insecurities justwrite

You look at these words and say they're not radical enough because I think fireflies are beautiful like a cloud with the moon shining through, beautiful in a way you can't touch, like me. My cactus skin waits for water, swells when it rains and smells like the dirt on the bottoms of my feet and petals crushed beneath, the veins of my leaves throbbing in the summer as great shovels dig more veins and more veins out of the Earth. I sit all day because I can't think when my thighs are making so much noise and your whispers are disrupting their rhythm when I walk. I used to dance, you know. I used to dissolve and let the air come in between each part of me, float away on a breeze like pollen in the spring, tickling your nose to finally watch you cry, your eyes watering just before you sneeze and I know your heart stopped for a moment, just long enough to murmur I love you and finally leave, fading to yellow, orange, brown, its shell falling as the children on the ground reach up to catch every wish before it burns out because I've had to many birthday cakes with wax centers. The candles melt to nothing while I try to think of what to say but only remember the wax burns when it is gas, like the kind that lifts hot air balloons but not the kind that makes rainbows on the asphalt when I know I should've wished to be barefoot. Everything you've ever seen reflects off your irises and stains the roses in my cheeks. Everything you've ever seen is so backwards it hits your mind upside down and needs to be flipped over before you understand. I wonder how we can trust gravity when we know this, but I'm too afraid to fly because you keep telling me I'm so heavy, carving numbers into my limbs, my branches, hearts with arrows straight through, and I remember it's been a long time since I knew how to dance. It's been a long time since I've danced with you.

thoroughly untalented justwrite

Piles of books wait at my feet while the windchimes outside seem farther away than your footsteps, watching the children in my memories build sandcastles and wait for the waves to take them. There are letters on my palms and letters that I can't see on my eyelids. I wonder how hands so small can hold so much and my pinkies shrink faster than you thought they would, lines forming on my face like a field ready for seed or right after harvest, the bones of corn stalks half-covered in the mud, turning to dust faster than my thoughts. There are too many people counting too loudly. I can hear them when I sleep and I forget why I exist, stare into my reflection like a waiter stares at the traffic light outside, trying to decipher its color. The world is black and white with no ecotones in between, but my roots find the sky and my names come to life on your lips, sound like poems made from broken lines and broken plates, a mosaic I can't forget, clumsy fingers inventing puzzles and explaining why I have to stand in this square and close my eyes and know nothing except that I know nothing. On cold mornings, there are sweaters and mugs full of hot chocolate and at least one sock, a stranger sitting alone but not waiting for anyone, a shadow on the floor. I step through myself and expect to be smaller but find only that I have twelve thousand pages left and not knowing how many those will take away. When you whisper these words, I want to give up because I love them so much.

snow dance sestina

I tried to find two identical flakes,
looked through the glass and only saw my breath
tracing designs and playing with the light.
A girl tells me she thinks my soul is blue,
tells me I am not lost. I have a string
around my finger until it's untied.

I have at least six nights until I'm tied
to the half-melted tip of a snowflake.
My tears will freeze along my cheeks like string
and I'll dissolve. I'll never need to breathe...
My hair my skin my eyes will all be blue.
A girl will tell me my soul looks like light.

I try but can not stare straight at the light.
I whisper to her that my soul is tied
around a tree whose bark is turning blue,
whose leaves are swept away in trembling flakes.
I whisper to her. I forget to breathe
and hanging from my palms are two frayed strings.

We are two. Then we're one, woven like string
that shades us from the penetrating light.
The air I taste is cold from her first breath.
They say she is a girl and she is tied.
She says she wishes she were a snowflake
because they're made of ice, not pink and blue.

The wind is cold. I wrap myself in blue,
a blanket knit from twelve miles of string.
She says she thinks my soul is a snowflake
then laughs until her eyes fill up with light.
We race for hours but we're always tied,
both of us gasping for our drowning breaths.

Her skin is always clouded by my breath.
Behind the clouds, I know the sky is blue.
I touch the string on my finger, untied.
It falls onto her palm, one lonely string,
twisting like a worm in the summer light,
then thin like lace, a freshly pressed snowflake.

She winds my breath into a rope, a string.
My soul is blue, is clear, is blue, is light.
We are untied, two falling matching flakes.

cloud forest justwrite

I hold my palm against the rainforest floor and you tell me to feel its heartbeat, its breath so cool when the sun is far away, your hands around my wrist to block the light, words tickling my veins with their fingertips. In the night there are voices outside and two women sit on a windowsill, their minds weaving songs as a lone trumpeter outside wishes he could sing so he could remember each verse like it's the same as the last, waves grabbing my ankles and rubbing my back, a seashell slipped on like a ring like the one around the moon when we're huddled inside a cloud, the cool breath in the soil climbing to our lips. The butterflies make me think of you, when they don't remember how to land and the cities look like they're exploding through my airplane window, voices growing distant or tides growing closer, like rain on my neck but it falls from the ground or just appears because the air is so wet we drink while we breathe. Today, the smiles of strangers are like fresh bread and a gold coin in my pocket, footprints with only two toes leading me up three trunks and not needing to steal my lunch because I'll share if you ask. What you bake is sweet, dissolving on my tongue like sand on my knees when I kneel and realize I've been praying all this time, palms against the forest floor, feeling its heartbeat and finding mine.

lapsus linguae justwrite

I assume the lunch position as wet dreams slip from your mouth and we make a movie, a silent film because the whole world is a little bit drunk tonight, scorpions gazing at us from the corner, watching you spin and really understanding movement for the first time. My tongue finds the marriage of a walnut and an apple, coconut milk like sweat on your chin, guttural music tumbling down the sides of mountains and swinging to you a face we can't forget. There are vines in the trees that wrap around our legs, women on horseback chest-deep in mud that is really ash, rain echoing off a roof that is no longer there, the men on the rafters wrapping each other in red tape. I watch almonds crawl over your hands for the second time and wonder how millipedes can be that small and still have two pairs of legs for each minuscule segment. Mine hurt just thinking about it, stair after stair until you want to jump off a cliff but you choose a ledge because your safety harness is just tight enough. The ground rushes forth and the trees follow like they were crouching beneath the mulch. The only metal I've seen that isn't rusted is the chrome on a beetle's back as it marches across a rock that is a continent, fire tumbling from my fingertips as moths circle me like snow and Canadians dance, shout, my dreams inevitable, wet or not.

Volcan justwrite

I slice the water and watch you struggle, lightning bugs against lightning above fire breaking apart, shedding my skin while you skin fruit I can't pronounce and I eat all the seeds because I've never had it any other way, trusting your count of stairs but feeling like it's not enough. Your eyes are the color of the pool under a waterfall in the rainforest, the vines hanging as gracefully as your fingers, and we met in a garden where the leaves came to life, painters dabbing patterns onto the backs of beetles and watching their legs scratching poetry onto a poor man's umbrella. The iguanas I chase down the path call to each other and ignore our mimicry, my feet black like a volcano's tears forty years later, bones hung in concrete and within rock where water sounds like unforgiving men on our balcony, their music serenading us as you talk about movies from the past and water that needs a bit more gravity. The sun nods and we lose time, your rain dance working almost as soon as mine, my arms moving so fast they're invisible if I close my eyes. I had sex on the hot spring, which seems like an impossible memory, and I was birthed again into a steaming sea, the air harder than I remember, and I fell into the arms of strangers but really had no choice. We shout to each other in languages nobody can understand but the butterflies, one tapping codes against Kayla's hand with its tongue... no... its proboscis. Gold coins fall into my pockets and there is a song that never stops, a fruit like a baby so I watch you cradle it for hours before we sip and slurp its existence into our souls. Your irises reflect anonymous flowers and your neck smells like lake. As the water piles around my mind, I see the place where the trees began to grow again.

Pura Vida justwrite

Roadside mimes while pure life is pulsing in my neck like an engine and wheels unsteady against the runway, the skin on my stomach, birds nesting in my hair while the Earth gapes at me from the edge of the street, metal becoming sand but only to empty eyes at a three in the morning that is one elsewhere, forgetting the gestures and being glad you bubblewrapped your lamp post because holding that position for that long seems like pain, like resting tired cheeks on garbage bags feels like relief, like a bite of bread and cheese mingling for seventeen minutes, wondering where two went and settling with pass as the doors clamp around our ankles and the men outside wipe each others' blood from their faces, like I did this morning with my own, water tasting like pennies and alarming on the silence only street. Kayla's hair is like a halo in the right light, and there is a face here more beautiful than a fountain with a much less intense mustache and a woman so short she is like a bird, with hollow bones and a song in her throat. The man in the corner burns maps off his hands, whispering that he's sorry and blowing a kiss that blows the ash away from the lips of a volcano, trying so hard to scream that everyone turns the other way, runs, whenever she gurgles a sound. Tomorrow there are seven places at once and a living history, but now there is rice setting early on the horizon and eyes closed at home, nodding to themselves as the night dawns.