gathering ghosts

love(less)

keep me close and
love me like a memory
you never had.
(don’t tell me
when you let go)

untitled

friday & you’re forgiven like a bad bruise,
slowly but surely. the weekend sinks its teeth
into you & tells you to let the pain linger.

call me by any name

before you call me by my own. i’ve saved my hands for holding something worth keeping. maybe this is it. maybe it’s just a mirage. if i keep wondering, it won’t even be real. so keep wishing on me to be your whisper — a ghost that’s mistaken for a shadow. and when you see me in the dark, call out to me.

nocturnality

did you know
that the comb jelly
glows? we mark what’s
magic by color & forget
what’s left in the dark.
when we close our eyes,
we can count what’s
left unseen.

rotten fruit

in the dead of night
i feel the most alive.
i’m remembering how close
we were when i peel myself like
a fruit, bearing my flesh for
feasting. nostalgia always
leaves me empty.

i’m remembering how close
we were when we’d imagine
ourselves as roadkill, burnt
into this memory of a buzzkill
summer. the sun would scrape
our skin raw, buzzcuts and
bone all that’s left of us.

fraught. faint. i’m imagining us
more than a fever dream, but
the idea becomes bitter in my mouth
and dies in the darkness.

distress signals

if you’re a shell then i am
simply sifting through sand,
collecting fossils and calling
them gifts sent from a god
i do not know. please, let me
love just this once. or, let me
believe i can be loved. i will trace
love letters on shores i don’t
belong in, and you will read
them as elegies. i want loving.
i am longing. i keep losing.

topography of the self

my heart is harbored in coastlines
along the countryside. i wonder if
my bones were scattered along the
bottom of the ocean, if they would
make their way back together. after
all, it is easy to take up space in the sea.
perhaps i will never return to the surface.

the older i get, the less i see myself.
i am fading. that is, i am losing my
reflection. i try to crawl out of my skin
by making it smaller. time traces its
teeth against me, chips away at my
edges. i contemplate resisting,
then realize i can’t change the past.

replica

in some alternate universe i am not who you want me to be. the versions i’ve locked away are out in the open here and i ask them how it feels to not tarnish in tempests or shrink from grief. these forms of me turn their heads in confusion as if my tongue is not the same, as if my words have warped through time or space or distance between us.

the world stands still, grief-stricken

you’re in the garden when it happens. your mother comes up to you, speaking with words that don’t sound like her own. you cannot parse what she says, save for a sorry between sentences. a sudden wave of grief pulls you down with gravity, yet you are anywhere but this garden, and you wish too to be gone.

How gorgeous is this?

my heart is harbored in coastlines
along the countryside. i wonder if
my bones were scattered along the
bottom of the ocean, if they would
make their way back together.

ooof. Your imagery is so spot on. Loving your thread and the very clear images you use to paint a picture!