Patchwork Girl

[jadynmccleery]

You make my heart skip a beat. I could run 10 miles when you call me your girl

[jadynmccleery]

hell, tonight, is safer than dreaming

In cocoon I am your innkeeper

You, the looks of your last meal. a web

Siren’s cacophony

Splayed out to bleed

told to create something pretty with the backwash

dripping

Finger painting a lovers demands

across my body. you sinking into my ribs

Breathing with my lungs

This plague

No

A haunted thing - love will be

For longer than it takes any scent to tug you back in

I will leave the door unlocked for now

[jadynmccleery]

The loving, briefly, and then the slow burn of

the unlove

[jadynmccleery]

Is running to you a fantasy long gone?

Is the airport, the flight, the showing up on your doorstep with the rain wrapped around me a figment of my imagination?

There is a letter you wrote, in a drawer upstairs, collecting dust in my dresser

You said that if forever is as long as it sounds forever is just not enough time

Is it too late to pretend that forever starts now?

To pretend the past is not past us?

Is that make believe? To show up some cloudy afternoon?

Is it wrong to drink in the thought of your face as I run to you, as I look at you and you stare back at me?

To picture a breath between us, inches away from lips, your eyes like burnt Newports

And my sorry against the sky

Over and over

Let us forget the taste of goodbye

[jadynmccleery]

Whatever is screaming

Woman

I am there. Chasing her.

Let me be covered in dawn and witchdust

pine forest, dusk

speaking the scent of she

And when the wolves come, they always come,

I will remember her name and call it myself,

even when the vowels sound of death

No matter if the tongues curve eats us alive.

[jadynmccleery]

Every immigrant I have ever met

Is much kinder

And softer

You are not anti- immigration

You are scared

Scared of brown skin

And the smell of good food

And a drive you have never known.

Try saying goodbye to your home country

And being bombarded with those

Who have no idea what it is like to have a peace of their own.

Who have no idea what it is like to leave their mother.

[jadynmccleery]

I remember

Months after you had left

your name would still slip out of my mouth

Like sticky chewing gum

Every time the same vowel would pop up mid-sentence

There you would be

Floating in the air around me like pepper

Haunting me

Measuring time passed by weighing out the feel of you on my tongue

How it would flip over in its own shallow pit

Aware of the mistake my mind must have made

And how it knew it wasn’t much of a mistake

If it kept happening and I hadn’t learned a thing

[jadynmccleery]

I've always missed you. Isn't that funny?

How I felt you before I knew you

How you still haunt me now

[jadynmccleery]

My mother is:

Rough calluses

Feet of a dancer

An engagement ring on top of an old wedding band

Sunday evening

Nylon hose

Pot roast and potatoes

The air at twilight

The sky at dawn

Thrift stores

Peach cobbler

My ears and boiled peanuts

The freckle on my right cheek

Broken

Scattered

Glued together

Her own canvas - and her own painting too

Dreams

Hopes

Disappointments

My mother is not:

Scared

[jadynmccleery]

And I’m saying,

If the world was ending tomorrow,

I know you would be with me.

For that last day.

Be with me until our skin turns blue,

Until our sides turn to our backs,

Until our hands lose grip of each other.

But,

Tomorrow the world is not ending,

And it will go on,

With or without the other.

J.M.

[jadynmccleery]

“Our ships sink or sail, or we are a buoy of our emotions.”

J.M.

[jadynmccleery]

For you my love is winter flurries-

The kind of snow that doesn’t stick

But oh, how it wants to

J.M.

[jadynmccleery]

White savior

If I push a door and it does not budge

is it my right

to break it down?

JM

[jadynmccleery]

America

Rich, poor

God, godless

Beauty everywhere

Hatred in most

places

Everywhere

Is burning

We are sleeping with our eyes wide open

[jadynmccleery]

Heartbreak is a different kind of brave

How courageous you must be to have your world end and wish for the sun to rise again

How strong it is to have your heart crushed and to hold it up to the universe once more

To be terrified and still say

I want to love like that

Again

And again

And forever after

J.M.

[jadynmccleery]

We had young hearts, and freckles, everything that gets washed out with age

J.M.

[jadynmccleery]

Things I have needed to give up have become things I have wanted to give up for the sake of myself