i won't go begging for light

1.

the night is young when we all get there.
it’s still listening to us, even after we get past the obligatory greetings
and dive into the words that unlock our lips once we’ve loosened them a little.
the scene is blurry, like vintage film, and tomorrow
none of us will remember the way the light bent around the glass
or fractured on the carpet we fell onto.
but for now, we choke on our secrets, cough them up
and forget to reel them back, leaving them as easy bait
to snag on and snatch our flaws in plain sight later.

2.

two hours and a thousand confessions later, three of us have cried.
we aren’t running out of things to share,
and we started off strong, with the beauty queen
who’s way out of everyone’s league sobbing over a heartbreak
that is and wasn’t and would have been none of my business.
she’ll still comfort the girl who admitted she wants a nose job
and she’ll say that watching her mother’s battle over her own beauty
made her insecure about her face too,
but she’ll pause in the middle of a sentence where she was going to lie
about being over what she internalized from that self-hatred.
we noticed. it’s like— we know.
we know. we know how love swallows you whole
and spits you out once bitten, twice shy
and tells you to take a look at yourself.

3.

and i think i stumbled into a room too dark—
or just one that was hard to come back out of—
because ten minutes later it’s my turn to cry under neon
and i want so badly for my tears to be perfect, so i perform at grief,
i stain the couch cushions beautifully. i was loved,
and i’ve still got to deal with that. i was loved,
and it made me more brittle. i want to crack my heart down the middle
and see how it reflected me, but that’s happened already.
tonight’s not for putting it back together.

4.

i sob on someone’s shoulder and they tell me my hair is soft
as they run a hand over it comfortingly and it’s all i’ve ever wanted to hear.
i trace a smiling face in the carpet with my finger
and imagine it on my lips. i imagine my lips as anything other
than split, pair it with eyes that are bright with anything other
than tears. look, there’s things i haven’t mourned yet
and i don’t want to get to them all here. this is a party.
these are my friends. i have to trust this shoulder
because i’m crying on the floor of their room
and that’s got to be friendship. that’s got to be something,
because without it, i’d be collapsed on the ground
and that’s not how i want to fall.

5.

in the weak morning i drag myself up by the nails, dig up my bones
and leave the party, but i’m not sure i actually do.
i could still be pinned under florescent secrets,
still listening to the beauty queen’s closet skeletons, still shored up
on someone’s shoulder, still clutching at the carpet like a life raft.
i think i’m not drowning, but i still feel the river in my lungs.
i feel guilty of pulling the party in with me, but then we all sunk into it
because we all felt heavy. i’m waterlogged,
and so are these eyes, but i must be ready to close them.
i must be ready to leave this behind.

you had this story you liked sharing
about the first time i went to visit you—

i was obsessed with the ambulances we saw
on the drive there when you picked me up,

drawn to their lights like the other kind of sirens,
fitted with a better understanding of violent delights

at age three than i have now in wiser years,
but it's all starting to come back to me.

you drove me out later just so we could pass the hospital again,
and whatever i was looking for, i must have found it, because

it looked to you like i was having the best day of my life.
i would have a bad one there after years of us both growing old,

stranded in those barren white emergency rooms,
but back then, it must have been you and me in the car,

listening to the sounds of red and blue, with youthful laughter
spreading across all lanes of traffic, covering those killjoy stop signs.

in a few weeks, i will see you rose-covered.
after that, i will never see you again.

here, the water is desperately blue in shades
you’ll wish to suffocate in, with smoke
you’ll want to make part of your lungs.
here, there are stars, but you won’t want
to find them: the trees will steal your attention
before your gaze travels that high and then bury it
underneath their roots where all the other secrets go.
here, i don’t even mind that the wind tore the sunglasses
from my face— it was doing me a favor anyway,
making every color devastatingly bright in my vision. and here,
i could even get used to telling you how far apart
our hearts are in kilometers, every day, on every high tide.

at a weekend campfire, you find it fitting to mention to us that
saturday is a word the color of the flames— orange,
but with promises of gold woven through to brighten it up.
we learn about other orange things too, like vivaldi’s music,
massachusetts, the letter g, and the direction east.
very few things are purple, you tell us, just the number four
and girls’ names ending with y. we ask about our names,
and i learn my other friend’s name is lime green, but navy blue
in the longer form of it that we never call him. mine is like
the red of the shirt i’m wearing, she claims, only more wine-dark.
hers is a soft turquoise, almost melting into an overhead moon gray.

i dream that i wake up that night and shake her out of sleep, asking
what color is love? she responds that love is the color of stars
and before i can ask if she means white or gas-flame blue
or the red of a sun death, she taps each of the freckles on my face,
drawing constellation lines before pointing to the brown of my eyes
and saying love, love, love. i didn’t get to ask for her interpretation,
but if the pain of knowing something was a dream had a color,
i’d say it was the black tucked behind closed eyelids.

poem v

there is a version of me who has never known loss
and she screams at me that she’s still the one in the right.

i make phone calls like my grandfather makes emergency room visits
and we both have too many numbers in our heads.
he’s counting down, i’m having nineteen slip through my fingertips.
the last time he crossed state lines he was eighty pounds lighter than before
and the last time he crossed my porch he was a man in skin
too loose for him, drooping over tired bones. i almost do not let him in
because my door is closed to strangers, but i make the exception.

there’s nothing to do, because there’s nothing to worry about.
my grandmother still lives in phoenix and that boy on the news
never sank in the lake and got to graduate this month.
i didn’t keep the last birthday card with her name signed on it
or check the yearbook because i never saw him without a mask on.
death is absurd, almost as much as life. i told it to go back
to its creation myth and now it digs itself into a hole
under my family’s apple tree, lies down and stares
into an empty sky. if i never think about it, maybe the wind
and weather will seal it away from us fools.

don’t even worry about it, i said to the stranger. i’ll take the highway
and fix the garden for you. i’ll even bring the shovel myself.
she did a good job while she was here, didn’t she? the wind’s low
and there’s so much space between raindrops. i’ll be outside;
maybe, just this once, you can let go of the numbers too.

poem vi

you and your claws, bright as blood.
has gentleness always been your prey?

the graffiti on the picture frame glass says it best:
the wound won't close. suddenly your bones
have turned to ice in summer and no layer will cover
your shame when you extend your arms out
in an aching plea for tenderness. all the kind words
written about you hidden in your drawer are addressed
on too-thin paper to the version of you at sixteen
and you want to mail them all back and beg
for them to say something nice to the great impersonator
you are now. no one could've warned you then
about how broken mirrors seem soft today:
you want someone like yourself to hold you close.
but when you let go, you reassemble into the scared animal
with too many glassy teeth, bleeding on the side of the road.
you're tempted to break the frame but don't. the darkness of ink
is the only thing shielding you from the fangs behind it.

poem vii

turns out, the moment i felt most cared for
all of fall was that buzzfeed quiz- i know,
it's wild- that we all took on love languages.

yours was words of affirmation, right?

right. and then you all went around the table
and said something you loved about me
that i didn't realize you thought. i was helpless.

when i smiled, you said you spotted the moment
the cracks between my ribs split wide open,
but i wasn't smiling for you. give me back the sting
in my side, the ache in my jaw, the weight of trusting
that it is a kind world, a world that will hold me
as i cling to the laughter that hurts my chest.

you couldn't find it in you to hand me
the right kind of pain. i talk about love
as if i've opened every vein in my body,
because i'd rearrange every drop of my blood
for someone to know my heart is right there
and it's ready to handle the beating. my name
is red on my friends' lips from it, but when you speak
you find a way to bleach all the color from that sound.

love is a bit like watching someone die, you see.
i will step out of the white and stand with those of mine
willing to bleed their true colors, ready to live in crimson.