without a need for the constant retracing of the beaten path,

rewinding, unwinding the frayed friendship bracelet 

ends of our beginnings.

We tried so hard to tie forever into those strings.

The truth is--

I want you

to stay with me

so that I won’t have to piece together your presence in my life 

from old texts, letters left unsent, and notes folded into pockets.

I want you whole, and here--

I don’t know if you’d be able to fit into my museum;

I’ve got too many perpetrators of unrequited love in there already,

and that exhibit is too full of pain and wasted time

to ever be home to your memory anyways.

But I have to let you go somehow.

Because until I shed the black and blue ink

that has defined my life’s truths 

I will never be able to loosen up

and skinny dip into the oceans rivers lakes

of the present tense.

For now, I am stuck on the shores

of the subjunctive,

teetering on the possibility of sending your paper trail

sailing down the river styx,

but never actually feeling like saying goodbye.

I am writing lines

folding rhymes into 

origami

I’m sorry...

If you want me -- free and unfettered,

I’ll need a room to stash my once-dear wishes,

piles of my pennies tossed into wells,

fragments of fortune cookies and

broken grammar predictions.

I want to lock them all away 

in a large ocean-liner crate

and drop the convoluted time capsule 

into the great darkness of the Pacific Ocean,

only to be eaten away by fishes 

and crawled over by crustaceans.

Where else could sustain the weight of my memories,

but that submarine kingdom beneath the waves?

The present is a folded-newspaper ship,

we sail onto the future every day,

salt-water past disintegrating yesterday’s news.

How very sad that in Spanish there is no word for bosom.

All the many underlying meanings of hold,

similarly slip through the cracks of translation.

In this city I live in the spaces left between words,

the left-overs swept under the rug

that has become my tongue.

I am getting lumpy.

After a summer spent speaking with strangers

I am re-learning how to be Southern-Hemisphere-lonely--

Sólo, en español, sin el acento,

can also mean -only-

a few letters difference in English 

but as for languages that speak in solitude,

the germans have a whole verb just for being alone.

In their language, loneliness is not just a feeling, 

but a thing that you DO.

If words are the vessels for expressing experience,

I want to live a life un-translate-able.

I like to think that I am made of my favorite words--

bufanda, barriga, bosom,

acarangüé, che ro’u, ombligo,

deja vú, riachuelo, tenoctitlán,

ambiguous, unrequited, cardamom.

But these words will never run through my blood,

or intertwine with my DNA.

Language--just as so many things in life--

is merely a construction of the societies in which we function.

So while words can run over the carpet of my tongue,

thread themselves through the tears in my tights,

and sink into the dimples of my freckled face--

I am made from the moments where language will not suffice--

when music inexplicably makes me cry, 

or when hunger dismantles syllables until I am stuttering on empty,

or when cansancia wrestles exhaustion, 

and pushes all conscious elocution out from my cranium.

There is no word in Spanish for bosom--just the act of sinking into one.

The many-layered meanings of HOLD 

are folded into intertwined bodies and in between fingers interlocked in silence.

Solitude is a language in and of itself.

The feeling of a fading obsession is the sound of the foghorn outside my window

reminding me that in the midst of these four walls

the echoes of a life lived on the sea swims through sound waves

and reverberates in my jaw.

I have chewed the same land-locked syllables for so long

I forgot what it tastes like to get lost in the fog of the unfamiliar. 

My mind has been running in closed circuits for 10 months going on eternity,

flicking between your words, your eyes, your smile, your arms, 

that place on the back of your neck--just there where I could--

your words, your eyes, your smile, your arms,

that place --

I have never been one to let go easily.

From the time my hands formed fists in the womb 

I have folded along the same lines I always have,

putting far too much faith in palm lines and wrinkles,

and not enough in things like departure dates or miles.

I read old letters and journal entries like the lost gospels,

hoping to match the paths in the map of my former feelings

to the street signs in the google earth of your past confessions. 

Retracing my steps like a monk lost in a labyrinth,

making a shrine out of the unforgotten. 

But the foghorn sounds outside my window

and I wonder at the relativity of distance.

Far too often I fall in love with empty place settings,

lose my heart to the way the air moves in spare rooms,

lovingly gaze aching with longing at unoccupied chairs.

We have had the most passionate love affairs.

Having spent most of my life eating at a table filled by four

I imagine how my twenties will unfold--

romantic nights eating alone

surrounded by empty space and place mats perfectly placed

settings seductively set

silverware wearing it’s very best.

You see, my mothers were never shy about teaching me all the right

"manners",

so by the time I was 13 I’d already read many books on

"etiquette",

I knew exactly how to set the silverware just--so--

in parallel people-pleasing lines 

that matched up with the perfectly arranged place mat

saving the place

I refused to let anyone occupy,

too enamored was I with the romance of empty space.

Once in a while I let some real humans audition for fillers,

flesh and blood dinner guests that play off my set-dressings nicely,

know how to fill their mouths with variations of my drafted scripts between bites.

But I have always deemed them insufficient,

sent them packing with the crumbs from their placemats,

maladighted for some minor misdemeanor of knife and fork, 

or perhaps a misplaced napkin corner,

imperfections and missed connections serving as carefully constructed

excuses for a life in which I fall in love alone--

goldilocks indecision undercutting the simple fact that 

lives take space to be lived.

Bodies change the shape of things.

Unlike empty space, their mass-filled molecules

force sheets, pillows, and my stomach to form new

ways of falling around them.

You’d think things that were given the properties of solids

wouldn’t be so malleable.

The too-numerous failings of the heart will go unmentioned.

I’ve never been able to fashion my chest tempur-pedic,

always failing the wine-glass test

and spilling over

with your every seismic on-the-edge-of-sleep twitch.

All this being said,

just know that when I blush at the slightest breeze

or breathe faster at the sight of an empty seat

it is not because of you,

but your very non-existence,

that I am all at once overcome

with the most frustrating waves of love

and loneliness

I spoon feed shovel poetry into my mouth like cookie dough

only stopping when I can feel the vowels stick to the walls of my esophagus,

all 

the

way

d

o

w

n

when the taste of excess coats my nerve endings 

and my stomach send signals to my brainstem to stop.

I want to wedge my tongue between the sheets of an unmade bed mouth

and lie there like I was made to rest against the pillows of your teeth.

Really I just wanna lie somewhere and fall asleep.

But the man in the crystal ball house said through the smoke

that saturn is on the move

and I can’t sleep while it’s on its way to scorpio,

god knows we’ve all got too many things hiding in our dark.

I haven’t had cookie dough in two months.

I eat cereal for breakfast now and dare myself to make it through till lunch

but whoever thought corn flakes were enough to hold you up

through crowded public transportation

four hour lectures

self-doubt

and procrastination

was wishing on sugar granules

they mistook to be the stars.

So I don’t collapse on the cross-streets before I get to you

I feed myself on poetry.

Binge-reading until my eyes go fuzzy,

grown over with word-mold

that got lost while it was looking for someone to point north.

I have -$2 in my bank account,

I can’t find corn tortillas and the peanut butter here doesn’t come cheap.

So I am going to be late again.

Going to waste more time recycling words

in the hopes of keeping some of the change,

blindly spooning syllables down my throat 

without regard to my stomach’s wishes

because maybe one day

If I didn’t have second thoughts or if propriety wasn’t my first priority

I would send you song lyrics and music videos

because I want you to know that 

at 2:34am in Buenos Aires

I still think you’re beautiful

and it’s your body I think about lying next to mine

when the going gets lonely

and when I can’t feel my toes

it’s the backs of your knees my dreams sink into

because I would rather have no one else’s warmth run through me than yours.

At 7:56pm when my stomach is hurting and my eyelids are heavy with wishes, 

my pillow can only be your stomach,

your imaginary hips sustain my ship in a storm

I pretend to fall into you ten thousand times more than I would should.

The words I have written to you, for you, because of you

fill the nooks and crannies of my overcrowded hard drive.

You are the nick-nacks in my over-crowded pack-rat attic

I can’t seem to throw the thought of you and me away.

I think it’s because I could never bear the thought of such a treasure

heaped in with the rest of the garbage men’s 8am conquests

when it could be held close to your chest at midnight

or read and re-read by girls not yet born

in echoes of every lonesome youth’s unrequited love.

But I think it’s really mostly because 

I don’t ever want to be the kind of woman who dies with an empty attic

all alone.

Because what is a happy ending if not a lump in the throat of someone’s child

reading old words written with no knowledge of the future in which they’re now living.

I don’t want to let my present moments go un-lumped in my children’s throats.

Which is basically all just an elaborate excuse for writing these unsent supplications

and these lust-songs unsung in the echoing silence of my insecurities. 

In short, I opened a blank email to you last night

and the cursor blinked black and white mockeries

tapping the infinite absence of meaningful communication back at me.

A million possible lines flew through my head--

I miss you I love you I wish you were lying here next to me--

I dreamt of the softness of your stomach last night and it almost made me cry--

Where are you, what are you thinking, what are you carrying inside your heart?--

Do your hands still make the same shapes they did last month?--

I once wrote that I loved you with my split ends

and I’m worried that I somehow ended up loving you all the way to my roots. 

I am thinking about getting my hair cut, but not as much as I think about you,

I wish I could have shouted “spots backs!” into your shoulders when we hugged goodbye

I wish you hadn’t held on so long