CIV. Will you write about this later? The couch digging feelings I wanted buried and the walls chipping to reveal something ugly underneath. You smiled like something dirty and I still can’t tell the difference between mockery and a dare when you look at me like that. I tried to keep from staring at your lips, and instead of saying, Tell me something pretty, an undisguised dare, a shameless plea, I looked at my own hands and said, I wish you would stop doing that. I didn’t tell you about the blood and the words in the sink, the books I’ve been leaving unfinished, the stories with epic endings and beginnings, but no middle. You swirled the drink in your cup, and I imagined you kissing me. I am running out of words.　

XCV. I let him put his hands on my hips but I am still wondering what he looked like in the daylight. I couldn’t look him in the eyes because I know he would have mistaken the California heat I have been dreaming of in restless sleep for something that would get me into bed with him later, because wanderlust is still a form of lust, the kind for lonesome people, and because I could tell he didn’t understand the importance of six extra, silly letters — because I could become a geographer with the way I have been looking at boys, searching, trying to find the Golden Gate Bridge in their spine, the Grand Canyon on the palms of their hands, pieces of the East Coast shoreline in their tear ducts, hidden islands inside their chests, tracing human anatomy with lonesome, (wander)lustful eyes and imagining arms and collarbones and hipbones all lead to somewhere beautiful.

XCVI. On the walk home I closed my eyes and imagined he looked a little bit like home, Brazil, his hands maybe, that he had Seattle’s emerald eyes, Chicago’s hurricane laugh, and New Orlean’s way of saying love.   

LXXXI. You were already half in love when you saw her across the room, something broken and close to innocent, whispered to me, “Look at those sharp edges,” voice wavering like you could feel your shirt staining where she was already making you bleed. I should have stopped you. I noticed the smell of gasoline on your breath, the spark that rose from the friction of teeth and tongue when you spoke. You walked into a burning building, set it to fire first so she’d be impressed, didn’t realize the person who needs saving lives inside of you, and threw yourself to the floor when you stumbled out a horror scene, bare boned and bleeding. We are all trying to find love in half tragedies, creating them before so we can be something for the silver screens, something of epic romance for a pretty poem. Well here it is — your poem. It is not so pretty, but you burned with a crackling spark. 

LXVIII.  If you are not at least half way in love with the little middle of nowhere town sprouting outside your bedroom window, “this goddamn city,” you said, rising from the skyline through your windshield like a promise of something great already broken, then you have not met the right people. Have not taken enough car rides on passenger seats, have not rolled down enough windows, have not put your feet up across enough dashboards, have not found the right songs for spring that’s mostly just summer ashamed and in a mask stitched of flowers and youthful hope. I was fifteen once and hoping to find the treasure that made the west coast the Golden one, sixteen and raising wars with sleep to dream of fleeing to New York City to discover the magic buried underground that kept the city awake. I remember mid July in San Diego and waking up with blisters on my feet but laughter still in my throat because we could sleep with the windows open, because the west coast really is Golden, and Cooler, and Kinder, still remember the mountains and the impressions they left, how I cried when I wrote a poem about them later. True, these songs we play and replay and replay like prayers would have sounded better through the cathedral California valleys, and these nights we spend drunk across couches and floors fighting the heaviness of our eyelids would be put to better use in the bright lights of the city that never sleeps, but for St. Patrick’s day I sat in the backseat of a half stranger’s car as he drove us two hours from my house, one hour from yours, and I followed Orion’s Belt after you pointed it out all the way there and back, because we were too far north for me to still follow Atlanta’s skyline over the windshield, because somewhere in between my house and that little middle of nowhere town we ended up in, sometime after my first concert at the center of Atlanta, and fifth, and twentieth and dancing drunk and young with statues I realized that this city, this goddamn, god awful city is a place eight years have taught me to call a little piece of home.

XLIX. I didn’t love you but hand me a match and half of the poems I wrote about you and I could set this neighborhood on fire. That’s the thing about poetry, it’s young and naïve and desperate to fall in love. You asked me my secret once, here it is: I only ever watch strangers in hope they’re beautiful enough, strange enough, broken enough to write about later. I wrote about you because you had eyes the color of a patch of the universe that’s still a mystery to astronomers and a voice I’m praying I can someday have the words to turn into poetry. I deleted your phone number the other day, half afraid I would call you drunk and desperate to make sure time won’t let me forget the weight your voice carries.

L. You asked me last week, are you still writing, and I said yes, like I have a choice. Yes – about you and strangers, (and tell me, what’s the difference these days anyway), about my friends and distance that’s weak but persistent, about learning to fall in love with the promise of a humid, southern summer, the way my tattoo looks after a day with the sun, the ocean and its tough kind of love. Writing, teaching myself to fall in love with everything, and anything that could some day love me back.  

XLVI. You’re looking at me like I’m something science could explain, and I’m watching the underwater sun through the glass door pretending I am something vast and still mysterious like the Atlantic watching something vaster and more mysterious like the sun because I am still trying to figure you out. The neighbors upstairs are quiet tonight so we play the music loud and we laugh louder. At the beach I can feel where my skin is trying to make me into someone who stumbles on her words less and knows what she wants and I didn’t say it out loud but the goose bumps on your arms looked like the footsteps across the shore and into the ocean. I noticed the color of your eyes under the bus stop the last night and the way you kept quiet when we talked about love. You don’t believe in love that’s not broken or books that aren’t tragic or the way I said I have words growing through the cracks of where distance and boys and America broke me. Wasn’t I the one who said unrequited love isn’t nearly as romantic and life, when it’s tragic, isn’t nearly as poetic as in these books we keep reading? I meant it. You wouldn’t believe it, I know, but there is still poetry in a twelve hour drive through the heels of America, rhymes in the sounds an old air mattress makes when you stir still a little drunk at six in the morning, and metaphors in skin raw and peeling, like maybe underneath the sun clawed skin there’s someone better. It’s all I think about. I’m trying to make you see, but the poet in me, I’m afraid, didn’t want to leave, is still down south, gasping for breath and words (ask me the difference) at the bottom of the ocean.   

XLIV. This time when I ask to catch the sun mid yawn over the horizon, when I suggest we stay because there’s a love affair to be witnessed between the Atlantic and the moon, I can promise you I won’t hesitate. You’ll say yes, a little drunk, probably, because your mother’s a state away, and because we’re not fourteen or fifteen or even sixteen but we’re still just as desperate. Did you catch me trying to dig collarbones through my skin from the rearview mirror, the skin I wanted to remold into something more boys would smile at, and the night I cried into my pillow because home sickness is something I was, am still trying to master. Being fourteen, I think, and fifteen, and sixteen and seventeen and most of eighteen, is shameful. You don’t sing in the shower and you only ever dance in front of strangers and you don’t share with your friends the poetry you feel taking root inside and when you ask your best friend if you could maybe watch the sun set later you mumble and hide your face because you’re not sure she’ll understand, because you’re not sure yet how to ask for beautiful things without feeling like you don’t deserve them. One day your friend’s mother tells you you deserve them, the sunsets and the midnight parking deck talks and the spring drives and the poetry you’ll write all about later, and the dances, “the dances,” she says, closing her eyes like the word tastes of something sweet and nostalgic, that of all things you’ll regret declining your body the melody of a good song the most, because shame is youth’s disease and dancing, she says, is the cure. You’ll understand later, when you master the taste of cheap liquor and shame grows to feel like something distant you talk about when you say, Well, when I was sixteen.

XLIII. It’s that time again. I should tell you about winter’s disappearance and how spring’s a season that exists all year long inside my rib cage. I should, but I’m fifteen and I’m writing a love poem, thinking it comes easy, that it feels the way midnight yawns and morning stretches do, that it’s clean, then the clock shines five past midnight and I’m nineteen in the shower with blood at my feet and flesh underneath my fingernails where I want there to be poetry instead, and I should tell you this, I should, and I should have burned all my books when I had the chance.

XXXVI. Turning nineteen, I want to tell him, it’s a crisis. On the first and second and third day nothing changes and on the sixth day you lose your footing on the steps when an almost stranger or almost friend asks your age and “nineteen” sits like an ingrown teeth in your mouth, but “sixteen” feels like a number a fortune teller carved bloody and permanent at the edge of your spine, so you start doing things you swore you’d never do. Autumn rises from the color of the treetops and you try your first cigarette, and second, and third on the same night, and you don’t cough or cry once when you learn the taste your parents have been sleeping with inside their mouths for thirty years, but you think of how much credit we give to people who are forty or twenty or not sixteen that they don’t deserve. It keeps going. On the third month you conjure up smoke in the passenger seat of your friend’s car because you can’t, because before walking out the door your mother said, “Be responsible,” like she always does, and you cry and laugh at the same song when it repeats because youth is a monster unpredictable and misunderstood underneath your bed and you’re still not sure if you’re the kind of person who cries at life because it’s fucked up or smiles because you might as well. Because you sleep on different sides of the mattress every night and because somewhere between You can be anything you want, and So, what have you been up to? the compass inside that points at college and conformity and contentment has broken. So maybe I’m restless and lost, but winter’s gone missing somewhere in the north too, an act of youthful rebellion, and I can understand. I want to tell him he’ll understand too, soon, but there’s something sad and livid in his eyes that’s not there because of the rain or the way it’s hitting us straight across, a dare, and I know he already does.