The plan was to play hard to get, that’s right. I wasn’t just gonna go giving myself away. I’m no easy catch. Can you really see me in fishnets? No. I always find myself slipping out the holes, swimming back out to sea. I’d never been anyone’s sushi roll.

But she, has lips like wasabi. My eyes water every time we kiss. Makes me wish we had a porch swing and a little home. Makes me wish I could right wrongs instead of poems. The heart is a bullet that’s terrified of blood. Love is a windshield wiper in a hurricane. Nothing is ever clear.

You mistake her name for the moon. Mistake porch lights for the stars. And sometimes they are. Her constellations lead me home, ten thousand shades of open, and if there’s one thing in this world I’ve ever known for sure is that this girl is gonna crush me like a small bug, leave me so fucking broken there’ll be body bags beneath my eyes from nights I cried so hard the stars died. But I’m like, go ahead, I’m all yours. I would kiss you in the middle of the ocean during a lightning storm cause I’d rather be left for dead than left to wonder what thunder sounds like. I’m not looking for someone to save me. Life rafts might keep you afloat but they rarely get you anywhere and I’ve got places I want to go. So break me in to, peel back my ribcage and cover every page of my heart with love poems that you will burn some day. The most fertile lands were built by the hands of volcanoes and I want to know what grows beneath the drone of hallmark and roses.

I want your goodbye to feel like explosives, your lips a burning building without fire escapes. Your hips the gates of Hell if I know if Heaven exists. But this will do jus fine. And I want to feel you like life lines on the palms of Jesus when nails went through. Is that really, really creepy? Just in case it is, let me also say that I want you sleepy-eyed in the morning waking at my side like a warm summer sky born from so much softness, the horizon cries every time night fall comes to take you. Let me also say that I want to make you sandwiches and soup. And peanut butter cookies, though the truth is peanut butter is really bad for you cause they grow peanuts in old cotton fields to get the toxins out of the soil. But hey, you like peanut butter, and I like you.

Let me also say that I’ve never seen anything more gorgeous than you were that night the moon bending through the window blinds. I told time by the light casting shadows across your face while you told me the story my grandparents married for sixty three years on the day my grandfather died he lay in bed and said nothing but ‘love, love, love’ then he puckered his lips and kissed my grandmother for the last time. Love love love. Love is like sunshine. Sometimes you have to get burned to know you were there and I want you to know I’m here. Every single part of me, my heart open as the river’s eyes. The first time it sees the ocean. My god, look at those waves. Listen to that thundering tide. Can you imagine anything more frightening? Can you imagine anything more alive?