April was an existentialist. She only believed in moments she could taste with her tongue outstretched, and with that, she deemed her story less important than the others, especially that of May. April and May could have easily been sisters. When they laughed, the sounds wove together, and when they cried, daffodils found the strength to get out of bed in the morning. In the dark, you could barely tell them apart.
Yet everything was more saturated about May. She was brimming with consequence. Even her biology reflected this, her full body barely losing the constant, precarious quarrel with her clothes. Her eyes carried the innocence and wisdom of sea glass, only made more beautiful by rogue tides. A guy could bask in her forever.
April was considered beautiful, but in an objective kind of way. Her clothes never seemed to fit quite right, either restricting her breath or swallowing her shape. Her eyes were often bright, but unstable, flitting from amber to dirt. You’d want to place April behind glass. You’d want to feature her under the gloss of a fashion magazine. You’d want to keep April at a safe distance. You’d want to fuck her, but only in your mind.
Many are colder than April, yet poets always consider her the cruelest. Maybe it’s the way she warms your skin in one breath and leaves you frostbitten in the next. Maybe it’s the way her harsh breezes overpower her subtle sunshine. Maybe it’s that she’s impossible to forecast, always one arm’s reach out of your grasp. Maybe she’s afraid of herself.
My hometown bleeds blue and gold in the summer.
Black and purple drench the evenings,
and as I undress from sticky denim I
catch my breath.
.
Ever since I got home from college,
all I’ve wanted to do is run.
.
In my bedroom,
my reflection seems duplicitous,
the skin superimposed on glass
fighting the vision in my head.
.
Protein versus postulation again.
.
The baby pink walls start to carbonate violently
like shaken rose-soda,
my vision scattering.
.
I picture my brain being paved
by tiny men,
words said and unsaid
dotting lanes in my head.
.
Love, insanity is
lying on your parents’ lawn in a
pink and white seersucker dress
while feeling the electricity
of a million eyelashes
brush your skin
and for hours forgetting
all your names and
earthly
loyalties.
.
I’ve been running since
May-fifteenth-midnight
whenever the strobing
dots of my digital clock
become too much to bear.
.
I’ve replaced sleeping
with the witching hour,
superimposing my dreams
.
onto the suburban setting of all my
high school memories.
.
I can’t leave my hometown.
.
The trees gossip more loudly than teenagers.
.
I trace the subtle blue rivulets of my arms,
wishing, more than anything, for veins like
roadmaps instead of
butterfly nets.
realities and intentions are separate, mind
God’s the pattern in the threads, not the start of the line
.
i glean the seams of the seat cushion fabric, pandering
pandering pandering pandering to the demons locked inside
.
rib (cage)
road (rage)
stage (fright)
(fright) stage
.
with etymology too far removed to undo,
i press every elevator button, thinking one of them is you
.
love, i broke my own heart on a Thursday afternoon,
finding the only proper nouns to be descriptors of time.
.
this life is a great experiment, try
this life is a great experiment, blind
My life is a veiled poem.
My love is a poem veiled.
And your eyes will liquify the lines of the tides I’ll never sail.
Someday you’ll understand.
Every leaf of inhibition mirrors the veins of your hand—
You compulsively tear strands of grass from the ground;
Since you were a child, you loved its lack of sound.
.
All I ever wanted was clean breaks and milkshakes.
But instead you told the waiter, “We’ll just have some water, thanks.”
And then over linguini, you told me how you felt;
You killed all my dreams with assassin-like stealth.
.
When tears come in streams, water tastes like moonbeams.
But water can’t feed all my fabricated dreams—
I need chemical strawberries frozen thick in my veins;
I need your ibuprofen stare to kill all of my pains.
.
High fructose corn syrup coats my soul, love,
It trickles my insides forming sugar stalactites.
I lie to myself while doing makeup in the mirror;
I’m lying to you now between bites of white rice.
.
Goodnight.
“She’s in a war of consciousness,” he said aloud.
He pointed the camera to the pile of limbs.
The image screamed “moderate hit with a sequel.”
The love-limbs grinned and turned to her side.
“If I hide my surprise, will you tell me how it ends?”
So he mouthed her last words from his lips to hers.
The teen years consist of slowly coming to a realization that the world is not as fair or as conquerable as you always thought it was—-and that’s a terrible and beautiful thing. And you realize that Newton was right, and that with every terrible, terrible thing that you come across, there is a beauty that matches its terror, and with each beautiful thing, a terror that matches its beauty. And you guess that despite what anyone says, or preaches, or believes, the world can only be accurately described in two simple words: terribly beautiful.
Your eyes are cathedral windows;
To smash them is a sacrilege,
.
But careless as I am, one dusk,
I tossed a stone across the lawn,
crashing through the layers of night,
dipping in dusk and falling in dawn.
.
Flying toward you with magnetic indifference
was the stone that so resembles my heart,
crashing through stained-glass windows,
crackling your faith-drenched eyes apart.
.
Jagged tears poured in time-suspended torrents,
encrusting the grass in red, yellow, blue;
In that moment, the air was prismatic,
enough to make me believe in you.
.
But then, the air stopped shimmering,
I barefooted the jagged sand;
“dark eyes don’t have to mean demise,”
I thought, stubborn as I am.
.
Dust clung to your rotting insides,
to benches and dead flowers.
I closed my eyes to breathe you in;
my lungs turned to powder.
.
Bible verses disappearing,
unraveling threads of miracles;
All my blood, wine, water
trickles to the earth;
.
Faith lost turns me to dust,
Genesis in reverse.
