what I feel for you has made me consider

that every other time I’ve uttered those words

it’s been a huge lie. That until I met you I didn’t know

anything at all.

The truth is that I don’t have anything of substance

to say. Nothing unique or worth repeating

just words on a page rushing

to a finish line

but you are the only person I always want

to say nothing to. I have loved you for my entire life.

ODE TO MELODRAMA

The blue-fingered midnights that once held me

together have faded into the minor details of my

history. Not forgotten, no, but remembered at a

distance. Once, I was nineteen and burning and

feeling everything at once. I didn’t have language

for my body until it was given to me. When does bad

love begin to spoil? Driving home from the coffee

shop where I wrote his sins, past the street where we

kissed elbows and bargained with hours, the voice on

the radio called my heart a fossil. Timeworn and

valuable and known and understood. My GPS named

this place home for six months after it was over.

Sometimes I cried so hard that the windshield became

just another moving picture that looked too much like

my life.

The voice on the radio called my hurt a lot of things.

Sometimes a liability. Other times hard feelings.

Always it was just another graceless night letting go

of the little things. I healed to spite the art that told me

I could keep going, continue wringing the neck of my

breakup for every poem it was worth, until there was

nothing left of me but the supernatural past.

A boom in my chest.

It’s true, yes, that I kept myself alive, fevered and

rosy-cheeked. But knowing someone else had

attempted it before me and succeeded, well — it was a

green light, shimmering noisily in the dark.

THE WOMAN I WAS

The woman I was at 19 cries in car washes

not because she’s sad

but because sometimes it feels like the right thing to

do, like putting on lipstick to go to the supermarket

or waving goodbye until everything

is the back of your hand.

She wipes off her face when she spots daylight

at the tunnel’s end, defines affection in terms of how

she’s received it and not by what she herself

has given, which is to say that she does not define it

in a way that allows her to sleep at night.

She’s timid,

believes with her chest that love is never going

to find her.

She isn’t stupid,

she just hasn’t come to terms with loss yet.

She doesn’t know how to part with someone without

building them a commemorative statue.

Her hands remain a bloodied mess of thorn and

memory.

Years later, I recognize that the pressure

I placed on her to be healthy was anything but.