late luminescence

(embarrassing): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RN0uMXm7Q1Q4t5-ckUFpjxxALRPS-aPk/view?usp=sharing

(embarrassing 2.0): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jmV8G-qJypjfZnn5eu8oZc_JtDddnNJ7/view

posted on: https://writetheworld.org/?code=3bd44680-09e0-40be-81e4-a18235598cc0#/viewing-a-piece/922352

I’m tired of writing poems about big things.

Instead, I’ll write about you and I, not as a shard of glass
representative of the sand and lightning and broken window panes
on a hazy summer tinged with puffy eyes and runaways who didn’t know
quite, what’d they’d broken.

Just as eyes and a nose and a mouth that envelops
silver spoons in front of a TV and teeth and sink through
soft mango pits, savoring the sweet cold flesh.

Just broad planes and angular collarbones and shoulders
to give way to wild arms waving in the wind like those wavy people
in front of a gas station, gesticulating as if there is a fire within you burning
or a fly in the air you might like to go away, but not kill quite with grandma’s
fly swatter,

imagine the black splotch on the wall

Just sides sloping into embraceable waists and soft cotton T-shirts
and a plush belly of smooth soft skin and a belly button that smiles
in the center, warm and loud and contented, everything anyone
has ever been in our cores, but that doesn’t mean we should judge on
geometry, dear.

Just hip bones that jut out slightly, they need to be known,
and give way to thighs, pillars and soft vessels of love
and secret places -- moles and divots and leg hair

And the best parts, your knees so wrinkled and scarred
with some falls I bet you can’t even remember
You press outward fireworks into them under the table and I screech,
sporadically spilled water at Souplantation and flowers bloom up my bloodstream

But boy, did they also love being skinned on cement and thickets of jasmine bushes
If only to remind me how it felt to be hurt and feel strong
For not crying, and watching the red mingle with dirt

as it all goes down the drain

Just downward shins and quaint ankles and flat feet
Elongated over the years, but still repainted with that hideous midnight blue nail polish
I bought at the dollar store
But the bottoms of our feet, with their weathered heels
and sensitive bottoms that are so serious

That you laugh when I stroke them with my fingertips,
trying to curl away and screaming as if it hurts while
Delighting and aching at being so vulnerable, limbs lashing out
in an attempt to regain reign of your body

And these kisses pressed into our hair,
Chins and elbows resting on our heads until we grow
too tall to be comfortably called children

Now though, we can still stack our heads like Jenga blocks
Just us two, like we used to
Resting our tired heads on one another on car rides
To the mountains and the oceans

You know, the big things.

posted on: https://writetheworld.org/?code=3bd44680-09e0-40be-81e4-a18235598cc0#/viewing-a-piece/921924