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I Am Not PMSing
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.
what are you thinking
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.
steam
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.
Me too
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?
Who I Wasn’t Going to Be
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.
Mornings
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.
ciao, Dante
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.