O! You love me while I cry.

There are captions inside me I haven’t

strung into song yet. Love is a sky

too bright! I can’t look it in the eye!

O! Eclipse me! For you I would drink

the most flamin’ mountain dew.

For you I would change the channel!

O! There is nothing more beautiful

than sharing a dumpster couch with you,

our little vacuum of time. O!

When we collapse to Cheeto dust, we will finally

be able to touch each other

the way we’ve always wanted.

O! O! O! We remain.

I’m lonely in the sense that everyone knows

my name but no one wants to say it. I just wish

someone would ask me what I’ve wanted all along:

to live in a lake & never grow taller than the water.

To pronounce myself as a family of coral.

But I am lonely as forever, lonely as infinite,

as natural sequences, as order, as Google.

I do take comfort in the lack of a lonely growth;

I can’t wake up to more lonely unhoused bones.

Everyone I’ve ever met has their own least favorite elegy.

Mine tastes like soap in my throat & lives forward

& forward like a wheel goes around its axle. I’m okay!

I’m still sad, though. Say hello if you pass me on the streets.

We can talk about disappearing. We can lay on the floor & dream

of becoming black holes. In my favorite someday, I meet someone

who recognizes me instantly. It’s ridiculous, but beautiful.

I donate clothes to thrift stores & pass pieces of me

on to someone else. Am I making less of myself?

I don’t know, but I wear two shades of bright dresses

in case someone compliments the top layer,

& I can gift it to them right off my chest.

If my bedroom’s a mess it’s because my heart’s

stamped on too many of my things, & I can’t decide

who should own the quilted throws of me. PSAs always say

that giving away prized possessions is a sign

for suicide but every time I’ve passed down my best

belongings, they’ve been material stand-ins for my soft

chirrups of misremember me if you want, but you could use this.

When I want to die, the wren in me searches for high places

& considers eating soap. I’ve lifted my bones to ledges

of buildings & turned back around. I’ve called my mother

& told her of the water, how all along my life

there’s been a river & a dive I’ve never followed down

& we’ve both agreed, alright, then. We’ll look somewhere else.

All those years I was too depressed to feed

my Neopets, they never actually died.

I could always bring them back to life

with a free piece of egg & cheese.

Heaven to me was how, even in my neglect,

I kept my pets, even when I couldn’t care

for myself. When I don’t hunger much

& my therapist blames my depression

I say smorgasbord over & over to summon

a dream of abundance & some reason to eat.

In the end I always turn to breads with holes

born to be this hollow & this whole.

When I imagine decomposing, the way

I want to go is through one final nourishment,

supplying my cats & my plants. My body breaks

wide & they’re all over my open, grazing

through red. It’s free. There’s no charge

no matter how much they need fed.

& no cops find my body. No one knows I’m gone.

They just notice how healthy the philodendron

looks & how the cats have grown so long.

I tell Téa how my post went viral on tumblr only after

deactivating & she says it’s like publishing poetry posthumously,

& how we could both turn famous once we die. I do still want to

return to Tumblr just for the drama of resurrection: I thank the people

who waited for me all these years & say hi. But honestly

all my favorite people know I’m still alive. I just crave the strangers

who once reblogged my posts to adore me again & again, like a motor

turning over. I do still measure myself in past tense, my bad.

Anyone who misses the old me believes I’m still trying to go back,

& some nights I believe it, too, so I lay in bed & listen to “The Funeral”

& pretend this is it, I’ve lasted long enough, everyone who loved me knew me

wrong. Or not. I have some faith that I am more than a bottle of blood, that if you hung me

up, there’d be a crowd livestreaming beneath me, crying

O! What a gorgeous day for mourning. I remain because I must.

When I die, my body will exhume love like dust.

It will spring out as petals & be hard to inhale. O!

Everyone will hate the scents of rotten flowers that should’ve been

plastic, but I’ve always been too sincere.

Some nights I want a public death. I want

to have a funeral under a fragile moon with lavender

and people who care about me but have names

I don’t care enough to ever remember. I want

my therapist to listen to my midnight playlists with me

so she knows who she’s up against. I would die for many people

because I love untransactionally. I honestly prefer soft

economies where we trade biggest intimacies.

My secret is that I would wear my bones on my sleeves

if I didn’t get disapproving looks on the streets. I’m not perfect

but I would live naked if I could. Strangers could call me

crybaby and I’d thank them for the kindness. I’m grateful

for the internet because no one else understands me.

I tell all of this over the phone to Madison, who doesn’t listen

to Mitski, and that’s the difference between us;

I’m no longer ashamed of my desire.

We listen to Harmony Hall in the car

& I sing louder with I don’t wanna live like this,

but I don’t wanna die. There are no good words

for suicide. Sun pearls my arm, loose

on the car window. It’s spring & I won’t

romanticize dying, though I do want a way to say

I want to die without making anyone cry.

As I unroll the window I hold my fingers through the running

air & let March mother me, brush my body

tenderly. I didn’t mean to write a love poem

but the love keeps happening, despite

all my attempts to leave. No one notices

when I sing louder; the moment passes anonymously.

It’s okay. I look for language to name me.

so I married the institution. The institution wouldn’t sleep in bed with me, would only fuck me in the wrong way. When I ate ham & eggs I ate alone. When I brought the institution its favorite black coffee, the institution would set it on the side table & mumble a slight that’s nice, thank you. In glimpses of joy I would remind the institution of its wedding dress & the institution would say it actually hated all that lace, the white washed out its opaque face. After dinners the institution let me scrub all the dishes & before sleeps I brushed its hair. I missed what the institution & I once shared. I remembered playing marriage on swingsets & dreaming of the institution. I remembered kissing the institution in my beat-up car under spreads of stars & the institution loving me back. I tried to pinpoint when that love went bad. It was the moment I told the institution I’d give it all I had & it was all I’d ever want. It was the moment I thought I was enough.

but I believe we could rename it for the better.

A flashmob. A disco. Phrasing only we fully know.

Light, I swear it’s the last time I’ll say this

& then I’ll let you grow alone, I’ll go, but

you made me want to voice an O every morning,

to crush on everything: your nose, dead bees,

any living creature that would listen to me sing.

I don’t even sing! But with you I loved boundlessly.

O, the gorgeous swell of your breath; O, the pink

feeling I felt when we first met; O, how I’ll never forget

any petals of delight even in my ache. O, O, O,

the multitudes, the swarm & shimmer, how I would yell

at clouds for you: damn their fluff! Fuck their gloom!

I would O at any matter for you. I would go vicious

& attack every bird that shits in your path. Pummel feathers

into bedsheets for you, I swear, I swear. I have to

ask: were we not each other’s grass?

I thought we stemmed from the same seed. I miss

plucking your hair in my dreams, speaking

of roaches but meaning we shared a love

that was abiding, one I couldn’t fathom but tried

to dive in. I want you to know I’m still

swimming. I’m still alive in it.

in the bunker claire crunches out a speech // how we are bigger than our bodies // wheeling toward a victory // a fleet of motorcycles five hundred feet away // and it doesn’t matter where we go because we aren’t dying alone anymore // come and gather, girls // this fight’s what we were born for // she busts into the sun // knives blazing into wide jaws // fresh blood // bandana crust // run she says to us // between silver bursts into skin // so we race towards the metal // kick the bikes back as claire cries how we will be remembered // the world will know us by our red hands // they will know us by our dust