As seen through smudgy glasses

The worst part about being alone in your bed

Is that the sheets still remember the shape of you

Pressed against them.

And as the sun creeps higher in the sky I walk into your kitchen 

And the find the coffee you left out for me is still warm

And the space where you were leaning against the counter is cold. 

Don't make promises

 Please stop promising me the world

When we both know you're only going to give me a crumpled road map and call it "close enough".

I didn't ask for you to bring me the moon

But this little gray rock you've handed me as a substitute is frankly insulting.

I didn't need epochs to the rainbows contained with in my eyes

But you didn't even measure the meter in this couplet.

The eight year old in me

 
The eight year old in me 

Wants you to know

It's not fair that the hickey on my chest is fading slower 

Than our relationship.

Did I say I wanted to be cracked open again? 

Did I say I wanted to feed you the marrow in my ribs? 

Did I say I wanted to show you the menagerie of butterflies in my chest?

I am dizzy with this spin cycle of loving and losing. 

How it goes from comic to tragic in a single turn. 

I am selfish with desires: 

I want my pink house made of love. 

I want to sleep beside another person every night. 

I want to stop bleeding from the marrow now. 

Water on stone

 Here's what it is: I kind if like that I'm hard to bruise. That I can send my lovers home with their necks tattooed with the shape of my mouth but I look untouched. Not pure but maybe stone. 

Here's how it is: I play with the edges of stone butch but never settle there. The most euphoric I feel in my body is during sex and I enjoy the pleasure and I tell my lovers sex isn't a competition. 

Here's how it is: Sex isn't a competition but it's nice to feel valued. Desired. Fucked. Capable of making someone's afternoon a little better or a lot better. Of walking away unmarked. 

Here's how it is: I resent that I have to preform my gender for other people but I only wear pants dancing. I still wear low-necked shirts that show off the curve of my breasts. 

Here's how it is: Gender is always a performance and I delight in memorizing my lines and then reading them in reverse. I like to play the part that contradicts with the people around me. Or maybe that complements, matches. I win the Emmy for supporting gender roles and I want more. 

Here's how it is: I want someone in my bed but I hate how empty the bed feels when they leave. I buy a weighted blanket instead. The marks of my lover invisible but sore to the touch.

Here's how it is: I saw an art exhibit at Mass MOCA and it was a room where the light was strange and the floor tilted and you couldn't tell where you stood and so the space seemed infinite, like there were no walls, no floor. I wanted to dance though the space and I thought when I see art, I feel the desire to create as a palpable, aching thing in my gut.

Here's how it is: When I tell my therapist I am a mess of contradictions, they tell me to imagine the grand canyon and just let my feelings echo across it, bouncing off its infinite walls. "There is enough space" They tell me.

Here's how it is: I chose they as my pronouns because the Walt Whitman line "I contain multitudes" cut straight into the softest bits of me. For me, they is a plural because I am a thousand conflicting feelings crammed into a beautiful and stone body.

Here's how it is:  I am infinite but my time is not. My flesh is not. I don't know what this thing is inside me that people call a soul but I know I am divine because Tricia Hersey told me so and I know everyone I love must have that of god in them because the Quakers taught me that and the Jews taught me that god is light and undefinable and infinite. 

Here's how it is: I am the stone walls of the grand canyon, worn away by the river. I am untouched by the gentle bites of my lovers but I am forever changed by a trickle of water, wearing against my skin. 

Here's how it is: I am the echo of sound bouncing off of walls, getting quieter and quieter but never gone. 

Like a pink house

 Poem inspired by All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

I want to love you like a pink house where we eat dinner with all our friends and family every night. 

I want to love you like my body is celery so I can be the very fiber of your being.

I want to love you like a manifesto, believing in the power of the universe to change.

I want to love you like the moon, always round, even when I can always see a sliver.

I want to love you like a dandelion in the wintertime, weak and lopsided and painfully colorful.

I want to love you like my very life depends on it. Because it does. 

The seven sisters 2

 We love a series...

The Holyoke mountain range is a giant

Lying east-west so one side of her is always

Too cold and one side too hot. 

She lives in the edge of discomfort and remembers 

There used to be giant beavers in this valley

And glaciers and moose and once long ago

She was the ocean.

Can you imagine

The electricity of being shaded on one side in the cool damp

Of hemlocks and sweeping mossy carpets

And on the other the smooth, hot shivering trunks

Of birches, beech, and goldenrod? 

Can you imagine containing multitudes--

The beavers, the moose, 

The hemlock, the beech, 

And the ocean? 

The seven sisters

The peaks of Norwatuk and Bear flush pink 

In the slanting sunlight, mirroring your cheeks

The Metacomet-Monadnock trail

Lies across the ridge of the Holyoke

Mountain range. I want to tread each step

Of that path until I know its every 

Evergreen. Every moss and princess pine

And quaking aspen. (Is it clear that the 

Mountains are a metaphor for you?)