socially awkward.

It’s evening now and I sit thinking of diners 
and please comes that I should’ve responded to.
A phone call the other night ended with four cigarettes at the end of each line
and a voice telling me that I would never know what it meant to love,
and then silence — a dial tone — and a quiet
walk in the moonlight, wondering if everyone knew me
better than I knew myself. 

This is a poem about a lot of things, but mostly it’s a poem about
how words can get lost so easily between two, and how
stories can be built out of nothing, filling the space
between the last kiss and today’s nothing
like an eighth sea.

A boy once read a poem of mine and saw his own silhouette in it, 
thinking that I was referring to his eyes,
to his lips, 
to the way he touched me
                                             just so,

but it was really of a boy whose name
I never knew, who left me a flower at my doorstep
somewhere in Pennsylvania, who I loved simply because
he came without a story, simply because he didn’t know
mine. 

There are days where the sky is porcelain and we hold it
between our lips to take a sip. Pale days. Stale days. The coffee has grown cold
and the neighbor has the mower on again. 

There are so many things I want to say to you tonight
out of all nights 

but I don’t know where to begin any longer. 

3:61 a.m.

Tell me something. 
Something the size of a thimble.

Tell me something that you keep inside of you
that you can only reach after pieces of you
fall away like matryoshka shells
and all that’s left is a small, beating

heart. 

Would you tell me something nice tonight?

  like what songs the bees are singing while the snow
                 falls across our eyelids or rather     

what box you would put me in 
if you had to pack us all away

      and                  and
                                  

Do you remember anything from before you were born?

I do. The vagueness of drowning when you didn’t know
that there was such a thing as a first breath. 

Would you tell me something sweet tonight? 

Something                about a war that ending /
                                 or of a gypsy who finally found a home. 

Something
that’ll make 
the night
seem a little
bit
warmer. 

Hello?

I can’t feel my hands. 

The moon is quivering.
and                                                           I can’t remember my name. 

Your hands are like swollen hearts.
Your heart is the size of small hands.

I love you because I like to think that family
is more than just a word and a predisposition to love when
you really don’t. 

When I wake up in the morning and see you laying beside me
with your hand wrapped around my finger and your arm around
my neck, I wonder what sort of dreams you had to have
come into my room so late at night.

You were wearing only one sock and when I touched
your cheek with my fingertip you stirred,
saw me,
and smiled. 

You are four years old and I still keep the picture
you drew of the two of us 
in the pocket of my journal, 

of me in one home
and you underneath another, 

with a path of blue
between us both. 

Seismologists keep mistaking our heartbeats for earthquakes
and smokers’ hands quiver like San Francisco.

When the world cries out in ecstasy and shudders,
hundreds of people die, but do we ever think to mourn
our lovemaking
too? 

Writing these poems hurts in all the places it shouldn’t.

Please. 
Don’t pick at your scabs to see if you can find a story underneath.
Red continents line your knees and all of our stories begin the same, 
with “I was drunk and fell on the sidewalk and cracked open my skin
and bled a memoir.”

Leave those stones unturned. Save them for another poor soul
who doesn’t know that this world means killing yourself 
to prove that you’re a phoenix, 

                         rising. 

Because it’s one a.m. now and I’m coughing up a bloody poem
into tissue paper. With my head over the toilet bowl I’m choking out
regurgitated aches. I feel my heart beating beneath my fingernails
and by three a.m. I’ll have given myself open heart surgery 
by the glow of my computer screen. 

This poem is my attempt at self-defibrillation. 

I can save myself
just fine. 

It’s the same feeling as going to the drugstore
and watching a boy in a university sweatshirt
buy a box of heart-shaped chocolates and a 30 
of coors light. 

Scoffing, you stare at the caramels you’re holding in line
and think of the casual dates you’ll go on tomorrow, think of
the boys you’ll hold hands with and the ones who
you know you won’t. 

You put on the heels that make you look five years older
and run into the liquor store to see the guy with 
green eyes who looks at you like you’re someone more than a
seventeen-year-old on a saturday night buying svedka
for her friends, and you wonder, once more, if it’s so wrong
to give the ones who like you a chance. 

He’ll ask you things about your world and you’ll say no when you
mean yes. You’ll tell him that you’re in your third year of university
and that you major in English, and you realize how easy it is
to become someone that you only are in wish-lists.

“It was nice seeing you,” he’ll say, slipping in how he majors in 
business, and he’ll pass you your change and let his hand brush
up against yours, and you’ll wonder what it’d be like
to kiss a twenty-five year old who thinks that you’re twenty-two.  

Before you leave you’ll want to ask him for coffee this Wednesday,
not because you’re lonely but because you want to see how quickly
you can make someone stop looking at you as if you were beautiful,
to see if he’ll ever look at you as if you were just another seventeen-year old
buying vodka on a saturday night. 

But instead you give him a smile that you save only for
strangers and bed talk and wonder how easy it’d be to become the person
that he wishes you were,

and how easy it’d be to become the person that you wish you could
be. 

When you peeled back my heart like a clementine
you found that there were enough seeds to grow an orchard

but like the rest you spit them out
and smiled at me without any teeth.  

I dreamt you had the hands of my last love, and
when I woke, I was treading water.

Consume the world or let the world consume you,
but you’ll never find an in-between, not when you’re not here
with me.  

This is the reason, though I never said, that I was always so sad: 

Nobody notices the seasons between seasons, no one sees
how the moon swings across the sky each night.

It’s always A to B, this to that, always a rush to get to another place
where we don’t belong, instead of stopping one more time to pick a daffodil
off the side of the road.

You changed from reds to orange to a bare-boned winter
all while I held your hand in my own
but I said nothing, only watched as you looked at yourself
and saw just the same pale shade of
you.  

There are those who wade through seas while other down them
on the rocks.

The last rain caught me with my back against the pavement.
Laying there with my mouth agape, a cut on my thigh from hypocrisy,
I couldn’t tell if I was bleeding into the sky
or if the sky was bleeding into me,

couldn’t tell  if it was I who consumed the world
or if it was the world that consumed me.

I apologize if the
words are a little smudged
around the edges tonight.

I have so many things to say but
the rain keeps washing them
into gutters and sidewalk cracks
and all I have left are a few dying lines
that are only good for lining the walls 
inside my bones.

I’d like to write a poem about silence
but already there is too much noise.