I fall in love and make friends with the same words.

What signals do you want?
What warning do you need?

I want you on your knees.

How to title an admission?
I’m curious not just for touch.
I don’t just want to be watched, I want to be seen.
I fear narcissism, but all these poems I paint are self portraits.
I am learning not to fear the voyeur.
I rise in fantasies of an un-touching audience.
Is it truth or surrender, regret or revenge that makes me crave this imbalanced attraction?
What if I let myself want?
I chose to love you as a friend in the hope it will buy us some time.
Will make this last longer, allow you to linger.

Would you care if you couldn’t have me?

I take your hand, let it travel my knee.
Let it crawl up my stomach and into my mouth.
I devour your want
Fuck marry kill: blue, violet, ochre.
I dare you to feel that hunger for all this color.
Can you hear me through all this red?

It’s interesting the things men will ask you in bars
they ask about work, about are you from here, are you alone
you asked for my email without knowing how deeply i reside “offline” in the online of dot coms and hyperlinks.
my secrets are spilled across the internet.

You told me you loved me at the second bar
but I’ll pretend to forget.
What you meant to say was: I could love you — I would love you, could fall if you let me.
We could be that for each other. I could be the one to want to hold your details.

I’m grateful for the stranger who asked about priority. Who let me tell them about in body.
About how right now, my biggest priority is being in this body. Practicing it in all its shapes. Feeling all the sensations of this surrounding. The bad and the ugly and the deep grief, so that when I felt joy, when I met love, I would know how to experience it that much more deeply.

Last week three people tell me I radiate joy and resilience and I cringe at the later.
This week, I hide from every how are you. I pride myself in honestly, in the reality of this grief, but still feel shy to admit how I weeped.

You trace the sun on my wrist and ask what my childhood was like.
i find a poem from fifteen:

‘they call her little miss sunshine but there’s a storm in her mind.
crashing burning, destroying, masking that night
she’s alone and the smile dies. the rain comes pouring from her eyes.
they call her little miss sunshine, cause they don’t know what happens inside’

I feel this erupting joy because i have felt the dark depths of my grief
I dance like this because my body has been bruised
I shake like this cause i have been held down, pinned to my back.
I move like this because i have been told to stay still.
I touch my own body — hips, arms, neck and hair -- because this is mine and i get to!
so when you see me dancing, know the invitation is not to touch
it is to admit, to tell me the truth, to be honest about the wounds that make you look beyond yourself — open your eyes!
Now, close them.
do you hear that percussion?
can you guess where we’re going?
what would your hips do if you let them go first?
where would your hands go if you let them touch?
What story is there in your own container?

Do you agree its the saddest people that have the best sex?
that know how to love the deepest, let salts mix and make crystals?
You’re happy in this crisis.
So how could I love you, how could the sex be any good if you don’t think about war?
If you aren’t contemplating the endings amongst us?

Tell me about the galaxies in ash. Who did you have to burn to become this iteration?
We remind each other of past versions, maybe past lives.
Either way things we are moving away from, evolving beyond.
But the familiarity brews a certain kind of attraction, like being able to cradle a younger you, console and confirm that broken part, the wounded version you’ve already left and had to leave but sometimes still miss.
The part of you departed that in lost moments you wish you could return to.
The you before your mom died.
Before your dad got sick.
The you before you realized.
Before you remembered.

I laugh that this is simpler.
I would question how I treat boys if I didn’t love women so much.
I wonder if I would love men more if I didn’t fear them so much.
I wonder if I would love men more if I had been around any growing up.
It would feel cringe if it didn’t feel so true.
Maybe I should be more careful.

I tell three men how I was hurt, turned, and taken.
I tell you I like to play and I wonder what you think that allows.

I play a song on repeat that wails.
I play Breathing Song on loop until I weep.
Run laps around the lake until I can’t breathe, can’t leave, until the heaving is physical.
I collapse in a loop of trees and let memory scream.

During my visit, you tell me I have a beautiful cry.
You whisper in my ear you want to destroy me.
What is it with me and murderous men?

Sitting on your floor in candle light, I ask, again, “what is your name” and I receive a different answer.
Your hands on my neck. Who are you when you’re angry?
If I hadn’t left how would you have hurt me?
What would you do when I told you I didn’t believe in your god?

I ride the line of Memorial tracing quartz.
I am so malleable right now, I feel like fiction.
And so what if we did?
We agree there’s more pain in practice and more practice in pain.
So fine, make a story of me.