your name on my tongue

a stone I’m not used to yet,

warm from the river.

we sit in the quiet dark,

learning each other’s silence....

i don’t call them shadows anymore.

shadows are harmless.

these things are something else—

the negative of a photograph,

burned onto the wall long after the subject walked away.

they aren’t lurking.

they’re waiting.

that’s worse.

lurking is what cats do.

waiting is what gods do.

last night i saw one lean against my dresser,

head bent like it was reading my diary.

its fingers made of moth wings,

t...

sometimes i think stigma is just another word for skin.

like, the thing you can’t peel off without bleeding.

the way people press their eyes into you

& you feel it burning,

like their gaze is acid,

like you are guilty for existing too loudly,

or maybe too quietly.

singularity—

i like that word.

makes me feel like i’m both the last star

and the first wound.

like i’m collapsing in on myself

but als...

sometimes i think about how even the flowers that rot on my windowsill

still release sugar into the air.

like they don’t know they’re dying.

or maybe they do,

and that’s the point.

like—what if the body keeps trying to love the world

even as it collapses?

what if the bruise is the proof of touch?

what if sweetness leaks easiest through the split skin?

my mother told me once not to keep dead thin...

i never asked to be peace.

i never asked to be your white flag in feather form, your postcard, your tattoo on the ankle of a girl who still writes love letters to the boy who left.

i am not peace. i am hunger. i am small bones rattling under sky. i am wings beating like broken clocks. i am the sound that happens when the world is too loud and i cut through it anyway.

but you—humans—caged me insi...

three people standing in a room. that’s how it starts.

no. three hearts standing in one body.

no. three knives, circling the same throat.

her:

i only wanted to be wanted. that’s it. the crime. i laugh too loud when he looks at me, and when he touches my wrist it feels like the sky has remembered my name, but then i think of her, how her eyes are whole oceans, how she makes me want to write my...

it started with a key. not mine, but pressed into my palm like a promise, like a wound that wouldn’t clot. they said, you are the bearer now. like i had a choice. like i could toss it in the river and sleep easy.

the key fit every door but never the ones i wanted. it opened houses i had never lived in, rooms where the air still carried the shape of someone else’s breath. behind each door, a sto...

i. words of affirmation

you say i love you but what i hear is i am leaving soon. you call me beautiful but what i hear is for now. i have learned to translate softness into expiration dates, compliments into countdowns. there is a window in my chest that only lets light in when it’s cloudy. i write down every good thing you say, just in case i need proof later that i was something more than t...

the trees are watching. they have mouths but no teeth, waiting for you to soften. their arms are thin, breakable, but they don’t need strength. only patience. only time.

you walk because the path is there. because forward is better than back, even if both lead nowhere. the red is climbing your ankles, wrapping around your calves like a gentle hand. like a wound that doesn’t close.

somewhere, a v...

i. shanghai, 3:42 a.m.

the boy on the rooftop has a cigarette between his fingers, but he doesn’t smoke. he just likes the way it burns down to the filter, slow and ruinous, the way everything else in his life is, except faster. the moon hangs above him, fat and bright, like it knows something he doesn’t. he remembers learning once that it’s just a rock catching sunlight, a thief of brightness...