Funny how
it was in the hospital waiting room –
the stiff seat cushions, white lights, and
September’s Women’s Health magazine –
where, despite the nurse at reception, 
I first felt like a real person.

We’ve given so much up already
and we keeping handing out more:
innocence and virginity,
bravery and youth,
teeth and hair.

These poems are lists of my grievances.
I don’t want to have been beautiful
only when in a hospital gown – or in memoriam.
We both know the gay bar is the only place
where it’s hot to have your ass out –
even for me.

Do me a favor,
tell me how beautiful I am,
in this moment, in this light, 
in this ignorance.

Funny how wounding it is
to become sick. There’s no way to recover
from something like that. I presented a piece of myself
as if I was presenting a pearl.

How funny.

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Header photograph by Jen Ippensen
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I want to rot.
I want to decompose.
I want the furnace of my crumbling organs to burn
so hot that it kills the grass above my grave.

Then I want it to grow back,
slowly, around the edges.

Until tender shoots nestle against the downy pelt of a rabbit.
Until velvet lips of a deer tear me out by my roots.
Until the water in my stalks dissolve into its bloodstream
and I spill through the chambers of its heart.

Thrumming as my petals unfurl and face the summer sun.
Thrumming with wild, vibrating insects harvesting the pollen from my buds,
dripping, sticky and viscous, down waxen walls.

Not the moldering sleep of the dead,
but the explosive cacophony of an afterlife.

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Header photograph by Jen Ippensen
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I’ve always loved the way the witch alders,
studding the bypass shoulders by the airport,
grow red in the fall, their scarlet tentacles the shade
of afternoon. It’s too bad they belong to you.

The black gum trees across from the police station
crawl like wooly tarantula legs into the pale sky,
but I rarely see them now, the way I don’t see
the fog-breathed gas station beer cave, the red sushi sign.

I have the grocery store that never had your pretzels,
the car wash with the spidering palm tree logo,
the small manmade lake near the gas company
that in late fall collects ducks like misshapen stars.

I can’t go to the bigger hardware store,
the one cottoned with spring flowers on the sidewalk
next to the Italian place. You could be there,
although you weren’t one for fixing things.

I gave up the library; you gave me the new liquor store.
I know you shop at the supermarket lined with evergreens;
you may as well live there, so I never go.
Instead I watch the sunrise, knowing the sunset will become yours.

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Header photograph by Holly Pelesky
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I hope you are with me
when the long sleep comes.
The thick warmth of memory
on our eyelids, like sunlight
pressed to the backs of leaves.
The faces we have known
blurring into gentle shadows.
Words, frozen like footprints
in evening snow, still
behind us in the dark valley.
The love that we have been,
rising, naked, into the air.

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Header photograph by Holly Pelesky
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

When the world ended,

we scavenged the things we could and vowed
to become witches together. A childhood

necessity. I searched my blackened cupboard 
for the flowers we’d dried, petals bleached

with age and ash.

You’d lost your crystal ball but gathered up
all the bones nearby.

I helped you find them, little white shards,
so burnt they’d crumble to the touch

until you were left with a dozen pieces.
The resilient parts.

Now, you watch the bones clatter, pay attention
to the forms they make.

One day, I hope the world will hold up its hands,
and in its palms, beating like a frightened bird,

show you its bleeding heart.

But I don’t bother with the bones anymore.

I roam the ash, find a good spot, and toss the seeds
that will shape it all anew.

In a few years
the world will still be a wasteland, but we’ll
watch that wasteland bloom.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I don’t remember exactly
when the ladybugs came,
but I know that morning
the sky was clear,
until they came rolling in,
a storm of shadow
that swarmed our house.
They hummed, pulsated, trembled,
weaving a thick blanket
that drove out all the light.

When my sister cried out,
I put on the brave face
my parents taught me, a consequence
of familial love corrupted.
A love that bore down on us
like the horde of insects above our head.

I once found ladybugs beautiful,
and by themselves they were,
but together they were ominous,
a show of unexpected force,
a thing I never knew to fear.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

If you are overpowered
by the weight of
this life

If everything here
aims at the throat

Then come take a seat
with me, for I, too,
am articulate in the
dialect of grief

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

It starts with wondering
which bridges would need crossing and which
direction the river curved, which four
roads you would need to get there when,
in fact, it is the same road with four different names. 

The road at the end of your street takes you
to the far side of the city, beyond where
the stalled train stops you, beyond the 
smokestack shadow and the swinging cranes above.

When you have reached the place
you set out for, you realize you can just stay
on that same road and drive, 
drive out toward all the other towns and cities,
if you don’t stop, if your car has gas,
if you have the time, if you are
unbounded.

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Header photograph by Jen Ippensen
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

But how to explain to you the phantoms that motivate a hunger like mine? Once I had a hankering for honey so strong I ate nothing without it for a week. Our honey jar was old, the golden insides turned cold—in some places, crystalized. You told me to just buy another jar, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the effort, the bees, all those trips back and forth to the hive. To not attempt to use it up seemed, to me, a cruelty. The night before you finally admitted there was someone else, I was contentedly working my way through the same old jar. It was late and I was tired and there were no clean knives left to scoop out the dregs, so I used a fork. When you caught me in the dim of the kitchen, I had already excavated down to the bottommost layer, where there was a surprise pocket of soft remains, a place where the crystals hadn’t yet hardened. I was only trying to salvage the last of that smoothness. Still it kept slipping through the tines.

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Header photograph by Jen Ippensen
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

my body, your body, our bodies, bodies, fading in and out and in and out until suddenly we are both nothing, nothing but whispers that echo like leaves beneath our feet, nothing but whispers like the creaking of a tree on a hill, nothing but whispers like i love you to people we will never hold again 

i am in and out and in and out of love with you, with me, with your body as we tumble into bed, with my hair as i will it to grow every day, with the growing comfort of us, i love you like i love the sun after an especially cold winter, the way the sun can take away all the darkness that festers inside me, i wonder if we would fall in love again if given a chance, i wonder if we were meant to be or if we were a mistake i learned to love, i have made so many mistakes and i have never learned how to love any of them and still i wonder if you love me the same way i loved the girl i used to be

i don’t think this is a love poem, i am so scared, scared that if your eyes ever set upon this, scared that if you ever heard these words, these whispers, the faint murmuring of my voice, you would think that i don’t love you, that i don’t love you with my whole heart, when the truth is my body is made of love for you, but this isn’t a love poem, it’s an outpouring, a river from my fingertips, from my mouth, a form of love that i just don’t know how to give

time let us grow up, grow close, shed our skin for new bodies, sometimes i wonder how you can love me after everything i’ve done, after everyone i’ve been, how many people have you loved by loving me, will you continue to love me if i continue to fade, will you love me if i fade in and out and in and out, i am not a ghost but i am scared that someday i might disappear, fade away until i am only a memory of someone you could have loved

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Header photograph by Jen Ippensen
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson