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If anything is eternal it is the fleetingness of summer.

What would I not give? To hold you. To show you all that I am-- imperfect, unfinished, unpolished, rough, harsh, soft for none, before you. And by Juno, that the lover in me may still live, that she may still be filled with deep, unflinching desire--an ocean, restless, godless, restless for someone who knows how to dive.

Neither of us were built for this--not from the beginning, anyway. I want you to come to find refuge in my arms the way I find solace in your presence, but temperance rests her chin on my shoulder, snakes her arms around my waist.

i. i abhor the time it takes anything to develop. the film of this lifetime, the heart of everything. my pride captures me with an old kodak. i don't recognise the woman in the lens-- she's yesterday, and i am one foot in tomorrow today.

i abhor the time it takes anything to develop. the film of this lifetime, the heart of everything. i am the spark, and the roar, and the culminant star, not the quiet, not the tame. my beloved calls me the sun, personified: too great to settle, too brilliant to be snuffed out by any ordinary means (don't cage me don't cage me don't cage me). freedom to me means living with the privilege to run barefoot through the loam and the silt with the atlantic at my calves, the tradewinds through my hair, and in my sails. unbridled. falling in love looks like teeth, and bones, and unraveling in ways you can only come undone when you are seen without fear, or judgment, and only pure desire to merge souls. even the little things consume me like a summer bonfire. i burn i burn i burn and i rise again and again and again.

my love my love my love i bare my heart and beg you to see witness me that i am imperfect that the bones in my hands are gnarled not from holding onto things and people but from reaching reaching reaching for stars something to believe in for god has forsaken this temple and told me that she is within me so that i am compelled instead to run with my mouth open under the storm tongue asking to be kissed by rain and lightning wild untamed wild feral and unlike your lovers before please do not seek to cage me

I don't remember learning how to love you. One day your footsteps simply make you known to me as your shadow crosses the hall. We are in the foyer and I am growing wings at my heels, because running means being there sooner, means more minutes that I will not spend trembling before the moon, asking her if you're well. In another eternity, I am braiding your hair, you are peeling fruit because you want us both to eat well. In this one, we're on the line, you're at the shop, asking if I want anything, knowing that we're two thousand miles apart. Black tea, honey, us in the same city like our youth again. Even for a moment.

And I wanted to say "if you found yourself on fire," but I've never known how to put one out. My first steps were on the hot coals of the fireside, and my lovers have all beheld me like the sun-- a woman aflame, aflame.

Broody November, how your lips taste of warm spice and black tea, no milk, no sugar, and yet I drink like a woman ripe with biblical gluttony. Yes, this must have been what manna felt like upon the tongue, what it must have felt like to stand atop the mountains and know any god.

Sunlight spills into the room-- everything becomes golden, illuminated raw honey. Baba says I was named with this radiance in mind, with this sweetness in thought. I do not know that I am as radiant or honeyed as my true name promises. Instead I am built strong, resilient, like the honeycomb. Instead my blood runs hot, molten, like the sun. I am not anything my forebears thought I should be and I am still fighting to simply be me.

Nails in my skin and I am trying to claw claw claw myself out from under it. I am desperate to molt, perhaps earlier than I should, forced ripe, bleeding. No, I would not let the little girl in me ever witness an unbecoming, an undoing. I would cradle her in my arms and tell her that she is the starsea. I would kiss her eyes and promise her god's head.

Delusion is the way I find you in the warmth radiating from the teacup in my hands. I am reminded of what it's like to have your ribs interwoven with someone's so closely, heartbeats become indistinguishable.

Someone calls it loneliness; I call it temperance, penance even. My mother's hands are the coldest thing I have ever known, and my own hands are rough and weatherbeaten from holding on, desperately. God is a woman and I carry half of her blood, praying for her to forgive me, forgive me, forgive me that I am not who she dreamed and wished I should be.

Speak my name. Like a hymn, like a prayer. I am no god, no queen, no evil, no fiend, only a woman, a body of divine fears.

May arrives gently; she's perfumed like Aphrodite's gardens. I shouldn't still wonder after anyone who thought I wasn't enough. Spring is slowly becoming Summer and I should be on the rooftops, waltzing with my lover under Diana's gaze. I should be in my own arms, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy, desperately greedy with myself.

I tell him I want to sink my teeth into him. I mean to say that I want to know what he thinks about at two in the afternoon, when he's just living. I mean to say that I want to be made part of that world, his world, ours ours ours--I want to make it ours.