socially awkward.

You didn’t know me when I was 
young enough to believe that 
you could bloom love like
orchids on the kitchen table. 

My father loved my mother
the way Degas loved his ballerinas.
He wanted to carve her out of marble,
but forgot that statues
don’t have heartbeats. 

— only cold palms, and 
        silk folds of stone. 

How do you learn to love when you were 
never taught to as a child? 

Trial and error is a difficult price to pay when you
want to know the recipe to make the perfect love. 

Two hearts, two artichokes. 
Too many reasons not to say Goodnight just yet. 

Tonight as I walked underneath romanticized moonlight
and picadilly streetlights,  I saw a man and a woman dancing. 

It was two in the morning and the streets were quiet 
and the old man sitting corner-side was yelling about the end of
the world, but still they swayed into each other’s skin wordlessly,
draping two shadows across the road that melted into one. 

In her red dress she smiled into his chest and he held her
like her shoulders were the only thing keeping him alive, and 

I, alone, looked in my purse for a way to remember, but found instead

two hearts, two artichokes
and too many reasons not to say Goodnight
just yet. 

A star slit its throat on the moon tonight, 
bled over its white basin and watched the color drain from its skin.

My English teacher calls those who read poetry sensitive, 
so maybe it’s not my fault that the smallest things break me, 
not my fault that even my blood cells are cracking like glass. 

My words have become fractures as of late, splintered bones, 
dark skeletons of lost poems and journeys home from places
where love sinks underneath the floorboards.

I can’t concentrate on these letters, on the way that
I’m supposed to draw out I love you’s into five-hundred character stationary.
I can only look at your nouns and say verbs. I can only look at
your skin and see coordinates for a place I’d like to call Ours, 

because there’s nothing more honest than loving in fragments, 
than cuts in the riverbank and the broken bottles that wash up
as sea glass beaches. There’s nothing more to it than the way
a lover can interject a kiss by telling you that you’re beautiful
or the way my skin is paused by tree lines, the way
my fingertips spread out like deltas into flesh-toned seas.  

Last night the moon was a bloodied red and today I painted
my lips the same color. On my way home at one in the morning
from God know’s where, time was cut off by a passerby, and change
scattered between us like broken words. When I looked into her eyes
I saw two full moons that she had stolen from streetlights. 

Everything is getting muddied these days.

Streetlights in eyes and verbs in places of nouns.
Words are broken mechanisms and 
I’m leaning on language as a weak-ankled crutch, 

but with pen against page I can still hear my blood cells cracking;
breaking; with each comma, 
I fracture. 

Good god, what I would give 
for another body next to mine tonight.

I couldn’t tell you which is more difficult —
this physical loneliness, or this draft that I feel between
my heart valves, like I left a window open somewhere in the
third story of my soul, and the flame of my candle is blowing
inward and outward, swaying with each of your sleeping
breaths.

You and I sat dockside with our feet hanging over the edge
like we were fishing hooks trying to catch young love
around our ankles. We were quiet, so that we wouldn’t scare
it away. But when I cupped my ears to my palms I heard
the sound of the atlantic, and suddenly summers became
that much harder to bear.  

Things tend to get to me so easily these days. 

Today has always been the loneliest holiday. When I look up
through the crack of the window, I can see the north star, but
I’m not sure if it’s guiding me home or leaving me behind. 

I sliced my finger open on cranberry sauce because I was thinking
about how love always finds me this time of the year when
I need it the most but am
too deep to understand it.  

It’s Christmas. 
Where is my miracle? 

We need lullabies in the morning more than we do at night.
- - - 

How many of you poets have written about
the topography of your lover’s back 
at three in the morning? 

Everything breaks before dawn. My spine cracks when I 
arch it, like I’m breaking in my bones
for another Sunday. 

The sun rises and yawns.
Shifting through the sky in slippered feet, 
he brews himself a cup of coffee and reads the features in the
morning paper. 

He sighs.   

They raised the price of living —
suicide rates have gone up. 

If I could kiss the palms of your soul
I would.

Tell me:
Are we two faces or a vase? 

When we lay with our heads turned inward
and our hands pressed together in prayer
I can’t tell which is more real: 

the two of us or the space in between.