To you,

with the voice like branches,

crisp throat and bird-tongued:

isolation took you nowhere

except sprouted limbs in the roots of your scalp

and grew resentment to the big man in the sky.

I’ve always associated you with thunder,

with windowpanes, borrowed rain,

and the occasional telephone cracks

that carried our voices past Nevada and Kentucky.

I became fluent in silence years ago, but you still heard me

seas away, and we washed the night with dilated pupils.

I wanted to hold the moon,

milky rinds like my plastic bag flesh –

pliant and flimsy and at the edge of blooming wings.

We were only fourteen, with hairline cracks

seamed across china glass skin,

you were chipped in the most beautiful way

and I thought if I carefully engulfed you

between wrinkled palms

like the nestled warmth of a newborn bird,

you could be fixed.

It was the summer I grew a year

in three months,

you showed me sun-kissed wrists

and the art of shrinking

through whistle fingers and teacups.

We were skins of ocean water,

bodies woven from hurricanes and cherry-lipped horizons,

half empty with a belly full of stones.

You, with the stomach stuffed with graveyards,

churned oceans of crimson corpses from your esophagus.

You were always the one with the best stories,

the loudest laugh, the biggest smile,

you said you liked the feel of adrenaline

draped across your shoulders

at five in the morning,

you said you never felt more alive

bathed in a thousand shards and veins and blood.

What were you thinking

when you scraped a silver blade against your throat,

were you scared?

Did you forget how humans weren’t made

to be sliced, were never chiseled statues

or fistfuls of organs from gutted fish?

What was it like to forget yourself,

to not recognize the angles of your limbs, your ankles,

to watch your knuckles wither, curl like dying leaves?

Maybe this is what death tastes like,

squeezed between your irises like unwanted pearls,

polishing an artificial smile,

maybe this is where we first began to decay –

between visions and illusions,

medusa in the mirror and distorted appendages,

eyes grow old after a hundred days of interpretation.

It’s that time of year again –

when crows cease commentations

and clouds roast themselves until burnt,

I am still clasping onto one end

of this yellow diamond sky,

half bleached with your mayonnaise bones,

the moon screams hunger, hunger.

I can imagine your wild horse eyes

capturing every motion of wind.

We are breathing, we are alive

but our faces wilt under indigo light.

This is how we’ll grow –

sleep-deprived,

but forever dancing.

Look

I’m just like you,

full

     and empty

          and everything

               and nothing

     and all the spaces

tucked

10.

     in between.

We grew up clutched between hands

of mothers,

fingers that boxed languages

and mastered the practice

of crafting lullabies

from steady shifting bodies,

cradling our ever-changing outlines

tightly against familiar bones

perhaps to decrease surface area,

our shadows melt

9.

     into another

footsteps outgrow each year,

each month

the moon unveils its blooming image

across a galactic sky,

suspended luminescence,

and for a second we remember

where we came from,

milestones and timelines,

all 365 days of a cycle

we trespassed,

for a second

8.

     we forget

every heartbreak,

white lies and promises

crumpled with ash,

every goodbye.

Or maybe it was a new

7.

     beginning.

Look how beautiful the sun

emerges,

fire and clouds,

a painted symmetry

like a rising Phoenix,

like wings

6.

     I never found

you.

left after she died,

only two years

before I was thrown into unfamiliar territory.

I’ve been searching for answers

in all the wrong places:

in empty mugs

and picture frames

and notebooks.

5,

I’ve been wondering

how time manipulates

and creases its knees

into an hourglass,

how we get swept away

4.

     like dust,

how minutes and words

spell miscalculated eternities across tongues –

when we were young,

the skies danced for us

and we forever questioned

3.

     Why?

2.

I’m beginning to understand

why we shatter into fragments

and incomplete thoughts,

when ribcages just aren’t enough

to sew hearts into flesh

sometimes

nights suffocate us

and tears become another means of communication,

why we lose pieces of ourselves

in order to make room for change,

enduring transformations.

Tonight,

I’ll fold the corners of my paper skin

1.

     into an origami crane,

creating wings

that will one day rise to reclaim

a kaleidoscope sky,

and when time lifts me into the clouds,

I will finally fly.