when asked if I trusted you, I always said yes

He was once a small and soft baby, he was once a collection of cells.

He used to smell like cedar wood and smoke.

I was in love with the curve of his jaw, his stubble would turn my chin red.

The day after she told me, I chose the floor.
I was mad at my own disassembled state,
but between falling apart or pretending I wasn't,
I chose the realness of melting and said

Look, I understand,
the world has its plans, but I had plans of my own.

I know we are all familiar with the ways loss turns our mouths

into question marks, our hands into.

His mom kicked him out of the car. She said get out of my car, get out, find your own way home. Fourteen, he already had a beard, the older kids asked him to buy beer. Fifteen, he waited until the play had closed before running away. Sixteen, on the road, was it, was any of it true?

He used to tell me stories.
When asked if I trusted him, I always said yes.

Life becomes memories becomes narrative, becomes the stories we tell.

Just like love letters are only paper, burning in the dark.

It all gets smaller and smaller
the farther away you look at it.

When I innumerate my blessings, I find only one resounding

There is good earth in this world. The sun pours down onto the good earth.

Tree branches with new leaves sway in the wind. Their shadows make a

dance on the window pane and on the asphalt. 

Birds dive from the trees, babies learn to walk. Mountains move, but slowly.

All of your ex-lovers try to reckon with the harm you've brought them.

((you are a worm             i don't even know how you love at all                 your

emotional life is a digestive tube                 you just eat and shit out other people's lives.))

people who are too broken to love properly

It is now April and this is 

what happens when you fall in love with starving people.

Starvation is an equalizer. Starving people will do anything.

Starvation has its own rationality which is different than 

our morality. Like how he needed me

with his hands on my body. He had no shame and I had  

no where better to be. I figured, we are children

raised on resurrection stories and I'd never been eaten before.

Is there another way to find out how much you can bear?

I keep learning over and over

that there is a limit to what I am capable of.