We can stick anything into the fog
and make it look like a ghost
but tonight
let us not become tragedies.
We are not funeral homes
with propane tanks in our windows,
lookin’ like cemeteries.
Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go.
Let go.
Tonight
let’s turn our silly wrists so far backwards
the razor blades in our pencil tips
can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside.
Step into this
with your airplane parts.
Move forward
and repeat after me with your heart:
“I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hated myself.”
Make love to me
like you know I am better
than the worst thing I ever did.
Go slow.
I’m new to this.
But I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop
without jumping.
I have realized
that the moon
did not have to be full for us to love it,
that we are not tragedies
stranded here beneath it,
that if my heart
really broke
every time I fell from love
I’d be able to offer you confetti by now.
But hearts don’t break,
y’all,
they bruise and get better.
We were never tragedies.
We were emergencies.
You call 9 – 1 – 1.
Tell them I’m having a fantastic time.
*
Print Flocking
from Last American Valentine Anthology
He wrote to you with firecracker chalk
on a blackboard background
from a free-standing landing pad
held together by choir claps
over buttercups spraying
out the mouths of doves.
Getting to his point
would require starting over
at the outer loop
of your ripple effect
swinging monkey bar style
arm over arm
parallel to parallel
minding the gaps.
Sometimes
it takes a deeper breath
to hover on holy
against the current.
He wasn’t falling out of love with you.
He was falling out of ways to tell you.
