you said, "how ready
we were to make love
to bones."



My childhood: I never could get my eyes to bulge like SpongeBob's.

Conceited, I said I'm not finished yet and pulled on your ponytails like shafts of rain, and I hoped you would overlook my skin. I rode a purple Scooter and sometimes I would get onto my bicycle and pray that I wouldn't forget. You wore red hair once and sometimes it was black, and sometimes you were teaching me how not to eat and sometimes you were teaching me how to have tea parties in a backyard. At some point you were Irish and at some point you were Indian. Once I caught you Chinese and we sat and laughed in my backyard on a swing that couldn't contain us, and we giggled until you confessed that you had peed yourself, and for a second I had felt so close to you that I reached down and pricked my skin with fingernails like steel and glue.

Once I had hoped for a romance that could transcend words and flesh, until you were Kevin and you made fun of my elbows, and I turned around and I said,



Seventeen lines. Nine hours.

The friar picks flowers and tells the future in the palms of hands that wish for tithes, that beg for healing. When he opens his eyes, out fall shadows, herbs, and we stepped on them in our haste to hold his hand. He said I will let you take her eyes and hold them but only if, and we interrupted him for fear of slowing down. Mercutio tells me he dreams of fairies and when he throws her dress up over her head, we hide the truth from him because there is more to be had, there is more that he will find. We make daisy-chain ladders and draw swords from pockets of skin, lips. Maybe we die, once or twice, I don't remember. When I die, first—or maybe it's you, who knows—we listen to a silent rumbling from somewhere around our heads and our feet, we whisper, if we could take infatuation and bee-keep it, then—



What more could we have done?

I used to swim until my skin was as dry as the canyons and scalps of the sun. I would lean back onto the towel and clutch my thighs together like sad-sorry lovers. When I got out of showers I felt like a human had been liberated from inside me, a separate identity, and I would seduce myself beside bathroom walls, romanticize my image inside of mirrors. A mermaid, a lover, a poet and a goddess; but underneath me lurked a prize-winning author, a humanitarian, a valedictorian, a Pulitzer and a Nobel. Inside my veins lurked paper and work and time and study and inside of my body yearned a focus, and I would stare into that mirror until I had disappeared. Once I drank a bottle of water in one deep gulp and you had leaned against the counter and said, "You like water, don't you?"

There was nothing more we could have done. Nothing. I wanted to tear myself a new skin but I was anxious about



You. In my dreams you are inside my kitchen.

In my dreams you are in my front yard, holding a ball under your arm, pricking my arms for fat. In my dreams you are a girl in a dark room on a computer, making love. In my dreams you are a mother with lineage hair and in my dreams you are a father with blue eyes. In my dreams you are little dead girls in quiet basements and in my dreams you are boys I have never quite known. In my dreams you are a man who knows too much and who I would like to tell more. In my dreams you are pairs of girls and one of you has opted out, quietly skirting away long thick dresses. In my dreams you are breaking mirrors and in my dreams you are seven thousand different people I have seen before, held in my palm, maybe loved a little bit; but they hold your lips and they steal your words.

In my dreams you are alive and in my dreams you are hiding and when I wake up I wonder who you are, because in my dreams you are always, always sick;



They have grown two bones now. They blossom from the ridges of my arm. Let's see you, Kevin, let's see you handle these.

On my hairline you can see the white blood. I tricked myself into thinking I was blue, all blue, inside. Someone once told me Anne Frank was going to Hell for her sins, and someone told me that SpongeBob could be arrested for disturbing the peace.

Nothing, I know. I turned around and I said nothing. If we could, then maybe we could've held onto it, pressed it into our palms until it resembled something more like love than sacrifice. It was about you and me and something I have never been able to pinpoint, between and without us. In my dreams I have to take care of you.

I took my hand and bit down, hard. I was surprised when the open, fragmented into little teeth-shaped indents—that the broken skin filled with red promise.



The darkness sat back on its hind legs, stitched to your ankles, and rocked you. I looked down, too afraid to say the words. I had wanted to hold your hand but I was scared of the familiarity, terrified of the way your flesh might fit inside mine.

and i said, "how ready we
were to
die."