whenever you breathe out, i breathe in

this sun, everything bloomed.

the forests got so dense
they obscured paths and openings,
sprouted lungs and limbs,
grew a head of hair so full
that rainfall never kissed the dirt.

this blessed season, a saint returned to me.
i was higher for months and months.
i awoke each day like i hadn’t seen sunlight--
or you, funny enough-- in years.

i see your face in running creeks,
all shades of green swaying,
sunlight shooting through the treetops
and sparkling off of the water,
off of your blonde hair.

this was when i became part of it;
i grew roots deeper than the tallest tree
and spread my seed as far as it would reach.
i was so, so cool. i burned so bright,
even the flies didn’t touch me.

once a month, i decide to come home.
our skin is dewy, so i lay in the dirt.
i can feel the singing birds
and the sounds of your movements
and the song playing from your phone.

if you saw me like this,
you’d remind me i'm stunting my growth;
i make angels in the grass and beg
for a new beginning.

familiar objects grow teeth in the dark;
our bicycles look carnivorous by porchlight.

i tell you i’m fine
while digging my nails into the places
your name still sleeps.
maybe it’s love, molting again.
i open the fridge, and the milk sings,
and i think about dying beside you
in some cheap house with wallpaper that
peels like sunburned shoulders.

the sky has split its ribs open
just to show us all that pink.
all i write about is a california that has
missed you.

she topples onto me like a newborn deer,
becomes nervous with newfound glands.
this is the dream i had before i knew i was sleeping.
i let her breath sigh into my face; her skin,
weathered, pear blossoms of sunspots cover her shoulders.
she touches my face like she’s unsure how to touch
someone without swallowing them whole.

she tries, though, despite it.

my ribs bow like old wood beneath her, rotting,
warping to cradle her. i trace along her vertebrae that
one day i’ll write a whole book about her,
that i see the world in the divots of her skin the way
roadkill sees its last sun. because of this,
she begs me to put her into words,
in case she doesn't have the chance again --

i tell her about how the salt of the earth is a poem,
just like this.

i swore i buried her,
but she keeps moving in the walls.
i smell her in mildew, in bathwater,
under the kitchen tiles. her tongue meets
the roof of her mouth and becomes a root in damp soil,
heavy and swollen and pregnant with water.
being sandwiched between
linoleum and fluorescent beams, i revisit myself;
her nausea becomes me, hiding hurt in the hallway
and bleeding it out after bedtime.

i can’t even imagine you doing something like that.
i can’t even imagine why you would.

my body is a ledger of
her debts.

i remember how she trembled,
how her ribcage vibrated like strings
of a broken instrument, hollow,
humming in the quiet rooms of houses
i could never call home.

her grief moves furniture
while we sleep; my spine rearranges,
nails in my soft tissue, vertebrae
cracking softly to the rhythm
of her restlessness.

i sit back and feel the joints
of my hips respond to the pressure.

in this one, the sun performs surgery on me.

my heart cavity is open to the risk of clear skies
and birdsongs, and i am so empty of everything;
bits and pieces of the last few years
manifest themselves in dreams.
there is nothing that i won't let fill me.

that’s the curse baked into all love:
you will lose it eventually.

i snuff out candles with my fingers,
break teeth on cherry pits, wipe blood on my jeans.
in these dreams i have, i let the door lock behind me.
i know i'd be weightless in summer,
but in the cold, my hands are numb.

the porch light bruises my knees
like a kneeling prayer.
her mother folds collars the way the river folds boats.

when she touches my throat, i can hear snow falling;
it spreads into her cupboards, tollbooths,
the knots in the fenceposts.
sometimes i find myself sewn into
the seam of her dress.

she is made of
borrowed light, dented where the sun
went soft on her ribs. she grew second mouths
in the small hollows of her body.
she tells me she drives past the places
she hated once, just to be sure
they’re still standing.

i count her blood like church money,
like receipts. at night,
the crickets sound like a needle skipping.
i find solace in it; you, on the road where we reversed
into a phone booth. you, in the few places where
the world has already ended.

i drift back to heavy houses,
to river towns swollen with missing girls;
the air there is as sharp as a blade
in her baptismal water.