You ask me why I'm always so damn angry;

let me tell you.

A friend of mine was raped.

My Muslim ex-hallmate was denied entry

to this country for his education;

my cousin was harassed in the workplace

and her abuser took the corner office.

Salma Hayek is slut-shamed for a scene

Harvey Weinstein made her shoot;

a transwoman was found dead in her apartment

with her head in the toilet;

Philando Castile was shot.

After all of this, if you are not angry,

I firmly believe you are part of the problem.

i can cheat myself around it

deny it

say chicago and california are just

too far apart

and besides, it's all fairytales, anyway.

i can lie there in your arms

falling slowly through your ribs, heart to heart,

and say that i can stand up anytime i want.

i would be wrong.

if I didn’t know any better,

I’d say that love was a

three-piece con between you,

another,

and your deepest fears.

if I didn’t know any better,

I’d say that love brainwashed you

like a tsunami,

drowning your rationality.

if I didn’t know any better,

I’d say that love became a habit

broken only by the clearheaded realization

of reality.

but hell if love doesn’t grumble in the base of your chest like pneumonia

and hang constantly in the black spaces between your ribs

and look like extra blankets and quiet nights spent reading in hotel rooms.

hell if love doesn’t belong to you like a left hand once it finds its way to you.

you are polar.

you are ice caps and the fog that

rests in front of my face

at 5AM in fall

you are whispered words of french

not meant to be heard or understood

you are vanilla cold-brew coffee

and midnights.

i am the fine crease between blue

and orange in the fireplace

at christmas.

i am blonde hair always committing mutiny

against a regiment of rubber bands

i am your early-morning trip to the mountaintops

to watch the sunrise in the last,

hounded days of summer.

we are small magic.

we are hands curved to fit keyboards and quills,

and each other.

we are the smell of damp earth in between the pages of adventure novels

we are dawn-lit orchestral manoeuvers

and words that aren't spelled how they sound.

we are just going.

If it makes you uncomfortable, it counts.

If you cringe when you think about the story, if you can still feel [his] [her] hands on you[r butt, your waist, your chest], if it makes you afraid to be touched,

it’s your truth.

If you don’t want to go running at night anymore because you’re afraid to be chased [again],

you’re valid.

If I don’t like being touched in the dark because it reminds me of the four college-aged boys in the side streets of a ski town,

don’t you fucking touch me.

Sorry, was I not supposed to take offense?

When was it your choice, whose hands left bruises?

I wasn't going to be the head-over-heels, can't-see-straight kind of lover

The writer of shitty 3-AM poems to accompany my heartbeats

The curfew-skipping, fuck-the-clock ne'er-do-well who overusues hyphens because all the thoughts in my brain slide closer together when you're involved

so that I can't separate "love" from "vanilla" so I make vanilla-love memories or "me" from "you" so I make a you-me symphony

how do I stick your sighs to paper like I stick anti-racism propaganda to people's rear windshields using chewing gum?

can I tape your heart in place for posterity?

I'm handcuffed to the sky so I don't do you the injustice of trying to put you in a poem.

Last night, when you had your hands all tangled up in my hair and my legs were all tangled up in your sheets, you asked me what I wanted from you.

I said mornings.

I want you in pajamas and a coffee mug printed with Shakespeare's finest quotes about love

I want dawn-lit mopeds in the streets of Italy

I want three-forty-five adventures to mountaintops, chasing high-altitude sunrises and solitude

I want your arm in the divot between my hipbone and my ribs

I want you to read me Tosches and Emerson in the honey-light of 7AM in the summer

You said, I can do that.

Wait for me at daybreak. I'll meet you there.

we rise morning after measure to watch the sun

rise into the illimitable blue.

I let the gold obsess in me

fill my royal ice-sculpture heart with the aura sacra of dawn.

I am not necessarily allowed to paper-cut Orion

or to claim a space in the star-speckled sea,

but I raise my copper-loved hands and open my mouth

And I let red universe spill out

a les infiniti del cieli.