Small and simple things sigh in final recognized satisfaction. Me, noticing each glimmer of tender evidence that there is a covert world wrapping its arms around my soiled and dried-out heart. Every day I meet people and then I go home. And I lay in bed. And I cry. Because I've arrived somewhere. Somewhere I only knew of from my dreams. This is a place I got used to waking up from. 

I wonder if I put on just how soft of a person I am. I'm like a summer fruit. Unable to bare another cold shoulder. Promise turned upside down. You don't know that I'm a big sister. If you do, then you don't know what it means to me. Arm's length. That is where you are. 

Being this age means I am wrong about everything, and I am saying it out loud each time I am. 

I feel newborn. Feeling air in my lungs after winter. 

For me

I've got half a mind to sit and meditate on every feather flowing past me on my mid-day walks

and half a mind to forget I've got a mind. 

The dense polarity between making sense of every side-mouthed smile and knowing the impermanence

of each moment. Life is happening to me faster than I can lay it out in my journals. 

My brain is withered and wise. Broke, but absent of cynicism. 

My heart is a new born child. Reaching but unaware of the aim of her grasp. 

The Earth finds a new axis.

I saw a bluebird today and I thought it was just for me. Is it selfish to perceive the world in such a self-tailored way? Let me be selfish, then. Let me find solace in believing each pushing and pulling of ocean current is a hello and consequent goodbye directed to me and me alone. 

Where I go when I sleep

A mermaid's lagoon

A soldier's boot

Sometimes I travel to the red hot edge of my father's cigar

Between book pages in mountain town elementary classrooms 

If I feel like it, under the peel of an orange

In my mom's lip gloss bottle but I exit so sticky

I like to sit on my best friend's pillow case and pat her hair straight

A dirty bar

A con man's wallet

Underneath the flooring of outdated shopping malls

Inside of bird's nests 

Cemeteries 

Drunk men's overall pockets

In barns with very loud chickens

and my favorite place of all: 

Perched right atop your upper lip

I wake so restless 

 If only I thought of myself the way I think of strangers passing me by

I pour an embarrassingly heavy amount of prayer onto them. They could be anyone. 

I just want everyone to feel love

even if I am last in line to get any.

on starting from scratch

 I've slipped into a deep green and ambivalent place of rest

No stopwatch or countdown 

Life is absent of watchful eyes

Glaring 

Recording my work

Only orange blossom glaze, poetry written by women (just as destroyed as me)

and the thought that I do not remember what your laughter sounds like next to me

whenever i'm in a foul mood

i've got to see you in your towel, nude

Men who have laid on my chest

The human ribcage

The place where my breasts lay 

I am in agony 

Too many men that did not love me

Have slept, soundly

In that sacred place

And naive me,

Believing 

My heart existing right there,

On top

Infinitely and unknowing

Underneath

Underneath

Underneath 

On my porch tonight

My porch light gives me the eyes 

Suggesting a cigarette break

Causing me to flirt with the idea

Reminding me of how nice it feels to just sit and smoke and be 

Pausing my thoughts to embody an elderly, Western man

Stoic, solitary, at the end of his days

A waking memory of misplaced youth and melancholy 

I light one

I sit

I watch

The sky diffuses into night

A young couple walks past my house

"...You should see it there. Children run all around playing, laughing. Parents chatting off to the sides. An ice cream shop on every corner. The best ice cream I've had. Let me take you there soon..."

They float down the way

My cigarette smoke following them home

Like an omen of protection

It looked as if it were reaching for that love

From my puckered lips, to my lungs, back out to the lovers

and all the way home.

deer

today was purple. my words weren't coming out right. they were falling out. spilling over the corners of my mouth. slipping through nooks between every tooth i've managed to keep. you just sat and kissed every part of it. even the places where my words fall out the most. times like these, i lose my tongue. she runs away from me and laughs when i go looking. days that aren't purple may invite her back. 

my heart feels swollen after seeing the ocean. it had been months since me and the sea found a direct space to commune and rescore. i walked home from the shore, following embers of faith, to see you in the living room. the sea told me you'd be a good thing. she's never given me false hope before. please. please don't start now.

a scratch i can not reach.

on a purple day, i read poetry in the sun. i took a stroll and noticed new plants on the street. people let their weeds grow out here. wild and crazy. boundless and lenient. like me. 

i've decided to let my brain take the week off. she's hardly ever in direct communion with my heart. always getting in my way. walking me into corners and back alleys. purple is the color of a friday in the grass with you. even when i fall through my words like a new-born deer learning to stand.