orgasm, ovation, opposition, avoidance

avoidance

avoidance

avoidance.

You are not the center of the universe;

I wake up with bruises on my knees.

Your name on my hollow heart;

a dead tree grows no leaves;

this is as tall as I will ever be,

this day of rain needs to end. am i blocking out your sun or are you blocking out mine?

I talk to God in the shower, hands together in my hair, kneeling to pick up my razor.

I talk to God in the car, shouting up toward the exit, bowing my head in the exhaustion of heavy traffic.

you call hyacinths lilacs but it doesn’t matter because you know it’s my favorite flower, waiting for me to smell them every time we’re walking through the store. the pharmacy closes in 12 minutes but you wait for me. the pharmacy is 37 feet from the flowers but you wait for me.

you tell me we should buy some while we still have time, while April still hangs in the sky like a promise, but I don’t have any room and the moonlight doesn’t reach past my windowsill.

now your heart melts warm on my windshield

even in the cold April breeze

vast changes from spring to summer

everything goes when the flowers bloom

I am tired of being so angry. When will summer come?

You have replaced my soft apple-core with your the plasticine torso of what you think women should be, my organic elements with the fear of being too soft for another, of someone else taking out my cloud-stuffing puff by puff.

I am tired of being so cruel. When will summer come?

My gentle, swiveling teddy-bears arms spun too many times by your cruel hand, falling off in the months after your absence, the lightest touch of another sending them to the ground. Leaving me to make new fingers with the only things I can find, the sterile rubber glove under the kitchen sink, the pocket knife in my desk drawer, the pencil that lives in my pocket...

12:30 am and I am peeling your bones away from mine

it is harder to unbraid our bones each time, and harder still to deal with your grimace. I look out the window as I hand back your vertebrae, one by one, hoping you will take my eyes before I have to untangle the entirety of our spines.

1:16 am and I have wrung you dry once more

please don't let me drain you. please don't empty me. please don't let me push you away. please don't leave me.

1:43 am and I am tired of severing this bond down to the last wire just to prove what color they all are

believe my when I say I am green for you. believe me when I tell you I am wired in earnest shades of blue. believe me when I admit that despite the weary purple strands building up, I am here.

2:21 am and I am walking away with my bones haphazardly shoved into my bag, with my body empty and your vacant torso before me

I see your face in the halls, in the commons, in the space between my upper eyelid and its lower friend before I close my eyes, weighing down this rot-heart in my chest, separating me from the one I see when those friends part ways again.

Who was I before you infected me? Who I am now that I carry this disease? Your cruelty eats my soul away cell by cell. My empathy shuts down with my consideration, the sepsis hitting the soft tissue of my kindness, corroding the outer wall of my compassion, the gangrene setting in.

I want the meds, I want the physical therapy, I want the surgery, the incision, the excision, the ectomy, the blasty, the transplant, the removal, the any and everything. Get OUT of me.

like sorrel in a field of clover, I no longer notice her when I drive by, just a sun-soaked memory baked in her brick walls:

you wear an orange slice smile and I wave a woven wrist, braided by your baby carrot fingers and tied by my mother's bare-bones hands as we swing palm in palm

I wear your love like a mouthguard and you pull back your hair and tie it up with my loyalty, facing the world together

The real angles lay on their sides, still waiting for someone to come up behind them and make them feel loved for once. To be loved in the dark, when there is no solace, no sunlight, no warmth to be found, when loving is hardest. They cover their golden halos and wish the light would fade for just one moment, aching for that darkness that comes with the true sleep of another's arm around their holy waists.

the love I've given and the trust I've broken: the inevitable yin to the yang. it's amazing how one month erases three years of love

my childhood bicycle meets me two roads down from my new address

a rusted blue thing, limp streamers hanging from the handlebars, sparkles still visible through the grime