my mother dug me from seashells:
two specks of sand from saltwater left to rest
on the vanity in a resort room.

As whirlpool. As wand. As window. As one 
whole gaze refracted in the watch’s glass.
As widowed fragments of metaphor. As wolf
scrabbling at hearth, wearing its form down
to the size of a lap.

before then i had never been kissed
on the ankle. there were no right
angles on the fourth floor: corridors
curved around pillars for privacy,
escalators around atriums for
vertigo.

Write what you know
Should I try to twist a poem out of memories
I don’t have of birthdays and graduations and holidays
Write what you know

Cut her down at every opportunity because
it’s not criticism, it’s love, and it’s not fatshaming
if she’s just fat and you’re warning her off the
extra few cookies that will stop a boy from loving her body.

i swallowed their fridge the other day and felt in my gullet
a brief percussion of twenty beers, but that was it.

i wonder what the boy was thinking | yeah
the geomancer explained | there was math
in the culture of cotton candy calculus
& in the garden

I’m an altar boy
untouched by life
watching Christ breathing
slow and hard on the cross

there is a mattress, and you
pull me towards you. strewn
amongst the mud and grass,
we are intertwined. you are
salt and copper.

Watch the coast. Angular substance
of the world tucked in a teal & shining
duvet; tread quietly. As poetry taught us:
in the end the things we love give back
our names.

and this time, when you curl up in bed next to me, it is because we want the warmth of familiar bodies. and when you say that the night is lonely, i stretch my arms only to fill the space of that absence.

you're drunk. good. write me a love song. for no-one else. just me.

This is for the poem that didn’t want to attend Literature class,
the one that never raised her hand unless asked for directly.

Write.

Write about the time they placed your nephew in your arms, and you oh-so-briefly thought about becoming a parent, even though you know you’d be a shitty one.

Write.

The dark red of his buttons reminded him of nenek’s sirih. Her stained teeth coloured his childhood, as did her stories of magical beings and wise kings, and the water spirits that would claim him if he didn’t listen to his elders.

I am eighteen years old and I am standing at the steps of
a books and music megastore. It is nineteen ninety-eight.