sunk beneath the ocean
sea-green, deep and
shifting from the surface
I am somewhere
below your line of sight
and somewhere
shifting in the surface
of the sea
connected and I love
sky and testing
the horizon
city skyscapes
and I sink

this weight of character
below my line of sight
eyes sea-green
wrapping around
things I just love
you are something else
connected and I love
thinking you
are
something
else
something like the sea

I captured you in corners of my tastebuds
and in memories that haunt the fringes of my vision
sweeping lashes and bare skin
intimate and hidden in the cracks of my fingertips

I can try to pretend these things will never change me
you never meant that much to me
he's my first--
mistake;
and when they stick to my consciousness
fumbling fingers
and stubborn packaging
I don't know if I was supposed to
care this much;
don't,
don't let me down
these wounds might cease to mend

but I will never put aside ambition
and you, maybe you'll remember me
what I gave is yours to keep

kneading my collarbone
up and down the boulevard
I loved you more than I'd ever loved myself
squinting in dim lights and reflected in your eyes
cities and color
aching for time

don't stop believing
carry me past oceans and I never will

when I watch you
I am fragments of this new life
people are alive and I am breathing
in tune to someone elses' forearm

I won't let them take you
love me marvelously
I am a new waist and a new passion

just a small town girl
and black eyeliner

I am everything I've met and everything I've touched,
I am you and I am him,

I still take pictures of chicago and paint until I cry
I love more than you ever loved yourself

disintegrating memories
dragging hand-in-hand
with speculating distances
and restless paper hearts

I am stitched into my future
enchanted by the past
cherry cokes at two am
and itchy winter coats

giving up is getting love
balance turned to black and white
shades of grey are stupified
and silenced to the back

we've never been real lovers
and a chance I've never had
force apart my calendar
and sketch you in instead

and we're just one short
feeling all the time
fingers on pulse points that flash bright so tight
you're suffocating
each breath is killing you and we need
to breathe for life
is suffocating

and my nerves photo-earth are scrambled up jammed up
shoved into a circle but
you're killing to survive and murder's not the answer
touch light, flash bright
"work a little each day"

someone hid the answers in a glass tin jar
at the bottom of the sea
where the fishes swim and the birds can't fly
no one flies at the bottom of the sea
it's suffocating

and if this doesn't make any sense at all
write three pages and turn it in tomorrow
when the little birdies swim and the fish fly high
and we all stop to breathe inbetween flash light stop light pulsebeats
of time we just don't remember.

essay questions on the back.

I keep writing the spaces between heartbeats,
I keep touching the things that aren't real,
I keep saying how I'm going to change into something,
I keep erasing the lines that I've written before,
and when will I write for myself.

it takes skyscrapers filled with polaroids
it takes little white lies and telegraphs
it takes reflective puddles of gasoline
it takes armfuls of daisies and paisley print napkins
it takes princes and paupers and slurpees and silver
plated bracelets and philosophical books and memories
of people sitting on cracked green-brown bus seats
it takes things I knew and throws them away; it takes crispy hot nights
when cheekbones are sweating and boys who know nothing
of what they want filling their hearts up with and euros in pennies and sitting
on six clouds of old medications and basements with just too much dust.

it's a matter of time,
it's matter of perspective,
it's a snapshot hold-back parallel circle of constant irrevocable dimensions of porch swings
and merry go rounds undeniably irritatingly provokingly making me sick.

swish swish go cassette tapes I keep within reach
I can pull out their insides and stretch out the tape to reach to the moon
past the treetops and over the sun and into my head while I sleep.
someday I'll tinker with those that dream nothing,
and someday I'll write for myself.

last night scraped painstakingly
from the fissures in my brain
scraped like ink from wood-latch boxes with
fancy carved roses on the top

chewing apart memories with
your nails clenched into my hand
I am falling out of love all over again

clicking keys and snapping wrists
ripped strings and fractured minds
slipping into different facades
of distances that felt closer
six trembling months so
long

touching your palm
with a face that isn't real anymore
pillow cased fingertips touching cheeks
bumping elbows ripple through ponds of
tension seething just under the skin and
details throb in my temples

I have vanished from the city skyline
I am taking back my couch, I am stepping on dried roses
pilfering paint from butterfly wings
frankly darling sweet pea
there were these picnic baskets and sunflowers

bitterly lamenting to everyone but printed on both sides
of your business card it says "heartbreaker"
and printed on both sides of the fortune cookie it said
"not your business, move on move on"

stitching holes in my cheekbones, I
haven't got the heart to put up walls
haven't got the nerve to break them down
still painting you into my sunflowers and I am
so wary when I scrape elbows

since when am I better than a heartbreak
slicing brick with nerves of steel
impossible breaches of wisdom and pasts
coming back to haunt me

I can find the two and find the four and
throw shit till they're six but
the daylight seeps out of my skull through my eyelashes
and I still don't notice the shadows

fact jack I'm plum squat but
make something out of nothing and a passion
from a rose tripped skipped fluttering
summertime in skylights, doors, midnights and escaping text
fast cars,
faster boys,
life flashing and I'm throwing myself out of windows to catch it

holding hands;
holding between two sweaty palms the promise of  day-lit winters dancing in snow
and summers dripping with the heat of the sun
captivating the colors in the green of your eyes.

to say i savor who you are and how well i fit into that corner crevice of your arm
is simply unmistakably undeniably understated;
for if eternity came tomorrow i'd bury myself into everything i wish you were
and dwell forever in contemplation about the parts that you are not.

to change is such a complicated process,
to erase everything we once knew about ourselves and rewrite it to a different criteria, the criteria of an editor who's simply insensitive.
i don't want that for you
i simply,
want you.

really i love you just the way you are;
i'm a fucking hypocrite to say that still today,
everything i ever say is a contradiction of words and thoughts and feelings,
and now at least i can admit my shit through this web of lies.

the summer tore us apart
and the winter is bare

for my love is but my own.

a hundred and six questions swirling in my mind, inoutinout of
focus until they fade away with the throbbing in my temples;
the pounding of my face, your distorted features

the dirt tastes like desert sun ----

touch me here, you whisper,
but I can’t obey, can’t entangle my fingers in your sweaty hair because I'm
perfect as the winter snow,
perfect as the motherfucking winter snow.

reading my thoughts like an open book fluttering in the wind; it’s not winter anymore

there are ninety three bones in
this scraping artist
of trembling lungs, slicked on memories
chalk outlines printed in hearts
boxes of nervous systems

there are forty five
f o u r ty f.o.r.t.y. spell it write
down impressions of me
spill them onto paper and gnaw
through fingernails waiting for
sunlight to warm your ice cold shell.

I am writing to please and backtracking
that's not good delete key space again delete delete delete,
making you erase your chalk outlines
again, again,
painting never ceasing,
colors flowing minds boggling
dipping hands in ink
smea_ring them into letters
and hugging tight
these pages of nothing

nothing nothing
and everything
and me;

shifting into pasts of
night walks, fluttering streetlights
caked mascara on sheets
baby-soft fingertips
shone in simmering spring greens

lurching eighty-six convertibles
sunset swirling in
dashboards obscured by smoke
cigarettes in the dashboard

barely even eighteen
milky eyes, transparent aspirations
clinging to my mascara stains
and memories of night walks,
fluttering streetlights and fluttering hearts

she's a pretty package
jotting notes in margins
sketching hands with broken leads
aching for dust at the end of the world

pasts drumming into skulls
daylight skimming shifting eyes;

you are black tie formal events
fragments of seconds and
silhouettes of murder,

you are last straws and
you are sinking into puddles and
getting words wet

crying over regards to "all that jazz"
you are suffocation of the bloodstream
you are lying

I am strings tangling veins saying
tear off that rear-view mirror
I am blisters behind your spleen

I am poisoning your mistakes
I am ripping up your photographs but
holding on to journals because

I am sentimental; I am a wreck
you are lying but I am telling myself
I need. these. things.

you are scraping off your passion and you are
making me lose myself in
fragments of seconds
and black tie formal events

standing on doorsteps
falling rain and I am
staring into silence
wind whispering past ankles,
"you were never good enough."

not a love poem
I am staring into
grey clouds sky rain falling
you are sitting on laps
perching on minds
seeping through cores
erasing bones

she is twisting your ankle
twenty-nine and I am
not like that,
she is "good enough" but
you are standing on doorsteps
falling rain and I am
staring in silence

tripping over sentences
"can't won't will not"
jesus couldn't save this town
headlights flashing red but brakes
are shooting into nowhere
gravel spinning

ferris wheels at night
headlights in the distance, flashing red,
holding hands because because
he talks like you want him to
49 cents and trips back home

mailboxes counting minutes
fucking minutes
and you're better off chasing
headlights flashing red
and counting minutes
trips back home
even jesus couldn't save him
can't won't will not

the sinking sun keeps calling
poetic bones and walgreens; three am
flinging glass, nightmares, explicit
circles of the wind

singing into daybreak
shutters slamming shut; flickering eyelashes
and flopping into pillows fluffing up
shifting clouds of how you smelled

porch swings, heartbreaks
capturing breezes soaking skulls
red wine and "oh-take-mine"
tracing outlines imprinted
swaying grass lays flat

where you were,
but the summer sun keeps calling

Sporadically tucked into the pages of my baby book are pictures of me from throughout my toddler years, many where I am clad in various brightly colored swimsuits with those fuzzy, worn-out bottoms that come from sitting on too many rough pool decks. Occasionally these photographs are ones taken at my grandmother’s lake in Connecticut or even simply around the pool, but it’s the ones taken at the beaches of Port Aransas and sometimes Nantucket where, despite the dripping sand-crusted curls flying wildly about my head, I’ve got one of those ridiculous half-grins of wonderment slapped across my face. The swimsuit may be secondhand, but the fun I appear to be having is entirely mine. 

The earlier shots don’t show much sophistication on my part- I guess I’ll have to admit to the slightly embarrassing fact that I’m eating sand. Nevertheless, as you flip through the fading photos I grow up incrementally; the next year I am demolishing sand castles built with careful precision by my siblings, the year after that I am discovering the ocean and its ability to knock me flat on my bum. As the pictures grow less frequent my memory kicks in more often, fond memories of combing the beach for seashells and sliding down sand dunes on boogie boards picking their way out of my brain. I remember flying kites and feeding seagulls, spending hours sometimes up to my chest in salt water I knew too well to drown in. I remember my grandparents there- my grandmother, that spunky glimmer in her eye, lobbing lukewarm bodies of washed-up jellyfish at any child in range. Despite our disgust the adults always found hilarity in the looks on our faces and the ftwack of skin-meets-fish. And my grandfather, bringing us early morning cinnamon buns the size of your face from the coffee shop we grew to love. I knew my parents as a couple at the beach, the two of them hustling kids into beach clothes and rounding up toys and flipflops. Mom always cooked Thanksgiving dinner in the kitchen of the rented house with my grandmother while my father and brothers watched TV upstairs. I remember epic family rounds of monopoly on rainy days and I remember the stories, I remember them laughing together at the shenanigans my siblings and I found our ways into.

In many ways being at the beach is firmly incorporated into everything I love and everything I grew up with. I rarely say no to an invitation to go, rarely turn down an opportunity to build sandcastles of my own that finally can compare to the ones I watched my brothers and sister make. I rarely turn down an opportunity to flush away the harshness of reality in the forgiving waves of the ocean, but in the nights I spend there it always creeps back to haunt me.

The reality is that the beach is something I’m torn about now, something that is filled equally with fond memories of the past and the truth of the present. Now my grandparents stay at home for the winters, their misbehaving bones and absentmindedness making travel too difficult. We don’t go to the beach at Thanksgiving anymore, haven’t since my father and mother separated and started kissing different people. We went looking for the coffee shop a few years back and discovered the owners had retired and shut it down; the place that is there now sells wheat rolls and halfhearted pastries for breakfast. My siblings are all away at college and my brother, studying to be an architect, no longer needs or wants to expel creative energy by building sandcastles taller than me. We don’t stay in that one rented house anymore and don’t need anymore seashells; I haven’t eaten sand in thirteen years.

But two weeks ago I was in Port Aransas and ran across a family of four on my walk back up the beach to the condo. It was freezing, the sun was setting, two young boys were knee deep in sand and dripping wet, hair as tangled as their arms and their legs and the holes they were digging around the bodies of one another. The obviously fruitless efforts of their parents to roll up jacket sleeves and pants had gone unnoticed; the couple stood in defeat nearby with their arms around each other and grins to match their sons’.

I don’t eat sand anymore. But somewhere, another toddler, in another baby book, in another world, in another situation; they’re getting their minerals, and maybe later, their cinnamon rolls. And their parents are taking pictures now; taking them for years to come and carefully pressing them into the pages of their baby books.

I can only hope so.

embroidering lips with fingertips
experiencing searing palms
writing into white hot flesh

enticing railroad lullabyes
electrifying senses and burning candlewicks
senseless mumbles, red-hot fumbles

passion is the demon we cannot chase away
feeling the sensation that never has its way
diamond is the metal who didn't get to stay

cursing as we're dragged
oblivion is calling
make the most of never
for sketches last forever

[we are but memories]

fading greens and yellows
fading into blue
seeping immortality
out of lines
scribbled mindlessly
clutching paper napkins
with those words
[keep me here]

the thumping of my heartbeat
footsteps fall less often
and the the farther i fall
the harder you press
your lips like scribbled ink
against my skull

the entirety of cruelty
is drowning all of me
and i'm clinging to your chest
to keep me floating
oil pulling
and your eyes are
paper napkins