One day a woman that I love is pressed against my side on a very old couch that we have treated twice for bedbugs and she says, quietly, “healing takes too long.”
And she is right, though I won’t realize it for several more years. My experiences of injury and healing are limited to minor and medium physical ailments. I have sprained a wrist, had my wisdom teeth out, run jagged scars across an arm by falling out of a tree and onto concrete. Healing in this sense can be long, but has a timeline, has a nurse who will lift a bandage and say, oh just about another week now.
I have not yet begun to work through the spiritual scars that I bear, but she and I bonded first over having left restrictive religions and the ways they can etch constraint into your soul. So when she says, healing takes too long, I do not realize that she means, I am looking for a shortcut.
We break up some weeks later but stay in touch for a few more years; she moves to New York and I will not disentangle myself from the life I’ve painstakingly built and am already paying steep costs for.
I see her once more, some two years after the breakup, a year into her stint in Brooklyn. She is frighteningly skinny, effervescently cool, angular in ways that make me sure I will break her if I breathe on her. We meet, she drinks her dinner, and when she drags me to the bathroom I am filled with reminiscences of past ardor, moments in which we could not separate, but she is offering a key bump, and my hands on her waist are grasping raw hips, sharp skin, old grief.

On having a panic attack immediately after an orgasm with a new partner

what is it about me that so clearly telegraphs to the people around me that I want to be hurt? but, this isn’t the right question.
on what part of my body is the sign hung that reads, hit me—jolt me—loosen me, deaden me, bruise me, please—please try to break me—
and how did he know, the first one that did it, that I would like to be choked? that I would not just allow the vise of his fist meeting in my throat but press up into it, eager for incapacitation?
this still is not the right question. I am assuming intention when I wonder if he thought about whether I would like it. I am assuming that some groveling part of my soul did not come leaking out of my mouth, begging from the corners of my eyes—please—take more than my body—take air too—take the rhythm on which every animal relies, on which we predicate every idea of what it means to be alive—take that—it is too heavy for me to hear—
and so here, in this bed, with a new lover whose good heart and good intentions are foundational to why I am in this bed in the first place, here I go silent, when inside my head I can hear my own first scream, and it is echoing in every cell of my body and every cell is screaming back WE REMEMBER THIS
YOU DID NOT LEAVE THIS BEHIND and the vise that crunches my muscles into my bones is not here, not now, it is years old and thousands of miles away, and I am still suffocating, and I am still fighting toward my first scream

Accepting new beginnings as next steps:
Not demanding the penultimate of each twist in the road

Accepting each heart as its own blessing:
Not cataloguing all the things I could be, or ask

Collecting each wave as it comes, the lessons I can learn, and longevity:
Existing in each tide, not just waiting for the next

The joy in the motion of each step:
The joy of selecting where to put my feet

Take what is beautiful and make it hurt
Take the single best gesture of commitment and connectivity, and let it drive you away from the person who offers it
Take affection and desire and adoration and let them trigger you
Let the purest thing you want, embody your trauma
Let it drive you away from open hands and an honest heart and those dark eyes and that laugh and the mouth it comes from

Or else what? What path can be charred beyond the confines of the body and its neurotic keeper?
What can you hope for beyond strict walls, righteous guilt of your upbringing, all the ways you were taught to crush emotion?

If you want this, you will break new ground
If you trust this, you will speak on what you need
If you are capable of this, you will find a wan

for what do I thank you now, Lord?
for what blessings—which experiences—
which skill sets gifted via trauma and lack—
for what I was told when I was young?
who shall I trust now except my mortal self?
You could not even save me from myself—
there is no redemption, no grace in this plan.

I am god now: arbiter, judgment, creator of pain.
I am god now: aloof, invisible, untenured and ultimate.
who can tame me now? the works of my hands are many,
and I am not afraid of consequences only I can leverage.
you leave me and I grow: abandon me, and I am untempered and unmeted in my ability.
ectoplasmic, stellar, sequential. I am a spore.
who can tame me now?

All day I spin my single wheel of waiting for peace, or quiet. All day I press the fiber to itself, cowl it around the spindle draped in its own soft, animal scent. For years I have sat here, just like this, spinning soft cloth out of the detritus of your lives and bodies.
You have all left here so much of yourselves: unthinking, putting down the loads of your hearts and mouths. You leave me your discarded winter clothes, assuming it will stay warm; you drop your skin cells, your aged-off hairs, your eyelashes, assuming you will not need a layered armor.
I could have told you what would be required. I could have shown you battlescars, hardwon, and the divots left in my bones and skin. I could have told you the great gross strength that would be needed but your smiles were so bright, when you left me, unencumbered and headed out into the summer breeze.
So I keep my peace. I spin and lift, watching others’ bodies rise.

Slow starts the steady drip of me into your bed at night. Thought by thought, cell by cell, the conversion of me and my fear into a new beast.
My tense heart has watched you for weeks, searching your face for what I think is inevitable: the abandonment, the reversal, the punch line. Icy with the anxiety in my bones I have tried to respond to your prompts, your kind touch. I am too stiff to swim, and the current feels like a threat.
But the mammal in me cannot lie. Bloodwarmth in my veins and in the quiet of each morning I am already reaching for your mouth, for your curls in my greedy hands.
The memories make me pause. I wonder what your eyes see, what your mouth tastes, what your hands touch, and I am afraid. But the tide has already turned, the dam has already cracked.
I think about your dark eyes. I think about your laugh. I think about your hips, and your hands, and your kiss. I am irredeemable; I am ready to drown.

On bringing a new lover home for the first time

The awkward of turning my back on you at the door, I have spent the whole night working so hard to read your body and your face and your mind.
It’s dark and I know every inch so I have never bothered putting lamps by doors, there is never anyone in this place who does not belong here,
so you wait, silhouetted, for me to cross the room and flip the switch and then your eyes go up and out and I am scared of what you will notice.
I see dirty floors, dishes in the sink, a full recycling bin, all the things I cannot bring myself to care about. I have been too focused perhaps.
You see my piano, you sit down and make it sing.
You ask me where a piece of art came from, you inspect my bookshelf, and we head to the back porch to restlessly rest.
Half my plants are yellowed in over zealous care, half the cats in the neighborhood take naps on this porch. You see this, and light up.
Where can I be but here? I am content only in the place where all my secrets are housed.

In hours you will ask me, where is this one from? And I will tell you the story of a fourth grade playground fall, a bottle of peroxide the only medical care I received.
Your hands on my skin are slow and I am learning to trust them.
And after, when my heartbeat has stopped pounding louder than your voice, and my hands have unclenched from around your forearms,
when my spine and knees have loosened from their gesture of protection and fear, you will ask,
where did that scar come from?
And in my silence, still not see me for the wraith that I am, the half-gone soul I inhabit.

the philosophers say we will be terrified, the artists say we will be blind. the mountain holds its tongue, keeps even the pines quiet in the wind, forces us farther into the peak before we can descend: climb, or fall.

lover of my mouth, are you ready for my words? you worship at my thighs, but i think you are not ready for my pace.

stop here, and listen a moment in this place where the water flies off the crest, where the precipice is so neatly defined and then refracted in a thousand shining ways. here the danger peaks, so too the beauty. here my soul threatens to fly, keens in the bright sky to be followed by your eyes.

the crash at the bottom would be inaudible from this height. your atoms and mine were made to be joined.

lacan's theory of the sublime says we will be terrified: that, standing at the precipice, or swallowed in the pure black of a cave, we will see beauty, and cower. 

the bloodletting here is too easy: follow me instead to the mountains, into the sparkling canyons, and touch the shaking walls. here is where disaster waits. here is where, soul in mouth, you can finally touch perfection, and be known. 

without your demeaning attention i grow too large, too secure. i began toes-deep at the shoreline, sniffing for the swirls where all the kestrels rise. i gathered the discarded feathers, studied the skittish patterns, and decided to stay in the oily waves.

i find myself adrift in shipping lanes now, directionless but valued. i see now that i need diminution, neglect or some other challenge: without these i grow loud, courageous, captain and crew and seastorms for days. breakers, tall grey thunderheads that charge an ornate prow. irredeemable and unsinkable, at home in the violent heights.

we have been so adept at drowning. somewhere in that dense swamp, there may have been a brief spit of firm land; in wading toward it i lost the surest sign that we would sink or swim. i recognize now that i could never have survived on the flat firmness of the dirt we dredged between us.

i wake deafened from the volume at which my dreams have been screaming at me.

for you i might be beautiful, who could say? for you i might be peace or solidarity or support, or produce some new anagram of your mouth and mine: built of entrails and a thousand old promises, perhaps you will not notice as it rots.

a small pebble from the monolith of my fear has been retched up into the recesses of my throat, and i am sure that in this quiet moment, peaceful between the two of us and all the ways we journey toward each other, you can hear me try to swallow past it.

because i cannot exist simply-- because i cannot be at peace in my own body-- you will leave me eventually. so for now, i stockpile the sensory experiences of your nearness, the feral way you size me up. i tangle myself in your hair, taste the gentle skin under your ear, wrap my legs around your hard hips. i inhale you: warm, dark, cigarettes and the way we are both driven by inchoate need. tongue my terror: these phantoms become realer with your acknowledgement, the pressure of your attention. crash me gentle onto the rocks below this darling cliff, your face and the ghosts that offer to catch me as i fall.

i am not worthy of the love you give me; this does not prevent me from asking for more.

steeped in twilight, i walk as softly as i can, the rusted steps that ascend to the place where i will attempt to commune with your wild heart. the bloodbeat of me echoes in my steps and every bone in my body, but i can only go forward. i know the universe will damage me when it can. the winds are only just beginning to rise; i hear my past echoed back to me in the hiss of the swaying trees.

open palms, open wrists, i streak the walls, i scuff the concrete, the brick gritty in old smoke and grime. at least now i know whose blood this is. dirt has ruled me since birth, the limey concourse of my body in this imperfect state, and i will always open myself to it again.

named, my holes are immense: it is clear that i can neither see nor hear. in the last gasp before the thunderstorm sinks its grey teeth into the earth, i am mesmerized by the ends that you are. i welcome you, beautiful heart, into the swirling chasms of my body, the battleground of my mouth, the gathering greenness of my flood.

Alternating hurry and hush, the climb and brake of my fear and adoration. In turns, I am all of me a catastrophic lover. You will have to lead me, over and over and over, to the mountaintop where I have already planted a pomegranate tree.

Push me pull you drown me dust you, the gravity between us growing lighter by the second. Water or sand or the way I cannot bring myself to say your name at climax. A journey at night, alone, through the desert, where quick-tailed coyotes shy and are never seen. The oasis of your mouth, and the cut heat of your eyes when they turn from mine.

After all, what shift in the quicksand could have brought me to your path? I am no bard, I am not looking for audience or capitulation. Pride and all the mouthy ways I shy away from truth: between my breasts a battleground, the lantern that could not be put out. And at the close, only gratitude: the broken verses I breathe for you at the altar of time and chance.

your voice, the clear sky: a million ways to know that we are in our right moment. the conspiracy of the stars and the crickets now defined by the pressure of your body, the warmth of your laugh.

i am ancient without you, renewed by you and the kind way you say, can i kiss you? i am lack, an ache, Persephone digging toward starlight. the history of my body reads as a gulf opened up in the earth but with you: a sprite, free and clear, in the depths of the quarry.

whether I lure you or you have called me, the result is the same: meteoric, the rising of my pulse when your fingers brush my skin.

before I shower

your eyes dark in a dark room, your hips rocked hard against mine
the taste of your mouth, the scent of your skin
the curls of your hair in my hands, tousled, held rough so I can kiss you
a first night wholly remembered, you are my only recent history
the story of your body pressed to mine and I will never be done listening
give me the slope of your back, the globe of your ear
and all the ways we can be together and apart.
if I could preserve one moment forever it would be this:
your laugh, a golden moment of connection, where in the midst
of heat and rush and pull you pause and say
I like you just like this.

Walking through a forest at night is learning to trust your ears
Having faith that the life of the forest includes you, does not preclude you

I am walking through a forest at night with terror in my mouth
And where my ears are listening and my eyes are obeying and my feet are walking
Still I feel fear of the darkness, the shadows, the movements of the tree limbs
Cast by the half-lit moon I am convinced each sound is an ending
Each catch of grass and twig at my clothing is a threat
But just as I am full of fear of going forward, I am sure there is no going back
There will be no turning back for a poorly built campfire even if it is familiar
I’ll take my chances in the underbrush, with the other small mammals
All of us pacing through this forest in search of the safety of your heart

Start by running from everything
Run from attachment, from indebtedness, from the thousand fears of your mother
Run too from the expectations of your father and all the strictures of your church
Run from the boy who rejects you in 10th grade and the girl who rejects you in 11th
Run from the stack of notes you passed with your best friend and all the secrets you told
Run too from the habit of secret sharing, the habit of connection, the grace of friendship
End while still running
Run from the instinct to leave
Abandon the drive to separate, abandon the hope of new spaces
Run from your fear of intimacy, run from your fear of love
Run from the chorus of voices that expresses surprise

It is true that you need only yourself to survive
It is true that you are owed more than survival