In Love and Free

In every relationship, there is an underlying question we must keep asking ourselves:

How can we at once be in love and free?

Give You

I give you up, fingernails dug in dirt

spitting up blood, I give you up

like the sea gives up her dead

like a string of pearls falling to pieces

crashing onto the cold hard floor

on my hands and knees, scraping up the mess

a rush of Hail Marys raining from my mouth

and I would imagine this isn’t love

but some other beast altogether

and if they asked me if I could have died

happy never knowing a world where

you don’t want me, I would say yes

They tell me love is something

I have to claw my way out of

Breaking through bone, tearing through skin

Stripping myself of everything

in this final show of my devotion to you

my everything—the only thing left I can give you

I can give you—give you up

April Fool

We came together in July, clung to one another like leaves to a tree, everything golden before the fall. My love was a bird feathering her nest, spring in my heart, perched on a branch, singing. Your love was a question that never found an answer—still hasn’t. I held on for as long as I could until I was stripped bare of everything you thought you wanted, and you couldn’t look at me the way you used to. Do you think what sparked between us was love—or just another beautiful trick of the light? I was your April fool—just three months shy of a year with you. Arms open and waiting, waiting for the seaside promise of summer, never once doubting it would come.

A Poem Comes

This was a poem that came to me

the way anything good comes

Like a comet that swings back around

or a recipe you reconstruct

from a childhood memory

The lens with which you peer through

all blurred and sentimental

It came to me through the

lifelong wonder I’ve held

of the way words will unravel

if you let them, as though they

are creating these sentient worlds

entirely on their own

The Gift

It was a crisp, bright day as I walked to my apartment, wanting nothing more than I had. By the threshold, a man twelve paces in front suddenly stopped—bent down to pick something up. With his back to me, he inspected it carefully, then slipped it into his pocket. I wondered what it was that lay twelve steps down the pavement, some small luminous gift from the sky. I thought about this strange and mysterious offering, what it could be, and how it had almost been mine.

If You Didn’t

If you didn’t know me
you would see me as they do

believe the lies they tell

about me were true

If you didn’t know me

you wouldn’t want to know me—

I would never be

the one for you