the first person in the bloodline to analyze their trauma does so after causing their weight in it.

for years

I became the shape of my anguish. I wasn’t just hurt. I was the hurt.

when you are the wound and the salt

you would do anything to stop the hellfire you have become

but not before

you enact the pain, make it reverberate

into someone else’s lap

say heavy

say here

say here’s heavy

between kindnesses which was how you were loved, wasn’t it?

everything has a catalyst, even you.

in my family it is tradition

to forget what didn’t kill you.

If it was a trauma

We do not call it a trauma.

We don’t call it at all.

I come from two lines of hurt people who’ve spent lifetimes pretending they aren’t hurt people

I come from the ridicule I was met with after realizing this and doing something about it

I come from intense emotions and the shame thrust upon me for having them and all the places I stuffed them in response

I come from the unraveling

then the learning how to upcycle my history

I come from big hearts and bigger armor

from so much love and laughter it makes a partner tell me,

‘your heart is so vast it scares me’

my heart became this

meadow when I started

tending the weeds

that entangled my loved ones

after they grew over my own feet

because you can’t move forward like that.

I have enough space now

I have enough to be a home for myself

and still have guests over

my heart became this meadow

only after

My least favorite thing about being an artist is continually convincing myself I am not one.

Imposter syndrome taunts in a voice that sounds exactly like mine.

Anxiety hands it a microphone.

ADHD plays 52 card pick up with my thoughts-

hyperfixates on negativity.

Invisible illness renders me too damn tired

to fight back.

Capitalism builds an entire amphitheater

for the performance

finds a way to fill the seats and profit

off of my fear.

I am afraid

the art I make will be good

and I will be expected to be good at things.

I am afraid the art I make will be bad

and I will use this as definitive evidence

that I am bad.

(this binary is a false equivalency

I am learning how to surrender

instead of disregarding my creations

and my creativity.)

self-censorship is like mugging yourself.

my voice has enough soundproofing

I didn’t install

in this world hellbent on silencing

femmes, queers,

and so many of us

How can I be my own oppressor too?

the poems I have written

the art I have made

has kept me alive.

If I’m not a writer

if I’m not an artist

then how am I still here?

An eclipse creates a shadow and wonders why it looks like that

I knew you were afraid

of falling

in love.

I never said

(but I wanted to say,)

“don’t.

don’t fall in love.

stand up

in it.”

an eclipse reminds me

that when you lose

enough of something

it becomes something else.

I came to you entirely

terrifying

and at just the wrong enough time

for it to be disguised as the right one.

Time is

an unrelenting god.

the year I realized I loved you

was the same year that unloved us both

the year you lost and lost.

If grief is love out loud

you were always singing.

you are always singing.

Once, it was Johnny Cash’s Hurt at karaoke.

in a space historically hellbent on joy

you sang loss alive.

We had

four seasons

of shedding

version after version

of ourselves together

until what was left was me

wiping snot on my jean shorts

at the sight of you

swan-diving off of our story

again

as if you only feel

in control

mid-air.

I pulled you off so many ledges

but the moon pulls the tide

not the other way around.

Wouldn’t it be so much better

if no one carried anyone?

I can see us standing

Upright

walking

forward.

an eclipse isn’t forever.

it becomes and unbecomes

until it is a whole

and brand new already.

on my most hopeful days,

that is what I wish for us.

I am talking to my mom about a partner.

she stops me mid story to play

a guessing game
‘Wait! Wait! I want to get them all right!
‘Who has a kid on the way?’
‘Oh! Oh! he’s the bartender, isn’t he?’
‘Who lives in New York?’
‘What’s her name?’

this is love:
my mother
adapting in real time
to a future she couldn’t have imagined

for me.

love
abundant
ethereal
omnipotent

I wasn’t raised to think of love
in multitude.

my date and I are curled into one another on the couch
we feed each other candy
by hand

This is the future I couldn’t
have imagined for myself either

talking to my crush
about the people I love
and the ones I hope to
isn’t a thing I knew I’d find.
I ask my date, between gummy bears,

about who makes her weeks:
learning the landscapes
of my lovers is my new favorite
past time

present time

All the years I played
with my own heart for sport
c o l l a p se
when I kiss
the people I care about
or when I listen to them talk
about fucking anything.

I know each of their laughs
by heart,
their catch phrases,
(which I have accidentally stolen)
and their favorite flavors

fresh-squeezed grapefruit.
key lime.
pineapple gummy bears.
vegan icing.

someone I love
makes the best beet based juice
I’ve ever had
and tells me the color is me-
calls it by my name.
my hair isn’t even fuchsia
right now
but it makes sense
like we make sense.

someone I love
danced
in the aisle at rite aid
when I was waiting
for my prescriptions
didn’t even notice anyone else was watching
his eyes locked on me
like I make sense.

there are times I am terrified
of how the world is proving itself to be
and then there’s this.
there’s them.

In defense of telling the people you love you love them:

In defense of walking loves’ long promenade
after falling off that shit so many times:

There is boundless joy
in dance floors. waterfalls of laughter. cheek kisses. hair dye. studded clothing. friends that love you like it’s easy.

in this short short life

there is tall wonder.

every time
I am nursing my ever-breaking heart,
I sing to myself

stay in awe.
stay in awe.

it’s been a year of years.

time, head down

concentrating-

lacing their shoes

like a fever-dream

I trip over

sometimes,

I look at the people I love

and I see cheekbones

and eyelashes.

smiles brave and worn.

In recent weeks I smile at myself

in the mirror

every single time

I step out of the shower.

(it’s liberating to unhold

a grudge.)

sometimes,

I look at the people

I love and I include myself.

tangible

progress

touchable

radiance

personified here.

sometimes,

I look at us, love,

and I stop tripping

counting

measuring

fearing

I look at us

radiant

fever-dream

future.

Polyamory: noun:

The philosophy or state of being in love or romantically involved with more than one person at the same time.

Says the Oxford new American dictionary

I say it is a series of questions

Sometimes in the form of

People

Other times in their natural form:

questions

would you ever ask a parent to choose a

favorite

child?

or tell that child

use one crayon

to forever translate

their colorful imagination

saying, ‘I know

you have worlds to create

but they can’t be blue

and yellow-

pick’

a sibling you love best

one place to feel safety

carve

your friend list to a favored person

your bucket list

to one beautiful dream

are you willing to trim

treasured memories

to a singular instance of joy?

No.

We say we love them all

infinitely

and differently

then why is it still controversial to do this with lovers?

Why is monogamy seen as the makings of an inherently more valuable relationship?

Do you walk by the rose bush

and refuse to inhale because you’ve already smelled lavender today?

Is the food you love most what you eat for every meal?

your favorite color always what you’re wearing?

Pwhat you pick as your passion the only thing you’re allowed to adore?

I know I would pick

my love out

in a field

of flowers

but I find comfort

in knowing

that he would never make me.

I know my capacity for love

to be kaleidoscopic

in blossom but always budding

concentric connected dreams

layered safety

stacked bigger

than my colorful imagination.

I birth a new universe every time I choose

when that choice is love.

It was years ago now

that my mom said,

“I want for you a mad and boundless love.”

I held on to that word-

boundless

and now I can hold so much more.

My shame is a mold that only grows in the parts of me I refuse to shed light on

Do I need a better flashlight?
a braver mouth?
a new dictionary
to find fresh words
to form familiar sounds in new ways?

I need brave spaces to fall apart
without anyone reaching for the thread
to stitch me back together.

I need people who don’t expect me to always be so strong
who know strength to be expansive and multifaceted
that my today strong might be a different shade or color entirely than yesterdays’

I need love woven into safety.

When I do not feel safe enough to name
my trauma
it calls me out of mine
feeds on my everywhere silence

bends me to its always will,
leaves me pretending I am healing
smiling
shrugging in the key of,
‘I don’t care… or

that was so long ago…”

leaves me
crying
like the city water fountain
like everyone wishes in me and I’m not sure
I’ve made any of them come true.

I need to be in community perpetually
with people who remind me
that I am making them come true}
even on the days where I feel impossibly inessential.
I have a voice even when I feel it is in vain.

What I do not make room to speak about
speaks for me.

What I do not share
shrinks me
in solitude
pushes me to be silent

no
to become silence

But the things I have done,
what I’ve lived through,
what I’ve said and what’s been said to me
what I stay up at night lamenting about
does not care about me
is not actually able to care.

(and if it were it would only care about itself, not where I am going)

My past thinks itself funny, thinks itself lesson,
thinks itself the kind of story I should tell
and tell until I do so laughing.

My past knows it is over.
My past sweet-talks my shame
down from the ledge.
It finds my grief up there too writing its’ own poem
My shame will not read their poem
will not write at all
so it grows bigger and bitter.

and my grief keeps telling a story

no one is reading
writes a story
long and knowing (and probably better

than this one)

but I wouldn’t know that-
I never read it either
(not because it doesn’t speak my language
but because it speaks at all
and that confuses me).

How can it know so much about itself and expect me to do the work to understand it?
Then again, how can we do that to each other?

I think the things we carry the longest

and the heaviest are the moments

we were misunderstood.

Sometimes I want to introduce myself
but my arms are heavy with all this carry.

When someone is willing to walk alongside me
it doesn’t change where I am but it does make the path seem possible.

I am still on the roof
I am with the shame
I am at the ledge

but I know I cannot jump
I cannot let my past put me in its’ place
I cannot let my shame shape my speech
let my trauma twist me tortured
marionette me through this life.

I have to tell my story
I have to make spaces for other people to tell their story

even when the trauma says
My story isn’t really worth much.

I say my story is worth exactly as much as it keeps me here telling it.
It got me here
(right here)
and on some days

I know that by the sound of my laughter
a friend’s voice
or even just our breath-
all such holy sounds.

When I feel held, seen, understood
I am reclamation
I can say, ‘this is mine now,

even if sometimes I don’t know how to talk about it
even if sometimes I fake it until I feel it
even if sometimes I barely feel it at all.

I don’t have every word for everything that has happened to me
but what I have is here
but what I have is mine
but what I have is enough for now’
until more words
until more joy
until