I am cut open for you.

I am empty.

Pulled apart.

You are everything that hurts.

And to write a long sentence for you makes me gasp for air.

Only fragments until I can understand where your love went.

I'll let you come back if you don't take too long.

We can pretend I am all better.

We can stuff me with cantaloupes and mangoes.
We can fill me with discarded National Geographic magazines.
We can animate me with strong coffee and discarded teabag strings.

Move me anyway you'd like.

My smile sewn with good intentions and promises that you won't ever leave me.

And I'll cut my eyelids away, so I will never blink. And this dream will never end.

Lets talk the way we talked before you hated me.
Before I lied to you.
Before I broke your heart.

And you sit looking at me with a closed mouth.

My dog buries her head underneath my thigh. She doesn't know I'm a bad person.

But I was good once or twice before.

When you knew, me when I wore sandals and complained about baroque art. I didn't know what baroque are was, but you liked the way the word fell out of my mouth. And I did anything to please you.

Before you loved me, I loved you.

And we would listen to violin solos and you would hold me while I cried.

You would press your hand on my shoulder and trace letters and ask me what you had written, I would answer, "You wrote the letters, L-O-V-E." even when you didn't.

You wanted to be the first to leave. 

I carried our love with a clenched jaw. 

Every tear begging you to stay. 

I've forgotten how to breathe.

Our always has gone away.

There are no harsh words to send your way. 

Because I love you. 

I will love you always. 

You held my souls attention with every beautiful word you ever spoke to me. 

You engraved my heart with every letter you ever wrote me. 

And in my clumsy way I became yours.

A story I can't tell. A word I can't spell. A memory I can't recall. 

My ache.

My other, my unknowable, so lovable. 

My always. 

Begging

We had a conversation about your birthday. We made plans to have dinner this weekend. We said goodbye.

I never ask what I want to ask. 

I never say what I want to say. 

My fingers slide from one letter on the keyboard to the next. Tears fall on my chest. And I'm wondering if my music is too loud. I'm wondering if the neighbors will complain.

I want to ask you if you could ever love me. 

Could you ever love me? Even for a little while. Just for a few days or weeks. Do you think you could love me?

and then, when you don't answer right away, I want to beg.

Please love me. Not for very long or very much. I just need you to love me for a little while. 

But I won't ask. I won't beg. We'll have casual conversations and I'll be distant while you're distracted.

I held my breath for you and waited. 

But you were nowhere to be found. So I listened to songs men wrote, that women sang, about broken hearts. And I cried, because I couldn't sing-along. 

I watched a movie and learned all the lines, I'll recite them to you, when you ask me to come back. 

There was an article in Time magazine that said someone could die from not breathing.

I listened to Amazing Grace and remembered when you saved me. 

I was so grateful and you promised to stay. So, I wrote your name on my thighs. 

It was my mistake to believe you. 

No one really belongs to anyone, especially if they belong to someone else. 

Again

She asks me my name.

I tell her.

We sit quietly and watch Little House on the Prairie.

I warm up a t.v. dinner for her. She asks if I've eaten already. I tell her yes. She says that she is warm, I offer to turn on the air conditioner, she declines. She asks my name again.

The episode ends and another one begins.

I turn on the air conditioner. She says it's too loud. I turn the air conditioner off.

She asks for dinner.

I sit quietly and think about tomorrow. She says she is tired and goes to bed.

I sit on the couch a wonder where everyone went.

And then I remember that I am alone. I say my name in an empty room.

Brown skin, warm to the touch, 

soft thighs, 

my thighs.

Excitable words are all I have of you. 

Heated and devouring. 

Control and controlled, 

the binary so close to synthesis the harder I loved you. 

More you begged. 

Pleaded. 

Past tense is all I have left of you. 

Pulling turned into aching, 

Begging turned into resentment. 

Your more turned into less. 

You have become nothing, and that's all I have left of you. 

lineage

I wonder how much my mother charged. I wonder if she would fuck for food.

I wonder if my father paid her or if he raped her or worse, if he loved her.

So, I walk around making men fall in love with me and leaving them. In honor of my mother.

In homage to her broken womb.

Even though we are apart, I am her daughter.

Her wounds are my wounds. Her aches are my aches. Even if I don't know the particulars, the nuances. Blunt force emotions. Her blood, my blood.

It is exhausting overcoming us both.

And when the night is quiet, I rub my belly and whisper to my empty womb,
"I'm sorry."

To my daughters not born, to the unnamed hurt.

There is a rhythm to my heartbreak. A slur to my speech.

An ache to my exhaling.

Even though I didn’t love him, I waited for the love to catch.

Walked around without a coat on and touched my eyes every second I had.

Let his love pour over me, in me. Let his love invade me, surround me.

I waited for his love to catch.

Long conversations with my soul. But men have loved me before.

Loving me has never been enough.

Sober

Sober.

Whispering the words. Five letters, two syllables. Two vowels, three consonant.

Sob
Rob
Bore
Robes
Robe
Sore
Ores
Sore

Sob.

Pulled over to the side of the road. Cried, screamed, raged.
Palms sweaty, mouth dry, tears, quickened breath.

Stop.

Name all the colors you see around you.
Name all the cities in California.

Slowly.

Sober.

There is a place between Southern and Northern California. 

Limbo. Purgatory. The Central Valley. 

Not dead, not really awake. 

A soulless place. 

Where my life was small and my voice quiet. 

And you stood faraway and waited for me. 

Underneath red and orange sunsets I lifted my head from my work, and there you were, silent and watching. 

In the night you came to me, and traced my body with your fingertips. 

And in the space between night and dawn, that blue hue that fell over both of our bodies. 

You asked me to marry you. 

I could not have written you. And in my dreams I never dared.

Your love is not a gesture, it is my destiny. 

I will never be the same. 

Untitled 73

Tell me all your nightmares.
Undo your buttons.
Unzip me.
Climb inside.
You said my pussy smelled like Jasmine.
And you said my hair felt like skin
Sometimes I say, "I love you" when I'm thinking of something else to say.
I wonder why you say it at all.

Strands of my hair stay with you because I don't know how.

Untitled 3

He stood there and said he was going to kill himself. He had a plan. I asked what his plan was, he said he was going to jump of the Golden Gate Bridge. I asked where the Golden Gate Bridge was.

He said,"Ohio."

I told him he needed to get help. I told him I was leaving.

We had been talking all night. After 3am it's hard to remember who said what and why.

Maybe it was me who said I wanted to kill myself. Maybe I talked until dawn about Kubrick.

Maybe he's the one who left.

Your voice was perfect for waking up to. I liked talking with you in the car, the sound of surrounding traffic drowned out your voice.

If you took your eyes off the road I knew you were making an important point, I furrowed my brow and nodded, urging you to continue.

I'd think about how much happier I'd be if I was married to Thom Yorke or better yet what if I was pregnant with Nietzsche's baby. I'd sit and trace letters on my knee. I'd trace words on my knee.

I write his name over and over.

The person you're fucking and the person you're in love with usually aren't the same person. It's easy to tell, after you orgasm, whose name do you want to scream after Jesus?

The first time I knew I was in love with him he spilled his coffee on the sidewalk in front of me.

The first time I knew I didn't love him was when he fell asleep during a documentary about the Holocaust. The second time was when I saw how he peeled a mango.

And the reason I left was because I saw a Stephen King book on his nightstand, I'd rather have seen a black dildo.

untitled 1

"If you've never held your own heart in your hand, you're luckier than me."

"What?"

"Nothing."

He kissed me hard, our teeth clanked together. I pulled away and laughed. He kissed me harder. 

One of his hands on the back of my neck, his other hand spreading my knees apart. 

I thought about how much I would have wanted this 5 years ago. 

"Hey, I think I'm going to vomit."

In the restroom I made convincing regurgitation sounds. I sat in the bathtub. And waited. 

By the time I came out he was asleep. I curled up next to him, pretended we had come home from a long day at work. I grabbed one of his arms and draped it over my waist. I pressed my head against his chest and thought about soap.