Based on true things

I dreamed you were pressing words
out of your fingertips, palms cradling starlight
in dark mornings. Then, sun beaming
on the hardwood as the dark turned golden.
I help you through the words
but no one lives here without dying.

Do we fear the survival
or the danger of drowning more?
Where are the threads that sew us back together?
How many colors of blue can they weave?

The inner truth in our bellies will release
and make us stand still, even if for a moment.
The things that go unnoticed, rushed through.
Record on the turn table.
Sourdough in the oven.
Memory of his smell in the backseat after dinner.
Foreignness of stepping onto new
earth after the plane touches down.

Eyelashes. Interlocked ankles.

There are galaxies of words I’d say
to you in the dark corners.
But the ones I’d say in sun-drenched
open hallways, I’d scream for an audience.

Your eyes opened all the locked doors.
Nebulae. Prisms.
Hung neon purple welcome signs.

But now, it’s been raining for two days
beating on my window like shock waves.
It is relentless. The memory knocking at night,
fever dreams of my lips landing and pausing.
Condensation gripping the edges
of double-pane glass; of wakefulness
and then going under. A wave.

I am no longer homesick.
Because, home is the place behind my eyes.
Dreading and anticipating the longing;
the call to always re-home what doesn’t fit.
Constantly up for adoption between
the north star and the ones I was made from.
A scattering that only I understand.

I am a tangle of knots of insulating
every heart of every person I’ve ever loved.
What do these buried ropes bloom into?
A refuge. A feeling.
When it comes, it doesn’t destroy me.
I do not run.

My own heart does not eat itself.
I will always break it in half to heal it.

I don’t have to explain the way my body
becomes the universe upon request.
Depths of space within me hold the
generational trauma that lived in the eggs
in my mother, that lived in her mother before her.

But, I am no longer traumatized.
Poetry rewired each synapse.
This rhythm of blood I’ll let you write stories to.
This tune of veins I’ll let you write songs to.

Flicker every light in your dying heart.
My love doesn’t need to be earned.