thirteen years old on
a summer afternoon, i grinned
at your suggestion, the
scenic route home, adventure
for mother and son,
passed a murky lake and your
eyes traveled backwards in
time, found the story of the
first boy who made you feel
beautiful, and the notion
cracked my mind open:

in my own mother, worlds i didn’t
know, an entire life before
i drew a single breath

what did you think i
would be on the first day
i wept in your palms, did
you imagine i would
soar and stumble the
way i have, were you
prepared for the times
my words would have
sharp edges, the days
my eyes would
become broken dams?

on the day i realized
the world was going to
screech to a halt, my
first thought was how
to get home to your reach,
thirty years old and running
to the first arms that
ever caught me

i am always carrying you,
into each beginning, into
the moments my hands
shake, into the nights i
am unsure i know
which way to walk, into
the conversations where
my voice is on the
verge of breaking

you are a thousand things
to me and one, all at
once, layered and simple,
too big to be held by words
and a single, clear feeling,
blossoming yellow in
the constant hope

I sat down to write tonight, and I’ve done more backspacing than building. When did I get so cautious about stacking words into worlds?

Part of me wonders if I’m still shaking off scar tissue from this goddamn pandemic, from watching the world grind to a halt, all the calendar days shaken loose, falling in defeat to the hardwood floor. Am I hesitant to write because I’m afraid everything will change mid-sentence?

I’ve been able to write in flashes. In an age of trusting only the present, my poetry has flourished. I’ve got poems on the melancholy view of a world through a window, poems on surprise glimpses of love, on the stories that surprised me on a hard damn year, on the moments a man felt unprecedented, on friendships like buoys in the swallowing vast. But to write paragraphs, to sit with the life I’ve been carving out and try to arrange it into something real and solid, has felt beyond reach.

I am still training my hands to be gentle in their carrying of this self. I am an impatient healer, a lifelong devotee to the idea that I can will my way through most anything, and I don’t know what to do with a voice box that chokes where it once knew to say something.

I’ve written this, some version of it, four or five times. They don’t need to know you don’t know what to say, some part of me grumbles, and yet this pours out every time I start wringing. Held hostage, once more, by the the most honest thing growing within me.

–

I read through old writing tonight. I think I hoped, in doing so, I’d remember my rhythms. Instead, I found myself stretching the stories out beneath the light, squinting in wonder at how time has changed everything and nothing.

A few weeks ago, I shared a conversation with an ex, somebody I hadn’t spoken with in years. We were clumsy in our cadences, tentative in the exchange. How does this go? Eventually, at least partly, we fell into step, exchanging jokes and updates. At some point, he asked me a question in earnest: Did I regret our time together? The answer, simple as an exhale, was no. Our story had its time and place, and we left both of those boys behind to become ourselves, two men messaging one another across geographies.

I study myself in the mirror and search for signs of aging. I am reminded of being a child, my younger sister and I wading out into the ocean and jumping along ocean waves. How certain we were we’d remained in the same spot, our feet lifting and falling onto the same sand, only to turn around and find we’d drifted fifty-one houses away from our family. So it is with time, and so I study my face and strain to see parts of me I am beginning to let go to make room for what’s next.

I am a different lover, thankfully, than I was at 22. And 25. And 29. My understanding of what love is, can be, the shapes it can take, has evolved right along with my story. In so many ways, I am still the same, my heart in love a wellspring of poetry and playlists and gestures big and small, but I have shed a few old habits. No more swallowing what I need or explaining away the hard parts of somebody I’m trying to love. I want to see him, want to show myself, in the honest light. I understand love, now, to be far more flexible than I’d imagined, stretching itself to grow and flourish in whatever container it finds.

We find our reflections a hundred different ways – in old photographs, in new lovers, in the stories we once lived – and we are reminded of time, brushing us tenderly onward underfoot.

–

Today, a friend and I reminisced about how, the very first time we met, we felt like friends from past lives rediscovering one another. I remember seeing him, introducing myself and driving him to a dinner with a few other people, and realizing, oh, we are going to be friends. Two and a half years later, drunk on the hardwood floor of my first New York apartment, we discovered we’d both felt it. We drank more, laughed like boys, kept telling each other, in different ways, how much we loved each other.

If anything has been a thread through this timeline, it is the love I didn’t plan for. People who wandered into my life, saw me, and decided to stay. There are people who have loved me through every era of my being, through bad haircuts and worse clothing choices, through heartbreaks and triumphs alike. I am bewildered, sometimes, by the fact that I am loved by people who have seen me on my ugliest day, found me in the deepest tangle of shame, stayed with me through the worst thing I’ve ever done.

I am still learning to love the hard parts of myself, still working to believe that I can be seen in the honest light and still so powerfully loved. Time has changed so much and so little. In this way, I hope the ocean around me devotes to its motions, gently guiding my feet, ushering me onward, onward, onward.

remember when
i pulled you into the hollow
of my fractured ribcage,
we practiced
breathing, what a
thing to
believe in forevers
without blinking

i scribbled the future,
paragraphs in permanent marker,
showed you and
saw you

time was a makeshift line
of polaroid stories, arranged
with tender hands across
the hardwood floor, before
the wind, human hurricane,
time coming loose like
fibers from the floorboards

to call more than one place home
is always to be aching for somewhere,
sitting in an airplane seat,
craving the earth and everyone on it,
ginger ale and crackers,
untethered and wanting

i am sorry for everything i have
missed and will miss, sorry for the
way my voice breaks, sorry i am so
often there when i am here,
i am here, even when i’m there

we once believed there was a
time and place –– for us, for
the aching and healing, the
births and deaths of our
highest hopes, regrets on
the shelf, out of reach, we
were believers, then, we

talking quantum physics and
human stories on the hardwood floor,
i am struck by the brightness
of your eyes, intertwined
with gentleness, you
are a tangle of compassion
and critical thinking, brush strokes
against synapses illuminated, there
is music in the way the planets align

what are we, if not creators,
lovers and thinkers, carriers of
every story we’ve survived and
every story we hope survives us?

you are the outstretched hand, welcoming,
ushering everything forward, better,
forget the broken pavement behind us,
miles ahead there is more for us, if we
understand there is magic to believing
in magic, hope in holding reality
in these shaking, aching palms, you
are withness, bearing witness
to our wildest becoming

you are warm conversation into the
early hours, glass empty on the
table but inspiration overflowing,
a story unraveling and coming together
in the exact same exhale.

oh, wide-eyed lover,
someday you may just learn
to let a
smile across the dimly lit bar
be a grin, let the
song that played the first time
his lips met yours
be music, let the
things he whispers in blue early hours
be words

perhaps, tender poet,
you can rest
your pen, let the
folded up shirt he left behind
be a hoodie, let the
villains who left scars in their wake
be men, let a
wound, somatic, on your open sternum
be healed

or, bright-hued painter,
you may just keep on
embellishing, let the
lunch under overcast skies
be an adventure, let the
hand finding yours while sleeping
be a love song, let the
hard days that didn’t break you
be a story.

what is there to say
here, now,
the road behind us
littered with
crumpled up notions
of who we could be
in each other’s
best light

i type, backspace,
type again, and pause,
stammering fingertips,
clumsy now in my knowing
you, what is there to
say, now, about all that

and there is rhythm,
i wonder if you feel it,
the song of a muscle
long left unused, remember
this tempo, dancing
for the makeshift
moment, do you
feel

time falling over us,
ominous blanket, crossed
out calendar days
stretching apart between
us, scar tissue bleeding dry
the soil underfoot

i know better now
than to believe my words
can convince fragments back
together, know better
yet i still try to tell you
something beautiful,
revolutionary, handprint
on your sternum, i was here

coq au vin and steak frites,
one of each, swap your
plate with mine, catch
our breath from running
through chilled streets,
laughing, what about this
place, pear martini, stories
of theme parks, what about
this

my handwriting is
feverish, graphite dusting
the margins, i want to forget
nothing, cannot permit
the blurring of a single
whisker, somehow this time
i am sure it’s important

i have never been one to
run down a road i haven’t
yet vetted, and yet
i am running, chasing
you through city streets
under lamplight, what about
this place, you ask me, my
eyes settling on you, what
about this

the calendar year shattered and
spilled in splinters across
the floor, and we
were so broken by the
brokenness we very
nearly missed the
way breaking makes room
for new worlds

you are unlike anyone
i’ve ever allowed myself
to imagine,
unprecedented, and
i can’t quit wondering
whether our eyes would have
found each other in
the unbroken age

i’m drinking gin and
watching someone sigh and
set his story on the lamplit tile,
my god, the worlds we
carry, and i’m seeing you,
pupils dilated, and
i’m remembering how
addictive it is to be seen,
sober and chasing you
through subway stations,
i feel drunk and unafraid
of the hangover

sweep things free from
the coffee table, make some
room for your sweating
back, i want to watch you
in this moment, paint
your picture over
every old, broken plan

glass of wine at my lips
as the new world unfurls,
the here, now, the
everything, catching
light in wild fragments.

what is growing
if not learning to trust
our broken fragments to
come back together
in the case we lose our
footing in the following
of our wildest whims

nobody keeps themselves safe
by trying to glance ahead,
pages flipping, skimming
paragraphs for clues, the
writing’s never on the wall
’til it is, ’til it
stares us down in
scarlet ink

won’t save my skin
by holding my breath, can’t
taste the truth and shroud
myself away at the
same time, sing to myself
softly, i may not know
where this road will
carry me, but these
palms are known in the
art of reassembling
a shattered self

plant your kiss against
my jawline and
there grows a poem
on the way someone’s face
never quite looks the same
as it does at 1:31 a.m., eyes
locked in indigo lighting,
what a privilege to witness
you firsthand, i can’t,
for the life of me,
pull my eyes away

and there, in the place
where your head met
my sternum, a poem for
the way my wildest,
brightest plans pale so
abruptly the moment they
are stood beside what is
real and unimagined

when i tell you that
you make me feel poetry,
i mean to say that
there are wildflowers
stretching themselves across
my wanting limbs, reaching,
with the rest of me, for you