every time i smooth out a blank page
i'm sure i've lost all my words spilled them throughout the day from the hole in my purse & left me with nothing of substance to say writer's luck to out myself as eraser shavings when everyone expected cursive i expect i'll get over it when i'm older
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I wouldn't know the love of my life
if they hit me with an armful of textbooks and crouched to grab them at the exact same time as I reach out and our fingers touch. Fireworks and butterflies. Wouldn't know until the credits roll that I'd gotten my lines knotted up missed all my cues rewrote the happily ever after in the end You know every word to Despacito
despite speaking Portuguese You have a chubby little cactus tattooed across your thigh and a fresh pair of koi swimming in yin yang across your spine You wear those sparkly rainbow booties with the three-inch heels to class and clubbing I suppose it has something to do with your being a dancer How else can you explain how you never trip? Never stumble? Never fall? Always graceful, when moving through twenty-four form taichi or six AM meditation on the rooftop, guided by the app chiming on your phone Tasting the thick Shanghai summer settling across our upper lips readying our minds for a day of pressure points and melon pops anticipating a night of ginger Coke chasing down a sip of herbal whiskey it's so hard to speak of you like you aren't right here still here I never want to put you in past tense Keep racing up the Great Wall with me, you barely sweating at all, me drowning in my own salt and the youness of it all the nowness of your earthy, thrilling chuckle You always offer me a cigarette. I always say no. You'll die of lung cancer one day, I say, as you drag and exhale and I can't bring myself to move away can't stop following the promise of fire
My palm reads like a young girl's diary
I am mostly dream, mostly crush Not much of a realist, but muse and doctor for friends and people who love someone else The bright sweetness of xylitol gum, already memory as you pop it between your teeth I fade like that, that fast you'll miss me before I'm gone
Your death hurts different from the friends I've lost
to misunderstanding, to unmet expectation, to lust I feel scraped clean by the butter knife of grief a used-up jar searching for closure, something to fill all the echo and past tense inside Maybe this is what they call resignation, this kind of loose-limbed falling But the living haunts me like acid aftertaste a bite mark that won't stop bloodying my tongue every word betrays the drowning I'm doing How do I mourn you well when I'm still regretting all the funerals I will not attend for people who I love âand love me not? When I close my eyes I see you
lips curling into unashamed grin There is no self-consciousness in the curve of your cheek Your palms lift skyward, as if reaching to receive coin I fold my fingers into them For a moment, you are solid, real as the eyelash in my eye I can't think of what I want to tell you before you disappear again so I let a giggle flutter from my throat and you meet it there our voices mingling in the still air and hanging there after even when the breeze races past and you are gone again In my family
Shake Shack is a friday where no one has made mom cry is appreciation for shushing the dog during the conference call is I love you sandwiched between the tomato and portabello The grease is every time someone wipes up the crumbs on the counter without being asked is the good mornings at half past noon The pickle is the leftovers reheated as the table is set for lunch The fries is getting called to eat & coming Shake Shack is an apology for the unscrubbed toilet bowl & empty box of dark chocolate is peace offering after being asked to take out the recycling & getting caught in the rain A patty is thank you for being my little brother & please stop dropping dumbbells at 2 in the AM Thanks for this meal protect this family keep the cough away and smiles real even if the cheese is fake in my family Shake Shack is prayer answered liberate me from quarantine
give me haircut, massage, manicure, or death —no matter whose the plague doctors sitting in public office wait like priests that prey on children shake their mandates like drops of water but can't keep this disease from waking staunching the main streets unleash the wronged rights until the world has righted its wrong oppression of my freedoms give me this or give me death amen it is past season for snow
& yet the pain of missing you flutters thickly down between my ribs like fresh powder building mound after mound of humanoid shapes melting, disappearing into a fluid thing rising & flowing I cried in front of my therapist
about you about all the empty you left when you left I hated to say it but why didn't you say goodbye? I wish if you had to go you'd go knowing I wished you well in your next life and I hoped we'd be sisters again even if again, too soon, you'd die Part of me wanted to go with you at least partway so at least you'd be un-alone when the part of me that was you went home so that I'd be ready to go on without you |
KatA young adult. Archives
April 2020
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