fumbling in between wavelengths

when the mountains fell we were stirring honey into our tea

[euplexia]

january

i’m so many miles above california nevada colorado but not you. never ct. the east coast will wash out as you do, and i’ll still have a dream in the airplane that we’re fucking, but in real life you’re down there not probably thinking about last night or this morning or the late one before.

there are so many new things i’m learning to really love in college. like it’s not about the east coast anymore but about my mama’s ancestry, about new york or connecticut exclusively, about UFOs on the quad or spying on a bunch of boys smoking out the window while we were trying to fall asleep. he said so many things. 

like the way his eyes get wide while i’m taking, wide in shock it looks like, but he isn’t he just laughs it off and uses words like absolutely and luxury and and yourself. and i say i don’t know. i shrug but i’m propped up on my elbows so my shoulders barely move. i don’t know. 

he asks for me to do something and i always do, i love it, a not knowing even a little who i am anymore. feeling okay if i started getting Bs. the first time we talked the whole through and through some miracle our pants stayed on. but now it’s straight to it or a quick hour of worship first. or i’m in a meeting thinking about how i want it and then at 1138 you text because you might too. or at least something, a hard on in the middle of the night, a little spoon. 

what i love is california dewey in march. the dead gophers waiting by my bed, and my aunt naked in her garden, and my whole town full of witches. what i love is new york on a hot spring day behind sanders. a middle of the night lying on our stomachs spying on the streetlamps after such consensual sex. 

i miss you and my throat burns we’d touch but you’re six thousand miles away  i keep saying i don’t know. 

[euplexia]

i’d say i was shaped in little ways in the littlest  bits of information she gave me before i turned 19, and  oh the hurricane that came after a new way of feeling the push back i listen to all night and think of you all night awake lying next to me in a single bed in college in a dorm room where the curtains don't close all the way where it's never dark but for me inside it's the deep indigo of not knowing  a color i wouldn’t want to show you,  a goodbye we barely spent leaving  now the days fall in quiet white petals where you shouldn’t have touched her now when i say yes i mean it more than ever  but somehow that’s stopped meaning anything 

[euplexia]

i get published in little bits by bits and bit by bit you ebb away till my skin pulls back the worst part now is that i'm violated when you don't touch me like the shame comes as you go (my advancement from your recession) i am getting better at sharing better at letting my body loose when you convince me that i can't get addicted to anything when i come over and lose a pack of cigarettes in your room when i keep your hallway smell on my skin for days i wear your tshirt to sleep even after i give it back i feel degraded when you stop forcing your hands in. i miss everyone. i wish i could tell you more like i'm prepared to reveal to you a history that was first given to me at eleven, a history i then shared with alya at the top of a redwood tree, a tree that soon stood for me as a representation of my father's own roots as he explained their fragility a tree that later took on her papa's legacy too early. and now i think back to those moments and remember that you could barely know our west coast like we have swallowed it deep. i have let the west grow in me. the west has let me grow. i work my words piece by piece and slowly our words are turning as our hands aren't a drifting across the mattress but an anchor keeping me still.

[euplexia]

the worst part is that i’ve lost my perspective  like in a few years i can’t imagine seeing you and being unfazed i can’t imagine not caring. there’s barely a way i can keep this going you know.  i like the little things the why are you touching me in the morning still it hurts and it hurts. i feel like i’m flying back to new york.  i feel like i’m in a field of california poppies. everything i swear is so tainted. my body especially. no one ever talks about giving that back. like i can renounce stealing if it makes me think of you, and 21st century ambassadors of peace and magic, and all of the little things (mostly in my thoughts or like coral or clams or glass or nail polish whatever) but my body just can’t let go. i can’t get myself back. instead i try to breathe deep while i’m falling asleep and i try not to go crazy on the way to friday.  like fuck. my body. my ridges, you pushed your hand against my sternum, against deep in my chest. my insides shoved back but really they caved in. my body your fingertips, my body my failures. my grandmother signing off on my giving myself away. but she never said how hard the comeback would be, how i’d find it so difficult to reclaim possession. and how i would stay up late making it hurt, and how of course when i write about it i can make a poem and feel okay, but when it’s real it is slicing. when it’s real it’s not big words or dreams, it’s just a blunt i’m not good enough. another reason to feel fucked up about my body. another reason to get too high. 

[euplexia]

he makes me feel like i’m floating but in a weird way. like i’ve been swallowed into some other world. like my heart is beating too fast while i imagine you doing little things while i imagine touching. 

      you had your hand on the small of my back       smoking out the window, a dance i would do for attention, a way i wanted to       touch you but she wouldn’t let me 

you feel like   a new season    a slow disintegration though    a body washing piece by piece dry down the shower drain,    a meeting that you don’t want to meet me after,    a melting that can’t be reversed,    a yes you are touching my back the small of it yes i am starving and laughing and trying to be numb  you hold my hand i grip back so hard that you probably try to forget  & i can’t make marks that are already there  & i feel so high when i am sober when i am not around you like i’d blow pot smoke out your window all night and still be shrouded in a clarity that the absence makes me lose  i’m not even talking about california anymore  about my home about my harpsongs but instead this place  which i swear is so tainted, especially my body  no one ever talks about giving that back. 

[euplexia]

in bed high in college baked off my ass with the rain sounds coating odesza and the seawater spraying on our golden state im listening to rain sounds to help me sleep to get me dreaming and odesza to think about hannah or doing my makeup nice before going to work  or little bits of weed and the elephant pipe now i wish i were sunny listening to hippie sabotage  in a different state, like nevada or maybe northern california or southern organ  there i’d be eating shitty food and hearing myself bounce off the mountains there i’d be like this all the time without good weeks of fullness of witchcraft of my lung expansion capacity whatever bullshit  my mom called  i listened to a different album  my mom called and i listened to joni mitchell and i sat there avidly for days and days on end and i couldn’t eat and i can’t ever again down by the yuba river down my joanna little leaflessness seated in the shallows at the park or the sea  i’m walking down the street thinking about walking down the street this is why i can’t trust you this is where he touched this is where i couldn’t stop thinking about it my heart might explode  just want my river beds, my goldfish, my rotten fruit under my bare feet  my iron my metallic necklace  my eucalyptus trees 

[euplexia]

you should know that i didn’t stop writing for you. i stopped writing because i felt like i needed a knife. because i woke up in the middle of the night to a text tone and i wasn’t quite sure if i had fallen asleep in the first place.

where can i find you? 

i was listening to the Life of Pablo in the early morning  i was looking at the snowflakes up close  and when it happened for the first time in eleventh grade my best friends fucked up, but at least not as badly as he did,  and also emily was there in the morning so i’m still standing. when we woke up we ate honey and drank earl grey tea with milk. i peeled the fruit and sliced off the bruised parts with my favorite pink knife.  i was listening to Joanna Newsom and it hit me like the air when we walked out of the airport in florida  or when i said goodbye to my mom last night  or when he said no and i said thank god but it happened anyway

Here i pray with my boy on a rooftop in New York and tell him about ben. i lay there early in the morning after sleeping in a separate bed. i let him use my plastic breathalyzer. i compare our sore legs. our cut knuckles. our drunk knife games our wounds and the joints he rolls and the shots swishing around and my sharp teeth pure white.  at night i’m swollen up like a whale. i touch my whale belly. i hate myself. i hate anyone who has ever felt me. 

informally i’m slumped across his bedpost while the alcohol kicks in. or i listen to a new song and hear a new voice. i hear eric. i’m in the library waiting for it to feel like college.  

[euplexia]

i told luke that it’s the kind of sad where something washes over you slowly  while it’s snowing, and your new friends are singing the head and the heart and they don’t understand how personal that is  how i wanted to just run out of there and fall down in the middle of the quad and give myself back to the senior year, back to all the times i felt the pain so fresh,  more than a dull ache that mostly just makes me grind my teeth in my sleep  i can’t wake up next to anyone  and i left california for something better, and found thick rivers and train tracks and boys on blankets in the woods smoking weed,  i found something great here as we wandered into the dollar store and bought shotglasses and broke shotglasses and took shots  as i did coke even when i promised myself i wouldn’t  and gave myself a million tattoos but i hate it, sometimes,  it’s almost ruined me  to be still waiting here near the hudson   hurting inside of myself  listening to foxygen year round and associating it with the wrong boy  and listening to the guitar strums and feeling the longing welling up inside of me i miss vermont when the mountains fell we were stirring honey into our tea

suddenly in college i fucking hate writing

[euplexia]

i thought about you in the middle of the night when the girls next to me were bumping the bass too loud  i love college i love california  she told me all the fucked up shit  knocked over the little statue i’ve created watched it crumble to pieces, watched me kneel down  explained everything except the hand holding  last month i wrote something romantic about someone else and three days ago i was pining over a different person and now it’s you towering over everything  like for a year he was complicated  and now simplified to a few titles, a  nightmare that i can wake up from quietly,  fleeing on a fleeting sunday night 

[euplexia]

alone in the dark  when you took my hand and it swallowed mine  or when i went a few days without eating anything  just to be the tide responding to the moon again 

[euplexia]

i’m holding sprigs of lilac and rosemary and  lavender and rubbing the pieces between my fingers to try and capture them forever  if i leave you here, will vines indeed take over the little precious surfaces that i have so worshipped  or will you become weathered into nothing  will i regret my leaving  or keep going as i have never gone before without looking back right now i’m crying at the thought of not seeing my mother for seven weeks seven whole weeks without our fullness  without our milk and honey ups and downs and unconditionalness  home starts to feel like away  but i push that down and down until the heaves can’t be staved off  until 7 weeks is really nothing 

by the fire, finally, in the past  when you looked in the flames and saw it all  now a little reassurance from california   a windy sisterhood carrying me still 

[euplexia]

i’m thinking about how my name sounds safe in your mouth  i’m thinking about echolocation and asymmetry in dolphin skulls  and the time i wanted to give you a black eye  but afterwards realized that i just actually might really love you  in lucy’s living room i looked at alexandra  and locked eyes while we talked about the new pixar movie about her father dying about how we want to be astronomers but don’t think it’s worth it  i asked my grandmama if she’d ever been to montana  she didn’t answer the question  i want to be in the middle of nowhere i want to be on top of a mountain in yosemite swearing at the top of my lungs  a week later i started driving to the beach and then stopped at safeway when i thought about bulimia  and now the not thinking isn’t doing much good  last night i felt you star studded wrapped around me  a moon glow in little pieces on my skin  and a tiny resistance shuttering within me  and a big exhale pushing it still

[euplexia]

outer space

even when we were listening to  johnny cash  driving the ascension of the sierra nevadas  i could barely feel it deep under my ribcage after the mountain range i missed it the most  & told myself stories about the silo  about trying to hold her hand before i’d learned to recognize anyone in the dark  afterwards she called because her parents tried to pull a  misunderstanding, tried to peel back her new skin and prove it cancerous  i still hate them. more than you. 

at the end of the trip we turned to look at the stars  and isaac and olivia couldn’t take their eyes away  and the moon wasn’t close enough to make out the landscape  but at least i saw the milky way stared at it for what felt like days,  held it in suspension for decades and centuries later someone will still be  feeling the same way in the palms of their hands and all over 

i can’t write about it  so i don’t know if it’s real. 

[euplexia]

i thought it was all almost over then but now i still am just  waiting for olivia to get home  i always miss her, after the henhouse  or the time when the bay bridge stopped halfway and i screamed  in my sleep we’re driving up hills and harmonizing at the top  and awake we’re sneaking out for one last secret before shutdown,  or trying to study at the berkeley public library right before i had the college interview that eventually did the tearing  i’m still right here, roots in deep, just a few minutes away  but spring will bring me too far

[euplexia]

sometimes when i feel it i’m sure it’s you,  only you and our little late-night talks and  cold walks with my shaking hands all undoing themselves in your pockets  but then the next moment i’m in bed with olivia and that’s  all that matters, our  middle-of-the-night conversations and trying not to let each other go but then running across the country because  i can’t take the heat for too long and she can’t take the cold  maybe that’s why i’m so confused. maybe the thaw hasn’t run its course yet.  but even halfway there i’m still making my mouth into a tiny straight line and trying not to count my ribs and you’re standing by the kitchen sink filling up a glass of water  like even that could make me hate you,  or make me fall in love a million times harder. 

[euplexia]

i could listen to this song on loop all night but it wouldn’t explain  why sometimes i just feel so crazy  earlier i tried to capture the sunset in its fleeting form and instead  stepped into a circle of amanitas, and thought of my best friend’s dad before he died,  and rinsed my feet in the creek that runs behind our property  in the winter california is everything i fell in love for  it stands for the eucalyptus trees, the softwoods turning to hardwoods overnight, my figure pressed against the frost in the morning and your fingers prying me up slowly here we are lifting  here we are doing all the work  and still something is absent

[euplexia]

the kind of high where nothing matters except the  rivers we both swam in  and california in its green glory  these days i’m incapable of feeling it for more than a few months or loving anyone else just the way you left marks on my back, and the little handholds in the middle of the night, and my hips sharp and strong  i had a dream we were in the middle of the storm on a ship with the waves lit up by bioluminescence and you held me, but i still fell  i love california and i love the miles  i won’t ever go back  but of course the waves they come and they hit and they hurt  and the tide pulls and pushes and you stop calling  right when i need it the most