leaving justwrite

I keep pebbles underneath my pillows, grind smooth, round stones into towers of sand, pillars I would wrap myself around if I were a vine, my fingertips sprouting when they touch you, my tongue aching for sunlight. I trace your shadow onto the tile floor in my kitchen, tell myself you've never looked so beautiful when really I'm thinking about the oranges in the bowl on the counter, wishing they were blueberries at the end of June, swollen and purple and as warm as the air. I cough all winter. You tell me it's because there's frost in my throat, creeping up my vocal cords, spilling cursive patterns along the dome of my mouth. My breath is cold. My palms smell like soil. I press them into the earth and expect something, maybe music or silence or something in between, something both heavy and light to dance across my arms. Instead, I have two dirty hands and two unimpressive handprints, so small they will disappear in a few seconds, as soon as the rain comes. I am waiting to grow more skin, thicker or softer or darker maybe. I am waiting to grow a shadow. I feel it peeking out from the soles of my feet some mornings just after I get out of bed. I feel its fear, then cold tile, then nothing but skin. You told me once that I was the most beautiful thing you'd ever seen, but you were staring at the apple tree in the yard, wondering if the fruit it would grow would be red or yellow. I whispered "yellow" while you screamed "red." I ground my words into columns of sand while you walked away. I'm afraid you'll become salt sometimes, but you don't look back.

mateo's room

Yesterday, there were butterflies, thousands of tiny legs prickling like needles so small they can't break skin. Just slip through the cracks, find the air seeping out from my lungs, bubbling across my lips and out through my pores, steam rising from my open palms, caught beneath the ceiling. When I sleep, I dream shoe prints across my eyelids, probing fingers searching for a thinner piece of skin. He has a nose like a proboscis, curling into itself like an embryo, forehead creased with concentration, face serious, trying to focus on growing ten fingers because that's all that parents think about these days. You hear their voices muffled through fluid like you will through drywall years from now, the same wrinkled syllables leaving their harshest vowels clinging to the carpet fibers. In my dreams, I grow wings. They sprout from the backs of my hands. I feel them fluttering, curtains on breezy mornings, a discarded grocery list caught in the wind. In the winter, we use novels as kindling. I wonder why we spend all year writing so we can burn them when it's cold. My father tells me you have to destroy what you love in order to feel the flame. You look up at me from the chair across the room, tell me I'm so deep, you want to go fishing in my chest. I tell you the water there is still. You forget to listen, reaching toward me with all six of your arms.

almost midnight justwrite

There are envelopes on your open palms. I know what's inside, but I'm afraid to look. I spill seeds on the floor behind me while I walk, but nothing ever grows from the linoleum, at least nothing with roots. I imagine your fingers reaching deep into my chest, curling themselves around my ribcage like it's a fence trying to keep them out. My heart will watch, ignorant, letting you convince it my body is a prison. On the mornings when there is fog thick outside my window, I'm always surprised when it doesn't swallow my screams, when the strangers on the street stop and look up at me, their eyes glossy marbles behind a lace curtain, a tablecloth hung on the clothesline. I only ever learned to take out stains with scissors, and I hung each on my wall so I could memorize its shadow, like trying to draw a snowflake before it melts away, recording a heartbeat haphazardly as though the next one is a sure thing. I keep pictures of you in my music box, but it still won't sing unless you're in the room. I tell it to give up its fantasies, but it turns toward the wall, still silent, its tears leaving rings on the table. My mom never taught me to use a coaster. I seal these secrets in an envelope I hope you never find. I hang it on the clothesline to be dampened by the fog, hope I can learn to stop screaming. I used to know your name, but now I just know your fingers, gripping my ribcage, roots deep beneath my skin.

knitting for you justwrite

There are petals beneath your eyes in the morning, when you wake up in my bed and I try to remember falling asleep but only remember dreaming about stains on floral print dresses and about long blonde hair tied back, trying not to catch the light. In church, the sun streaming through the stained glass always made the skin on my hands look blue while I prayed, as blue as shadows, as ink, as babies the moment they're born, people just before they've tasted air for the first time. I can't remember that either, can't remember if I felt the cord being cut, the ends of yarn falling like snowflakes around my footprints. I knit you hats because I don't know how to talk to you. I knit you hats and leave them on top of the basket in my closet because I'm not sure which color you'd like best. I never ask. You asked once to see the fingerprints laced across my thighs, the blue skin looking like blue light, like shadows, like a newborn face. I try to convince myself bruises are ink that won't wash away. I tie knots with sticks and fold my voice into them, hoping you'll hear me in the patterns. When I finally show you my closet, you ask why I wasted so much yarn, say you've never been cold. But your breath is frost against my neck. I break the icicles off your lips before you wake up in the morning. I pour my sun rays into your skin and watch the petals bloom beneath your eyes just before they open.

short tired justwrite (2010!)

I still have feathers between my teeth and my glasses get so foggy when I breathe that I learned to take the oxygen from your bloodstream when I'm near you. Your fingerprints get stuck in my head, nothing but swirls, the light caught in your eyes like a firefly in my hand, peeking through the cracks between my fingers, wondering when I broke away from myself, losing all my change between the couch cushions. The coins in my pockets used to tap against each other when I walked, wanted me to remember they were there, wanted to leave their imprints on my mind like halo silhouettes on my palms. Now no one hears me coming, so I call out my name, throw it into the air in front of me, but it is a birdsong, noise that is part of the silence. I'll be a shadow some day. I'll have so many holes in my stories that I'm lace, the first part of a tablecloth to be worn away, yellowed with age and tearing against itself. For now I'm stuck in the nicotine stains around my father's fingernails, the way raindrops race each other on my window, and with the light within your eyes, watching the world through this curved lens, seeing only the reflection of my own face. If I reach out, I'll learn I'm not trapped, but my hands are deep in my pockets, searching.