1. You are always going to be the first thing I think about when I wake up. 2. In autumn, in the Midwest, you can see Orion gleam like a slew of gemstones. 3. Patience is learned best through pain. 4. In this country, I am still not safe in my skin. 5. Virginia is colder than one would expect, even in the summer. 6. Just because you don’t talk to someone every single day for every single minute, doesn’t mean that you mean any less to them and vice versa. 7. Home can be both a what and a whom all at once. 8. The spirit grows when love takes roots in the veins. 9. I will always miss a person over a place. 10. This body is constantly fighting. 11. Death has spent far too much time knocking on my door to be called ‘stranger’ anymore. 12. God is out there, and they are whispering in every melody that touches the ears.  13. Being a beer snob doesn’t make you cool, it makes you an asshole. 14. Grace looks like a girl on a yellow couch staring straight at her laptop screen, Irish storms clouding her eyes, rain escaping down her cheeks, mouthing to me ‘it’s alright. I’m fine.’ 15. This is my body, and my life is the loudest weapon. 16. There must be more poetry, there must. 17. If you spend every single day in contact with another human being, even the blink of an eye feels like the longest silence. 18. I am so happily, and hopelessly in love with you. And I accept the consequence of both. 19. There are people who will haunt your mind long after they have forgotten you. You are allowed to talk to their ghosts once in a while. 20. Nobody really knows what the hell they’re doing. We’re all winging it. Sometimes you have to give a person a break. 21. Prayer is love in verb-form. 22. There’s still something about your eyes that none of my words will ever get right. 23. My mother is what made me what I am. 24. Hands might be the most important part of the body. 25. Love, love, love. In the end, that is the only thing that will save us. 26. We come back stronger, louder, fiercer. 27. You don’t have to love the exact place you are at, but you should love where you think you’re going. 28. Shitty wine is better than no wine. 29. We are not good at listening. 30. Just because your mental illness comes back doesn’t mean you aren’t making progress. Keep fighting. 31. Grace sounds like her voice on the phone saying ‘happy new years.’ We survived it. Thank you for getting me here. 32. The physical word: books & letters, are a sacred part of our world now. 33. Every language on this planet has a way to say 'i miss you,’ and learning all of them still wouldn’t be enough. 34. I belong right where I am. 35. You are always going to be the last thing I think about when I go to sleep.

baby! i look at you and my heart remembers the time when my atoms were a mossy log, all ray of sun. you make me remember a summer i never had. feel like a future where we live with our rescue dogs and greenhouses. make you more flower crowns. when i dance with you it feels easy, one-two-three. like kitchens are ballrooms.

they’ll call you the wrong kind of romantic,  the wrong shade of red printed on sale-flyers,  mouth coming away darkened by cheap ink.  some contracts taste better at the swallowing  than the signing, your jaw snake-soft around

5:10 PM & i’m folding another sunset under my tongue, its hues bleached out by the cold into cotton-cloud pale. & it goes like this every year, coming back to this frost  to watch ice braid itself clear into my hair, & every year this season is a little less cold than memory tells me,  but the air is still taut with it. still springing away  from every breath that wants to draw it in. here,  the stars whisper flicker-faint, only showing their faces 

I pay to shoot guns in an alleyway. Remember his tortured smile and magazine wrists. I try to grow thyme, live with thirty one people and call myself stable. I surround myself with cats and houseplants and forget his last name. I clip my nails too short and bleed into the sink. I go to our pizza place and forget how much not crying hurts. I taste your coke, lick at your obituary. I am lockdown, intoxicated tongue. I demo a kitchen, a bathroom, a heart. Chip my knuckle. Ruin my only mouth.