Tesselation Tea

In Order to Crawl in the Right Direction in an Avalanche, One Must First Know Up and Down

To find yourself while

Avalanche sweet, nested in death

You are the girl trapped below, you are the dog

Padding above

To find yourself, lips too long un-kissed

By the depths of yourself

White walled in by the upheaval

Of mountains that never echoed back your throat-song

But came down beckoned to rhythm of his voice

To find yourself, when all you have is

Heart and spoon and hunger, memory coughing up

The jargon of your love for him, how

You still know the temperance of his laugh

Even here, even curled under in the snow of

Latest writhing, the undertow of cold below

And above you,

To find yourself, yes, now

To find yourself and

To spit, if only to know

Which way is up.

A Series of Love Letters

The First

Oh Adam

Couldn’t you see, I wrote your ribs

For you? Look at that woman. She is so full of fruit.

I would rather have no garden at all

Than one where you’ve loved her.

The Second

After lovemaking the male orb web spider

May either leave or be eaten. If he leaves he will die within hours, spent.

When he turns on his back, when she eats his heart for their children

Is that an act of love or contrition, that he need not die

Alone? This: mouth to skin, swallowed vitals, an empty chest.

Something else is being woven.

The Third

The first clock divides the air around it into allotments of heartbeats.

Hollow point bullets of moments; everything is stopped into rhythm. 

Never again does a kiss exist alone, but is spit into the pantheon

Of love’s wry arching. Tally by tally, the clock swears

It can hear the universe sigh.

The Fourth

This is the truth: Love needed postage,

So you were given a mouth. 

Title

The body does not mean what you think it means.

This body says, come home.

You think I am angry because the last time I saw you

I could not crook my fingers for days,

Did not say Come here.

What did soldiers wives say when their men came home?

Mostly the same as when they didn’t:

So many things still the tongue.

I am nursing the soreness of my unkissed mouth.

It should be enough for you that my new lover

Believes I keep too many shoes under my bed,

Has never pulled the boxes out by candle light,

Has never carpeted the floor with photographs and said

What did you mean when you said love?

Why I Paint my Nails 5 Times a Week

You will grieve in the shower with your eyes shut,

Biting the polish off your nails.

It comes away whole, brightly coloured copies

Of the backs of your fingertips,

Bastardized versions of a Van-Gogh choice:

You can still hear her

In your nail beds,

And all the colour

Has leaked out of you. 

Salt Hymnal

Someday I’m going write poetry that isn’t the wind chime

Of what you last told me.

Someday I will only hear you when the storm is so far away

The lightning looks like the fireflies

I used to hold in open palms as a child.

I never wanted to keep anything so bright.

It is why I left gaps in our fingers when you held my hand:

You were never something that could be clasped,

Securely chained around my neck.

Someday I will remember you the way the desert remembers the sea:

How now I live a different kind of sweetness,

Something less hopeful,

But equally vast.

The taste left behind by your mouth

Is still a recipe I am unlearning.

You said my limbs were like butter:

You always wanted me to be the ingredients

For something else.

Some days I still cry.

But you cannot leaven anything

Without a little salt. 

Goodbye for the Spring/Summer

Alrighty, well, I have my final exam of second year in an hour. 

This summer I’m avoiding most of the internet so I can focus on exercise, self-care, and getting healthy. I have my first CBT session in like two days to help me cope better with my PTSD, so that’s scary, and necessary. 

I may update with pictures of my ferret or maybe some writing/crafts, but other than that I am self-banned from tumblr. 

Hope all of you have an amazing spring and summer! <3