Bleeding raspberries.

There was grass there, grew to where our kneecaps rested and we could see each blade like when we caught glimpses of our eyelashes that pressed against sunsets and light that glowed golden. We were still fresh, still young, and still burning. We had swallowed embers that sizzled into the hair that melted into our necks and into our backs. I have been seeing your eyes, all dark and full of mud in places where they don’t quite belong like when we found birthmarks in the bend of our knees and we were wide-eyed, surprised at the sight of them. Some days I think I might break, split in half or wake up and find that my limbs had snapped off like the twigs underneath our shoes, that my neck won’t hold my head. There are water bottles half empty and wrinkled white sheets and I’m trying to figure out where exactly it all went wrong, why you rubbed my fingers until they were bleeding raspberries, until they looked like summer afternoons just to fade behind all the dust in my pockets and under winter’s breath. Why you waited until I let the sun light up our cheekbones and uncover the shadows I kept in clenched fists. I’m turning my cold shoulders at the way the traffic lights twinkle the same way you did. Green, red, and yellow whispers in the dead of night: blinking and blazing like shivering fires. The running water still holds your gaze inside it’s droplets and I watch them until the tips of my fingers turn into raisins and the bath smells like december again. Maybe I’m still getting used to seeing you where you don’t belong, turning walls into haunted homes and draping over my eyes like cobwebs I can’t get rid of.

old eyes and something beautiful.

Your eyes were brighter than I said they were, they were glassy and wide but still quiet like the calm before the storm, the breeze before the hurricane. I could spend hours staring at them but I could only ever catch glimpses of them like dust in my palms, a moment before they would scatter and disperse. I had ghosts dancing in front of me once, coming in colors like they were made of pomegranate seeds and cherry blossoms and their limbs were awkward and young, fragile and made of milk. They had your eyes so I inhaled them like cigarette smoke and sewed them into my lungs, feeling their bones rub against my ribs as I turned gold in the sun and they explode at the ends of my fingers when I want them to. I hope your ghosts melt into your eyelids like our sweaty shoulder blades in mid-summer, like old fruit and when my hair still tasted like sea-salt. I’m starting to peel the tangles from my insides, realizing that sometimes we can’t help falling apart. And that we can hold our bones until they rattle loose but we can’t hold them once they crumble. There is something beautiful about the way we break, like cities that couldn’t hold up but they cause fires that blaze for miles, red with orange specks against blue skies and green eyes.

honey and sugar.

I woke with eyes made of clouds, cotton candy pink, peeling back against the yellow creeping in through the blinds and pouring over window sills. My dreams made noises I thought only existed in nightmares, in quiet corners, behind doors with broken hinges we thought we had locked. You slept in my lashes, slipped inside the spaces between my teeth and I listened to the songs my wrists would make to ignore hearing you. In my sleep, the corners of your mouth taste like honey but we know that isn’t true. We know the moon likes to turn your eyes into fireflies and coat your lips with sugar. And when the howling fades and hides behind dawn, our skin grows cold. Our whispers come out in heavy sighs, damp like they had been dipped in the ocean and pulled back out again. You had words floating out of your mouth like glass, ready to rip me apart, to turn my skin into loose strings. In the morning, you had your hands on my milk thighs, counting each bruise with the tips of your fingers. You told me how good it felt to have your palms on my bones and your nails in my spine. I told you how much better it would feel with my hands around your neck.

I am enough.

It is sort of ironic maybe that summer did not melt away with the taste of maple syrup and orange juice in my mouth but instead ended with the taste of iron like I swallowed the change out of everyone’s back pockets.

I feel the way winter is slowly starting to bloom and usually this is all boxes of cigarettes and blankets that never cover my feet but the air is like an arrow right to my lungs and I’m tired of not letting them expand like I know they should.

Maybe the truth is, I don’t know how to be okay without him and I don’t think that anyone else could love my crooked bones and the way I put too much into everything too soon.

But most of all, I think that with the cold winds is coming something better, something bigger.

I am enough.

I am enough.

I am enough.

I’m not afraid to say it anymore and I’m being brave and realizing how okay and beautiful it really is to stand on my own with my chin up towards the sky.

"You wouldn’t mind leaving me behind."

It feels like static and it burns my ears with the distortion and noise but I can never quite find where it’s coming from. I keep thinking it’s in the empty spaces between me and you, cradled in the lonely state lines that have nothing else to hold. That maybe it’s in the way you say my name because you have to, not because it tastes like lumps of sugar on your tongue. I could fall into the ocean and make a home under the tides until I grow gills and a fish tail. I’ll have pearls for teeth and the starfish will replace your hands over my breasts where the tips of your fingers memorized the curves. And you wouldn’t mind leaving me behind.

“Welcome to paradise.”

You knew how to smile and make it last even after it had gone. Flashes of your teeth and pouted pink lips every single time I closed my eyes like a quiet tattoo etched into the insides of my eyelids. My skin was crawling against yours from the heat and the more I sighed, the more your fingernails dug into my hips. I was lost—somewhere in the middle of the ocean—but you had been found simultaneously between my thighs and something about that made it alright. The floorboards shook underneath us, like a house that cried over what it had taken and what it could never give back. And the stars peeked through the sky like tiny pinholes, your face half made of milk and half hidden in the shadows that lurked there. Every thrust made you more discouraged, like you were trying to find something that was not there. Hunting for skin over limbs only to find bone, a hard interior where everything should be soft and sweet like teaspoons of sugar on your tongue. You wanted a postcard from the sea. “Welcome to paradise,” it would say and instead you found something that formed like spider webs in the corners of ourselves everywhere we’d go. So you finished with moans that grew shallow underneath the groans of frustration, the ocean leaving me salted and dry and you pulled out a cigarette to fill the room with something other than regret. The ceiling above the layer of smoky air was beginning to chip away, I remember and I watched while you buried your head in your hands, the taste of copper and sulfur somewhere in-between my teeth. Welcome to paradise indeed.