There’s something about the way
your skin spills onto mine
that undoes the tourniquet
I’ve tied right under my chest –
the one that usually stops
the insects in my stomach
from flying above the waistline
(or even developing past the
caterpillar stage). You leave me
hypnagogic, so much so that I have
only just noticed that there are
flowers blooming on the walls
of my stomach and there are
grape vines lining the bones of
my ribs and there are endless
gardens inhaling and exhaling
underneath my skin and these
butterflies you’ve helped grow,
my beauty, are flying up my esophagus
and falling like kisses on your lips and
pouring like poetry on my notebooks and
yes, every time I taste you,
and every single time I write you out,
I lose a few hundred pairs of wings,
but I don’t think
we should be alarmed.

I think you’re their mating season.

The expiration date on the
sticker on your forehead
is blurred.
This taunts me like soft
music on a tense day;
the kind that would distress
you until you soak it
fully in – forced
epiphanies encouraging
unapologetic weaknesses.
You’re not a poet and neither
am I, but there is poetry on
the tips of your fingers and
there are guitar strings on the
fist-sized organ in my chest
and baby, you might think
you’re tainted and broken
beyond sympathy but all I
can see is you fixing me

and this is you playing with
my strings again so I can’t
take all the credit.

The warm outline of my lips
in place of that sticker
says more about you and me
anyways.

The day we met, you taught
me what the word         sultry
really meant and I promised
to devour you like the lines
of my favorite poem – to consume
you like the notes of a song
that moves me in a
way that makes me cry

(even though I’ve told you
before that my tear ducts were
taped shut by my own doing).

There were things you knew by heart,
and things I taught you;  like how
I like strawberries dipped in chocolate
(even though I can’t eat them in public)
and how I got that scar on my stomach
and how I pull bodies to me like
sheets that keep me warm at night
but only manage to keep myself

covered until the sun comes up
in the morning, and how I’m
still mourning the parts of me
I leave unwillingly on strangers’ skin
and how I used to be an optimist
before I became a depressed realist
and how the masochist in me
seems to have found a safe

haven in the way you avoid
eye contact even when your fingers
are kissing mine under the blanket
and how when you asked me to leave
my hand behind before I got on
a plane, I confused it for another
part of my anatomy.
And I would ask you not to expect much

from me but there’s so much
I want to give you –
and you say,
“I want to be like you for a day,
just so I can know how it
feels like to be numb without
having to take my medication“.

But I feel it all.

The rules are clear and they
state that you’re not allowed to
tell me that you want me in a way
that scares you witless
and leaves you paralyzed
in a pool of
maybe I shouldn’t
and I’m not allowed to tell you that
I want you like 12 am
wants the moonlight
even though you know that my
want is really just an embarrassed need
and that I am too proud to admit
that darkness fills my chest
when you fail to come around.
So we don’t, at least not out loud.

*

I will pretend I don’t notice the
wetness on your cheeks after you brush
me off your teeth and you will realize
that I now realize that
even though you are not mine
your lips had told me otherwise
when they kissed the arch of my back
the night before
(and please just tell me you noticed that
our bodies fit together like
the ocean to the shore
and that your sand
has made itself a home at my very core).

*

I’m sorry I don’t know how to want you gracefully, and I’m sorry that my desperation for you stinks up every room I enter, and I’m sorry I was the hurricane that shattered the calm after your storm, and I’m sorry that I poured a bucket of ice on your already cold feet. But the forces that bind me to you are the very same forces that bind the Earth to the Sun and my only excuse is that I was trying to cool the fire in your chest, and my chest, but the closer I got the more the two of us burned.

*

Love is sin enough, but loving you
will leave me eternally unredeemable.