#startwritenow

& she's blushing all over, cheeks splotched with ruddy pink, it

stains her face like a kool-aid spill.

i didn't know lips could blush too or

maybe it's syrup from the watermelon candy,

she stared straight at me as she crunched it into shards,

i’m thinking maybe this redness is chemical.

she glances at me and her eyes

slice the room apart,

dividing our distance into a series of rivers:

i wind through a crowd of bodies like a brook trout squeezing into the space between stones.

she is an island, and i am beached on the shore of her gaze.

i am forgetting how to breathe on dry land, words bubble up in my throat and suck themselves back down my windpipe,

this is a rhythm of rise and fall, push and shove,

courage and falter.

a dribble of watermelon escapes the corner of her lip, she is a goddess and i understand this to be ambrosia.

the candy gives me a secondhand sugar high,

i am electrified into existence and

she doesn't kiss with her mouth open.

the taste of fruit like summer breath,

her kisses are fluttering moth wings,

i am trying to prove we share a pulse beyond

the heart left twitching on the operating table.

i am trying to prove that she doesn't believe

love can be sterilized into experimenting

the word floods my mouth like iodine,

stinging with sanitization as if

fucking was only okay in a labcoat.

i want my love to make a mess,

i want her to open her mouth.

i kiss a girl

& she's blushing all over,

pulling herself away, prying her lips off mine

i am trying to prove that we share a pulse and

she is trying to pretend she's never met me,

the candy splinters like glass, she chews fast and nervous,

experimenting.

i stare at her lips and know that lips can't blush,

the beginning is slow

soft and

sweet but you’re

still on the edge of loneliness.

and he wants someone

who is

so right that

the beginning is loud

almost nonexistent and

proud but when 

has anything started out like that?

we never

started out

1:41 am 

was the last time we met

& under two half-dimmed lights

we slept

and i kept

the blankets you wept

on & now what’s left

is nothing except

my tears

& i like to think they’ve mixed 

pass the salt

(and your smile,

the it's-ok-and-i'm-alright

one, because i know that i'm the

one who let go first, but

you haven't even talked to me in

3 months, and i never imagined

i'd hurt you this way, and i'll admit it,

i miss your sweet smell sometimes--

that does not mean

i want you back 

in any way whatsoever)

when i was younger, my mother would drop me on aunt eleanor’s doorstep, and depart with a dry kiss on the forehead and a stern look at eleanor. i would duck behind eleanor’s legs as we waved goodbye to the angry growl of the 1956 mustang starting up, and mother would drive to the rhythm of so long, farewell as she sped off onto the highway. i never saw which way the car turned; she would drive away so quickly that the wheels would kick up a dust cloud bigger than the sun, and one time i stood in the street, squinting, hoping to see mother glance backwards to check that i was safe, or even just a glimpse of the mustang’s red paint, but i got dust in my mouth and for a second, i thought it was cinnamon.

when i was younger, i was a dandelion growing in a field of sunflowers, and when i began to sprout, i touched my leaves with trembling fingers and cried, afraid of myself and afraid to fall in love, because i knew anyone who loved me would make a wish and blow me away. mother uprooted me every summer and planted me in the center of aunt eleanor’s garden, where i bowed my head in shame as the other flowers bowed their heads in admiration. she’s from the city, they would whisper amongst themselves, their dinnerplate eyes smudged with blackened attempts at grown-up makeup, pudgy fingers clutching at cans of coca-cola, craving their fix of sugary carbonation. the flowers there would marry a high school sweetheart, drop out of college, work the dinner shift at the local pizza joint. they would waste ecosystems picking out their own petals, curled up in the fetal position at three in the morning, the moon catching on their faces like it might catch on a piece of broken glass, unable to fall asleep because they can’t stop their own mouths from forming the shape of the words: he loves me.

i knew this, because i was taught this. even a child (especially a child) could pick up the way my mother’s shoulders began to slouch after a night or two with a man, because she knew she was settling for the crust when she could have had the whole loaf. she would close the door quietly behind her when she came home, silhouetted in the fluorescent light of the television, she’d kick off her heels and roll her pantyhose down to the ankles, dejectedly resign herself to a corner of the couch next to me and say, let’s just be quiet tonight. and she’d turn the volume on Saturday Night Live as loud as the neighbors would let us, so that i’d hear the laughs, not the sobs that escaped her body involuntarily, or the shuddering sighs that followed. she thought i was deaf to these late-night tears, but i’d stay awake hours after she put me to bed just to make sure she had stopped crying on the fire escape.

aunt eleanor dismisses my mother like an atheist dismisses god, with respect but secret pride because aunt eleanor thinks she knows me best, and tells me so. even though i had never met my father, i am still a child of divorce to aunt eleanor. she tells me that i am the lovechild of heaven and earth, the subject of a trillion year custody battle. aunt eleanor tells me that the horizon line is just the tug of war rope pulled taut, she tells me that the sun rises every day just to see me for a little while, she tells me that before i was born, i was a divine embryo delicately folded into the womb of the universe. aunt eleanor whispers promises to me in the dark, asks me to fall in love with the solar system, make love to the moon. sometimes, she tells me i was the cause of the big bang, and when i die, i will die unto a supernova. i want to shout, I AM A WEED! but the words don’t come out, because a dandelion would like to be mistaken for a sunflower sometimes.

when i was younger, mother would roll into the driveway on the last day of august, with longer hair and a new pair of blue jeans, and aunt eleanor and i would meet her at the front of the house. my hair was all brushed and i was wearing a skirt aunt eleanor had bought for me, eleanor was holding a bouquet of dandelions, she handed them delicately to my mother. “all those flowers in your garden and the best you could do for me were dandelions?” i got into the front seat of the car, trying not to be noticed, hoping i wouldn’t scratch the leather or get my skirt dirty. aunt eleanor nodded, said “a dandelion is a very beautiful flower.” (aunt eleanor was a poet, and you should know that you must never ask a poet to do anything but write, they take real world encounters to a metaphorical extreme that is not at all suitable to a sensible, systematic lifestyle).

my mother scoffed and started the car, it purred and growled and finally roared, we shot forward into the cinnamon dust, the dandelion seeds blew away and were lost in the wake of the mustang, mother turned on the radio and said with a little laugh,

my mother reasoned that what she felt was just the

n   e  g   a   t   i   v   e      s   p   a   c   e

that came along with an empty nest,

but dad and i knew that sadness had

silently crept into the crevices you left vulnerable.

you told me to picture the world like concentric circles,

you sat me down and whispered that you fit into a different circle than we did

but dad thought that if he shook you hard enough, something in you would

shift back to square one,

a blank slate,

tabula rasa.

i knew it was a lost cause.

i sat with tight-lipped admiration for you as i read the psalms.

my older brother skips church, i thought, trying to force feelings of rebel pride.

my older brother skips church, and he wears eyeliner, and tobacco smoke pours from his lips like steam from a manhole cover on the streets of new york.

i liked watching you get ready for dates,

watching you flick the black pencil up at the corner of your eyes,

pulling your eyelid up with your thumb and forefinger.

you blinked,