Frost

Thank you for the poem, the one about the first time any man I loved could look at my loneliness and know from the inside what it means to live outside America, in America, about what it felt like to clasp hands and tell each other about the words in our languages, about maps, about the places our families arrived here from, carrying ribcage xylophones, thank you for sinking your teeth down into my honeydew heart and filling me with salt, for the night that I looked back into a lover who saw me,...

In 2007 I was twenty-four, outside a club somewhere in the city, sitting on a sidewalk taking pulls from a flask with this guy I had kept running into over the years. When I met him, he was a Louis Vuitton runway model, but he was twenty-two now, and washed up, most beautiful boy I had ever seen up close. He looked like a painting of a person, and his boyfriends were always awful. We loved being pretty, but we were worried about it, too. We were high as all get-out on something he’d paid for,...

whether or not we are alcoholics; we know about the lead pipes, my dude and our jokes end in punchlines like “health insurance” It’s not that I don’t fall in love, it’s just that I’m realistic about how we’re all digging holes with our fingers and our teeth Like, who gets married anymore when we can just fuck each other senseless and get drunk and cry in parking garage construction sites at 3 am And show up to the Food Not Bombs meeting hungover and still disenchanted but doing it anyway because...

I need to believe you are good, in case this never gets better. In case there is never a resolution, in case all that is left here is silence, the kind that is thick, palpable. In case it is just ghosts. In case it someday feels like that town in Pennsylvania, the one with the fire underneath that has been sitting on a burning mine labyrinth for 56 years, what if you are like that? What if you never actually leave? I have washed the sheets, but I am still finding your hair on pillowcases, so...

I am harboring pieces of him like fugitives, stuck here, a cluster of cells and soul, and this ghost does not want to go. Inside my body it is a collection of memories, too. We made this in the dark or in the morning, he and I, each time with our hands in each other’s hair, each time with poems and confessions and exclamations of love. This ghost is here because once, somebody loved me. I place my hands over my abdomen, I press down, I say, Did you just come here to die? Did you, darling disaster,...