where I am happy: where your heart sinks
quiet into my arms, where bliss is rain falling and white walls.
your mouth fastened to my future and I had always thought
that this was impossible, but here you are,
dancing. the white ring left around my finger after
a summer of you: after years: when all of me will full bloom.
so that, shaken awake at midnight by the ferocity
of my dreaming, there is a spotlight in the sky
at full posture, directing me: a white halo where your hands
will be again, come morning. what could be impossible
when your name in my mouth is a realized prayer?
since now that I can speak, I am a cadenced voice, a place
unto us both where your soul is structure and narrative.

the masters tools will never dismantle the masters house

her hands move over the branches and stems

methodical, careful, at moderate pace

she snaps off the browning buds, one by one

her eyes are narrowed in concentration but

her hands are so sure I think she could do this blind

I think she could do this without any senses

without any tools, without any assurance 

that the sun would rise tomorrow she would still

be crouched in this garden, making her way

down to the lower branches where she is 

surprised by one pale pink late bloom.

what I am now some nuisance some
half baked dinner left to rot in the oven
you never turn on
a spring birth, a simple child what I am
to you now that we’re done
a sty in your eye with elementary rhymes
a useless deviance, unprincipled slut
a candy tray full of ash, a vase of stems
what I am to you
now that we’re done

For all the ways in which I am already compromising
and have no guide, no instincts
to know how much is too much:
you could reach across all my borders,
stretch out stem to stern across me and I
would welcome you, Armageddon or no.
When was I supposed to learn these lessons?
How does it seem that all the others know?
I break cadence to ask questions,
and in these moments of my bravery I am
quite stupid, full of harm and fear.
I startle you with my ready abandonment.
I startle you with my cowering, groveling mouth
and low posture when I do, inevitably, crawl back.

introduced to an environment in which
I cannot lie any more—a chameleon without
color, a snake without camouflage—
I hope only to adapt, to not disappoint.
you will find me later, curled up against
the breakwater and boulders, seeking
the only comfort I am always sure of:
the buffetting of wind and water, the tidal fury
of natural forces, so much larger than
you or me, or the disease and discomfiture
that lurks in my marrow in this place of love.

do not sabotage

You are comfortable now; but do not forget
what hunger felt like. You are warm now
because you have been cold. You are whole
because you have been in pieces, and you decided
to rebuild. In a decade perhaps you will be
even more full, in need of so much less.
But do not forget the days when you were cold,
and tired, and alone. Those are the days
that taught you how to be alive.

I dream of children and fences,
the moon and a dozen hoarse geese.
Green eyes follow me across the dawn:
you measure me, crouched, silent, absent.
In you I have a treasure smaller than skies,
tangible, and hot in the bed at night.
Small voices that are not yet born
haunt my hips: what will you ask of me,
before the end? And, in the end,
whose voice will still be heard?

I have seen the end already,
in looking at you: I have seen the end
of what I am, fierce, and fiercely alone.
I have seen fire purge my scars and I know
the next step is being forced
to beat new life. You sweep through me
like an errant match, forceful wind:
it has been a long, dry summer.
I am readied for your coursing purge.
What is new growth but perpetuation of old patterns?
It is reassuring that my sins will come back to me
with harder shells and softer hearts.
They are food for the foragers, when they come.
Together we can break their fast.

Who cares if I
We have to go see
I don’t think they’d even
What was that
Have a half a quart of
Snap

The only thing more damaging than someone you love abandoning you, is someone who tells you they love you but who has never understood you  at all. That abandonment is constant, everpresent, and grates into your skin with every interaction you have.

Solstice + mercury retrograde.

I am grateful for the lessons I have learned, even the hard ones, because they have made me smart and fierce and quiet and true. I am grateful for my struggles because they have kept me honest. I am grateful for my traumas because they have shown me the measure of my strength.

At first it was spring rains, light falls that promised growth and renewal. We sent our children out to dance in it—see if you can get to the oak and back without your hair getting wet!—and we welcomed them back with fluffy towels and stories of the bulbs that would burst into bloom in the coming weeks. And the tulips did rise, but the rain did not stop. The summer thunderstorms arrived, with their sallow clouds that gathered into swirling, bruised epitaphs on the horizon, swinging sheets of warm rain down relentlessly. We measured how far open the windows could be and still keep out most of the wet; we learned how fast sundresses could get soaked through, a brief moment under the open sky enough to slick your curves so smooth as to be indecent. The year faded to autumn with no respite, through the swirling fear-filled tornado season when all rain felt like an omen, and into the bluster of the self-important fall rains. Grey raindrops filled the horizon interminably, fat and cold and pointed, each drop a reminder to get ready for winter, get ready for the cold. They eddied with the red and yellow leaves in the gutters, tiny bright rivers that washed color down the drains. And winter came on gradually, because the rain would not give way: we hovered on the edge of freezing for weeks, fogging windows up with our breath and noses and hands as we watched the frigid rain sleek down out of the turgid sky. Then the day came when the downfall seemed slowed, more meandering, and the drops paler and paler till snow finally arrived, a heavy and dense snowfall that gathered immediately in sidewalk crevasses and potholes and bricks. We wrapped the children up and let them wander through it, drunk with change and wonder, letting the crystals fall into their open pink mouths, melting in all the places on their coats where their bodily warmth seeped out. When we called them in an hour later, it was clear that the snow had no intention of abating, so we left the hearth burning and divvied up shoveling shifts. For weeks now the snow has been omnipresent, the management of it the center of our lives: frozen several feet deep, we have paths that look more like tunnels, from the front door to the street, each hole on the street a portal to our neighbors’ lives. I wonder what the coming months will mean, if it never lets up; I wonder if we will be sunk entirely. 

i feel like i'm relatively more mentally healthful than most people, more sensitive and sympathetic and self-aware. but i come here because no one can hear me when i talk. so i pay someone for an hour of their time so that someone has to listen to me when i talk. because ___ couldn't hear me when i expressed myself to the extent that me crying after sex became normal, right, and she thinks it's some kind of catharsis when really i'm just too strung out on whatever my brain chemistry is doing to not have angst pouring out of my face, and she thinks it's like an expression of trauma,  but the way my trauma comes out is fuck you not i'm sad. and _____ did the same, they all have some predetermined framework in their heads of what they think their lives should be like, and they're wondering why they can't just shove me in the box marked "girlfriend" when they never fucking asked me if i even liked that word at all. and then there's just the years of miasma with _, just fucking stagnation incarnate, all the ways i wasted the best parts of me in glorifying something i wasn't and couldn't ever have been just because both of us were too fucked up to say this shit is real fucked, this is never going to go right, but i'm too self-serving to even have noticed that when i was younger, too hooked on the possibility that someone would consistently say they love me and maybe actually stick around, i can't see my own hands in front of my face, he's both the forest and the trees. and the fact that i still feel lost? if i still feel completely and totally ungrounded and unwitnessed and alone and without family and without community? is that a peeling off of the assumptions i had about what love should be like? or is it a peeling off of the assumption i make when i say i think i'm relatively mentally healthful? why can't someone who fucked me for eight years recognize my needs? but everything is simultaneously too late and too early, you know, like i've fucked up so incredibly badly so many times, and i'm carrying around baggage that's not even mine now just because someone told me i had to, and maybe if i keep doing what people say then they will think there is some value in having me around. and i keep picking these paths sort of objectively, thinking that could make sense for me, outlining the strategic reasons why some decision about my geography or identity or profession or politics should make sense, but it's all totally objective, i'm just trying suits of armor on, one at a time, and none of them are actually mine. i stand next to people until i blend in and they think i've been that the whole time but really i'm already casting around for someone else to stand next to. like i'm gonna find any way of being authentic inside of that strategy. but  you tell me what i'm supposed to do, people want to be seen, they want to be heard, so i just stand next to them and say you're right, you're right, you're absolutely right, and then they think i love them? i don't love anyone but myself and i'm not convinced that sentence will ever turn false. how the fuck can any of these motherfuckers say they love anyone else when they are all self interested? and so am i, so why would i be different? except for that i look at what they're calling love and see the narrative they've built and laid themselves into neatly, and i'm not a character in a story, i don't have a single trajectory, i'm never going to stop experiencing cognitive dissonance, but if they never do, is that what makes it real? if when they say i love you, they're not simultaneously reaching for the car keys, is that what makes it real? because i know well enough to control my hands and my mouth and my facial expressions when i make promises like that, but it doesn't mean i meant it with my head or my heart. and he's gonna turn around to some girl with half my IQ, half my potential, half my talent, half my baggage and say yes, that's what he wants. that's exactly what he wants. why would that not be what he wants? why would that not be what anyone wants? if you could pick that, over me, of course you'd never pick me, and neither would i. there is nothing beautiful about being fucked up inside. there is nothing desirable about being the kind of person who writes extended blog entries to their therapist declaring that they don't know how to love anyone. so i will just never be enough, for that. small enough or accomplished enough. i will always have too much to say and too much to show for it, and also too little preferences and too little dedication. i am tired and i hate all of my exes.

Dating queer femmes is hard, so here are some questions you could use on a first date that won't make things harder

Is this table okay? We can find a quieter place if we need to

Do you want a drink? Or if you'd prefer, I can get just a soda with you

Tell me about your first kiss, or the first intimate experience that you initiated or desired

Tell me a childhood memory, or if you don't remember any, tell me something you feel nostalgic about

Tell me about your family, or your chosen family

What's your coming out story? Or, who in your life had the best reaction to you coming out

Please disclose to me all the ways in which I might inadvertently kill you

If the state does not record your living or your dying, did you exist?

When someone I love hurts, I hurt too, she said, patting his chest and stepping away. That’s basic anatomy.

It is a strange kind of club we build, women
who have been grateful for death.
We steep bitter mint tea in tap water
boiled on gas ranges, we spend a full hour
talking around the point, and then
a lull. And someone will say:
he died in West Virginia. I’ve never been back.
Or, John died a few years ago, and now
I’ve finally made a photo album of my kids
when they were young; I cut his face out.
Someone will say, he got a quiet end, some nurse
told me sclerosis. It was too good an end.
This is the only grief circle I have been to
that does not cry.

Lately I’ve been looking at my face and seeing nothing worth looking at
I used to see a few pretty things, a few interesting things, something good enough
But these days all I see is flushed skin and empty eyes and uneven brows and dry lips