kerri

in the left-hand window of the train, there are 2 suns, and i can’t look at either of them.

the voices took their time reaching the window. they were languid and warm, and i couldn’t tell which language they were in aside from summer and sighing

i looked from the sun to the moon, and for a moment felt my place and the rotation of the world as if it were some kind of secret. my body tilted, leaning into the motion, thinking it could roll over and follow the sun forever clockwise. i had the rare sensation that i was the only one who knew.

keep watching me, I beg of you, or I might disappear. I don’t know where I go when you blink, I vanish in your sleep, unless you think to dream of me. do me a favor darling, lean into that lucidity, retrace my shoulder with your tongue behind your eyelids. allow me to exist.

i just realized i live with my best friends and we have a cat. isn’t that like the dream?

i loved you for your music, and left you just the same

I will not be that for you which justifies your fiction or your love for the absurd. that is to say, I will pour the final sip of coffee down the drain, because it is cold and grainy and I cannot stand the sorry face of martyrdom.

saturday

you are gnawing on the core of a mango over the kitchen sink

as I ignore a movie from the couch.

your weekend job thinks you have a stomach bug,

today, but I know better.

there is strength in your eyelashes, downturned, and your long hair is sticky at the ends,

and you have never been more beautiful.

your hands searched my body,

inch by inch,

and I wanted them on me even while I knew what you were looking for—

cracks in the facade, and I held strong for some time

but eventually gave in

because your pretty, scarred fingers had felt so nice anywhere you put them.

you found what you were looking for,

that hidden fault, between my ribs,

slipped in and curled your knuckles

wedging a strong grip underneath to peel back a layer and

I bent, like aluminum

and you saw me, open, for a night and a day

and I couldn’t bear it,

and ran away.

in your city, in your shoes, I walk. I ache to rewrite this terrain, to add new layers to this stinging familiarity. but, as I speak with someone i think is kinder than you, I see you in the dusky chatter of every blue-lit bar we pass. i cannot help but look for you on those street corners, where we kissed and i recoiled. she is quiet, you fill the silence. your ambivalence has made its home in my bones, your coldness on my sleeve.

I read your favorite book, and understood, better than you might, the danger of your passivity.

drip coffee, ceramic cup, silicone lid. sitting in college campus traffic with the sun definitively risen reminds me of the recent past when I was never late to class, except that one time. but I exist on the other side of things now, there’s rent to pay and desires to ignore. still, I arrive early to my destination.

the tattoo I gave myself in my bedroom at age 16 has not faded, though the metaphors I use to justify it have changed. beaming from my hipbone, it’s been sweetly kissed in orange light, has whispered to me on lonely nights. it represents a permanence I could not have understood when I first sunk the needle into my skin. it shows me, tenderly, the way my body almost forgets sharpness, how surrounding scars have sealed and whitened, how phases are vital, how I have lived. the jar of ink, which I bought from walmart and told my mom was for a painting, still sits among watercolors in my childhood bedroom, and smiles at me from hundreds of miles away.

will u let me imagine some feelings for u?

pills, sideways;

you, on me;

i, the spiral again;

sun, behind the city.

I think it is okay for different parts of yourself to yearn for different things