nasal congestion justwrite

I have paper cuts on my tongue from trying to taste poetry. My dad sent me a Valentine's Day card, and his handwriting looked like shadows cast by foreign veins, clutching my heart with roots I can't pull up, squeezing until my pulse barely murmurs at my fingertips. I read the braille in your skin, trace the lines beneath your eyes and memorize their arc, match it to the whorl in my left thumbprint and tell you I've never seen anything like it. My eyes are so new light forgets to reflect off them. It sinks like the rocks I try to skip across the pond in your backyard. I pretend water doesn't know how to be anything but ice. I pretend my lips froze while embracing each other, that frost crawled up your hips while you were dancing. Cultured somatic cells of humans divide a set number of times before all dying at once. If you freeze them, when they thaw they continue as if time didn't stop. I tap this onto your eardrums while you sleep. I think of only this while I press snow angels into the hillside, only this and the sky, speckled with white as if it's still night time, me counting your dreams as though the sun will refuse to set this evening, will dig her orange fingernails into the horizon and cling like I do to the image of your earlobes, of the lines beneath your eyes. You kiss me and taste blood, poetry scratching at the corners of my mouth. My lips embrace each other, pretending to be frozen, pretending their cells aren't counting the minutes until nightfall.

dreaming justwrite

In my dreams, I have aerial roots, but you already knew that. I told you on the side porch that evening when we bought cheap champagne and mixed it with expensive orange juice, sat on the porch swing and pretended we could see the moon through your neighbor's roof. I still have the ticket stubs from that movie last summer, the one I knew I wouldn't like but took my little brother to see anyway. I didn't like it. The popcorn was okay. My brother has eyes like an old man carving lions out of wood, eyes that know cedar grain more than they know themselves, eyes buried in sagging skin, heavy with laughter, heavy with light, so full I want to catch what is about to pour out of them, hold it in my palms that are open and aching, hold it like hands hold other hands like my mouth hold thoughts that are ugly like my thighs are ugly, in the way where they aren't really but I've called them that so long it's all they know how to say. Every fall, I press leaves in books, thick books--the dictionary, Joy of Cooking, Mom's dusty wedding album. I'm afraid to open them in the spring because the colors might have changed. I watch the veins darkening in my ankles, cracks full of shadows, telling me I've been walking on them too much. I try to run sometimes, in afternoons like the ones when we picked peaches that looked like newborns from branches so old they had more knots than leaves, and the leaves they had were pale at the edges like my brother's irises, like the ring around the moon.