Independence day

Snapdragon, fire cracker, lights in the sky
Fractured patterns flicker, shimmer, thunder and cry
Fire ruins, embers smolder,  smoke in your eye
Think of water, think of winter, try not to die.

Childhood past

Asphalt: there's no way around the word:
It's flat, black and hot
No ulterior motives, no hidden meaning

Synonyms for asphalt (as per dictionary.com) run as follows:
pavement, road, concrete
sidewalk, path, blacktop

Asphalt is black and hot
It drives the temperature of manhattan two dreadful degrees hotter in the summer
Asphalt is human made
Crushed, heated, and spread across the earth by huge gas-burning machines
Asphalt is ubiquitous
Think about the last road trip, the last time you went to the grocery store, the last time you walked to   the corner store

Do you remember the road you grew up on?
Did you walk barefoot in the summer? Remember the feeling of the heat on the tender skin on the bottom of your feet.
You played games on the asphalt: hopscotch and four square
And when you couldn't find chalk you used sticks and shoes to mark boundaries.

The asphalt would shimmer in the summer heat
You later learned mirage to mean an illusion looking like a sheet of water
But you were never fooled by the asphalt
There was no way to dress it up as anything other than the black road it was.

Lunes about home

Tell me of your home
What smells live
There? Who welcomes you back?

I love the wild children
Who run underfoot
Knowing they are welcome here.

Come in and be fed.
Bring what you
Have, take what you need.

queer love stories

i fucked them with a strap-on for an hour and we spent the next three days processing our gender dysphoria (and other queer love stories)

there was no label for the relationship between us so we carved a new space and named new constellations for our pet names

they asked me to move in with them, to have a threesome with them, and to love them in that order. i said yes

i wrote them epics of poetry and changed all the pronouns so no one would know

they never bought me a single gift, but made them all by hand with a tight budget and a limitless imagination

every time i saw a sunset i thought of them. sunsets also don't believe in the gender binary.

we traded podcasts about queer theory, books about anti-racism, low-budget antifascism documentaries, and once a kiss

Mosquito Heartbeat

They say if you squeeze your arm while a mosquito is drinking your blood it will explode.
Because its tiny body can't handle the influx of such great quantities of life
These tiny things
That cause such great suffering.

(not) Clumsy (not) Girl

To hold something in my hands is to break it
I have watched brick walls crumble under my touch
So I don't touch brick walls any more.

heartbeat

The more I touch the more my greedy fingers ache

-a love story