Some days I am a stranger with foreign
hands and a sleeping tongue. Some days
my skin is a shade I do not recognize.
Half the week I am lost, and the other:
I am waiting to be unwandering.

But I know myself.

I know the way my chest rises and I have
memorized the way it falls.

Down.

Even on the days I am down, even on days I am
lying face-first on the ground, my stomach is
churning miracle out of dust. Even on days my
hands are fists I cannot untangle, my knotted-
up fingers are scribbling poetry on the insides
of my palms.

I know myself.

There are earthquakes in my chest that echo
through my veins like heartbeats. They shake
against my ribcage but my ribs are daggers that
will always fight back.

I know myself.

I know my heart is the desert and the mirage.
I know there are waterfalls within me where
there should be nothing. I know there are
universes underneath my skin that are just
waiting to be recognized.

I know myself.

I know the way my chest falls. Down. But I am
not pulled down with it. But you are not pulled
down with it. For every fall, we push upwards
twice as hard.

And even the moon smiles down on nights like
this. On nights my name against my tongue is
more silk than desert sand. On nights I am
more wandering than lost, more miracle than
mistake. On nights I know myself, and I know
myself well enough to know: I am here. I am
here. I am sometimes magical and I am not
going anywhere.

I stole your hands the first time I touched them,
gripped your fingers in mine and refused to let
loose.
You couldn’t even be mine then.
Your eyes were still learning the roundness of my
face and
you were a visionary, a vision, and I was looking for
something to put my faith in. You showed me miracles
in fields of sunflowers in the middle of a sun-
scorched desert,
and I wished to burn myself until
I became the light that drew you. But you painted me
happiness, said you were looking for something to
reflect your light off of and I did;
I swallowed your rays
inside my gut and tried to reflect you into poetry.
Nothing I wrote was ever right.
No combination of twenty-six letters could ever form
something that could adequately contain your magic so I
transformed myself, turned my pens into violin strings
and moaned every time you played me,
back arched and strung over your shoulder.
We were symphonies.
We were orchestras.
Our nails in each other’s skins like music and
we became it, notes rising and falling into our ears
like melodies played in secret.
You sang me through my darkest hours, love.
Reached out and lit all my abandoned corners,
ignited flame from the ash that
swooped inside my halls.
I was the light that drew you, lover.
And you are painting me still,
joy and tenderness
your colors of choice.

Darling, I am writing to stop writing you.
I am hanging out all my pens to dry and burning all my
notebooks.
I surrender.
I surrender.
Every-day language was not tailored to fit all your
divinity, and I am a peasant,
a lowlife,
a barbarian kneeling at your feet,
and you are the Light that has driven all my ghosts
away.
And I surrender.
I surrender it all to you,
take my rhythm and rhyme
and meter and diction and
leave me only those hands
still gripped tightly between my fingers,
thumb steadying my heartbeat
and pulling me home.

I have drawn maps for you, dear.
Every mountain and valley painted
out; every swamp, lake, and desert
pinpointed. I’ve made calculations,
sketched with accuracy; back bent
for days on end.

Right here is where I began to love
you: throughout this river that ran
through the whole of me and back again.
I loved you into oceans and seas,
tsunami tides threatening to drown
whole cities of me. I was quickly
underwater for you. Lungs full and
breath discarded; given up. I had
never known my forest heart to burn
until you touched it, acres and acres
of trees ablaze.

And here I was, a post-apocalyptic
world of a person and you roam me,
victorious and solitarily, planting
your flags on every continent of me.

You have claimed me, lover. Every
speck of sand and droplet of water
was yours for the taking. And I have
exited myself and migrated into you;
every inch of your skin a home I have
dug my roots in.

I had drawn a map for you, darling,
I had mapped out all my landscapes.

Burn it;

my love for you like a thousand
recurring Big Bangs exploding, and
imploding, and erasing, and rewriting
all my pasts and presents. Apocalypse
after apocalypse, and only you survive
amongst my wreckage.

Here is where I exist: outside of me
and within the confines of your skin.

An immigrant rediscovering my motherland,
I pledge full allegiance to your heartbeat
and your smile and those hands that have
carried me home.

You wanted to be seen. I wanted to
be heard, so you pinned your right
ear to the right side of my left
breast and I filled my eyes with
the whole of you.

For the first three weeks we were
in love, you would yell “poet talk!”
giggling at every exaggerated sentiment
I’d used to romance you, but I could
tell from the way the corners of your
lips pushed away from one another that
you’d believed me.

You didn’t always believe me. There
were times when those same lips would
purse with disbelief when I would call
you beautiful, would feign
a smile only for the sake of showing
gratitude when I would tell you things like

“baby, I swear I had never understood
why people claimed to “fall” in love
until I kept tripping on my own two
feet every time you would flash that
heart wrenching smile at me”.

I swear, for every second you spend
believing you’re mediocre, I will
dedicate an hour of my life to
convincing you that you’re holy,
my lover;
because when you hold me,
every cell of my zealous body
screams out in prayer, breaks out in
shameless submission and reckless desire.

Would you believe me if I told you I had
never, ever aspired to belong to another
until the first time I laid eyes on you?

You, with your honey-dipped lips and hips
I would gladly lose every part of myself in;

you:

heart of gold and eyes like the sun come
up again;

my sun,
my sky,
my stars,
my moon, listen:

there are so few things that can change a
human heart, can alter its size and function,
can condition it to beat harder or faster
or softer or stronger, to beat at whatever
rate they see fit. I was never convinced
that love would fall under the category of
things that could accomplish this.

You’ve heard me say such ignorant things.

I think I said exactly this back when I was
trying to convince you I was a cold-hearted
cynic, that I didn’t believe love even existed,
that it was an
overvalued,
overrated,
pointless emotion I had no interest in,

think back to our very first conversation.

You said, “it hurts to fall in love with so
many things”.

I took that to heart.

I didn’t even know why back then.

But when you said, “it hurts to fall in love
with so many things”,

I took that to my heart.

And in sweet silence and unbound determination,
all the so many things inside of me lined up
for display,
and my harder, faster, softer heart and I,
we both agreed we would prove you wrong.