Let’s call it social hemophilia.
Someone touches me and I bleed for days.

I’ve been carrying around names of old love in my skin like I’m wet cement
and I can’t seem to scratch off the reasons why we’re all in such a rush
to find someone who will carve u + me 4ever into their throats.

There’s still a photograph of the two of us somewhere in Manhattan.
I think of that often. More so than I think of you.

Sometimes the recipients of my poems change halfway in between
like I’m trying to hoard all of my lives into one poem so I’ll never have
to write another.

Let’s start with this.

Late autumns have always harbored the loneliest people
and the loneliest people have always found solace in me.

I can never read old journal entries after I’m done writing them
because there are some things that always remain raw and bleeding
long after I’ve put them to bed.
But sometimes the only words that comfort me
are my own.

Dear Diary,
Today I met a boy whose hands I wanted to crack open and put
my own between. What do I do now?

Dear Diary,
I can’t remember the last poem I read before he kissed me
and that makes me sadder than it should. My world is messy
and lamplit. Shutters closed. Shudders open.

And again.

Dear Diary,
My hands shake when I think of your hands shaking
and I’m sorry if my existence is a run-on sentence,

but I have no time for semi-colons and caesuras when
I’m trying to stop myself from bleeding out of these
lines.

I’m holding words underneath my tongue
like I’m smuggling secrets across some border between us
in a country that no one has ever known how to name.

Here is our world. Here, without words.

Have I ever told you how many stories I keep like dirt
in the folds of my skin? I was them out each night
so I don’t wake up each morning remembering everything
I didn’t have the courage to say.

Lord,

be my savior.

Nail poetry into my palms so I don’t sacrifice my flesh
to a feeling that I don’t understand.

Winter has left me bone dry.
Driftwood sentiments keep finding their way onshore
and I’m still ankle-deep in a continent that I’ve never heard of
and the natives won’t tell me where their heart is.