In my dream they were blue and green

I was briefly addicted to nicotine
when I was too young to buy cigarettes
and in love with a guy who didn’t believe
in brushing his teeth. I was bone-thin
because he didn’t eat.
In this state of being underage
with minimal hygiene and health standards,
I’d leave him sleeping sedated in my bed,
walk to my classroom,
and roam the streets instead,
eyeing the ground for half-finished cigs.
I scavenged mostly from grates and flower pots,
a perpetually-buzzed waif
peering into coffee shop windows
like a ghost through the veil,
envying everyone with purpose,
flushed cheeks, friends.
People have never seemed so precious.
Like the earth from outer space,
beautiful and beyond me.

How I Love Her

how i love her
like the fruit sprouts the seed from
her juicy sweet garden
and a little bird under a dandelion
shivers at a puff of wind,
a gift and a cradle and a
gasp, a startle of feathers
as she sighs under me
grass bends together in the
breeze that starts low and
whirls its way into a siphoning
sky carousel, sending dew drops
sparkling and curving currents
out into the air. i am
spun up into her and
spat out shaken to the bone
and knowing i am hers,
i am of the same heart as
her molten core and
her sprawling rainforests,
and as the stars and
her moon, that minute wanderer.
how i love her
down to my tiniest atom’s
imaginary friend. in her
defense i could start a
tsunami and swallow
it in the same breath.
caught in her light i am
suspended in awakening
like a starstruck asteroid
just before it bursts into flame.
she holds me down and
oceans surround me and
flowers grow under me,
i am unravelling in bloom.

Buoy

In silence we settle on the bench.

“My step-dad died this summer,”
you say after a while.

Every time we really talked that year was in the park.
It always felt like we swam there,
surfaced, then dove back under.

My hair blows in your face and your voice shakes
as you say your mom had just begun to realize she was safe,
and you don’t know what to tell the little girls.

I stayed in their room when I visited you
and wore their swimsuit bottoms to the quarry.
It felt like a mermaid lagoon.
I floated in the algae for so long that everyone was worried,
sky brushing my eyelashes when I woke to you and Buddha splashing towards me.

We stand to leave when the sharpness recedes,
suspended for the length of the lanterned path
before submerging again.