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art n' stuff / any pronouns / watch aikatsu stars and play ffxiii, tokyo mew mew is my passion 

[aikaleegrave]

i’m writing you a poem

you exhale silver moths that wing their pale way into the sky. daughter of a land crushed kingless, silhouette of a city turned lightless against stars that shiver in the sudden dark. in the silence, you ask what poem i have clenched between my teeth tonight, and i kiss you, wordless for once. on a distant horizon, the flames are dying, smoke carried across the sea. we, too, are burning. we, too, crack like the teeth of ice, walking onwards to a half-forgotten dream.

in a city drowned by night, we stand with our backs to the mountain, mouths filled with ash and the dead wood of grief. the streets echo emptiness, no fires or drawn blades or oaths left to be broken, no weaving of gold and silver lulling us to sleep. what songs, you say, could ever be sung about tragedy? i’m holding the answer on my tongue, i’m letting it flutter free, your name lighting every candle in the city, pushing back the dark inch by inch, your name a spark, a faraway star, a hope rekindled.

[aikaleegrave]

evening star

you count backwards, give each tragedy a name you can remember. summer sweeps the breath from you, offers you wildfire smoke instead of memory, no sound but the soft cindering of childhood. in the dark of the forest, you’re navigating by your own silver, the constellation of your skin spread under the shadows of the trees, the meteor of your name hurtling from the sky. truth is malleable in your mouth, bends like a wire, and in a city named peace, you relearn your body as a weapon, a thing with teeth. silver cannot prove itself until it faces the fire. you always return to the inferno, the mourning under your tongue that no one wants to hear you sing out, the morning you woke to nothing but the sound of flame. the stars burn too, on the other side of the sky, but you won’t know that until you touch them.

{ a.s.w. ||  find me on patreon }

[aikaleegrave]

skyline

you don’t know the name of the city that’s etched itself into your bones, but the streets mapped out in every hollow of your body are as familiar as your name in a lover’s mouth. you rise, waterlogged, from the canal dark with secret runoff. telephone wires hum between your teeth, a thousand voices singing despair into the listening void. it’s so easy to forget everything but subway stops and street names, to forget how to beg forgiveness from the concrete and broken glass. it’s a city of steel-light and suspension bridges and it swallows every broken-winged bird and spits out desolation.

{ a.s.w. ||  find me on patreon }

[aikaleegrave]

dreamscape

your pleas for mercy have never been answered by the beryl-glow of her eyes. you still beg, because she likes it when you do. your body is the shadowed ground riddled with dead roots, bone-dry and yearning. but saltwater never makes flowers grow. 

you wake in the middle of the night and ask the silence if she will return. the silence wonders if she ever left. 

and again, you dream of her hands in salt-light. and again, you home her in your bones and wonder why they break every time. she takes your wishbone in two fingers and you feel the echoing snap as she dissolves into brine. 

{ a.s.w. || love prompts ||  find me on patreon }

[aikaleegrave]

sharing an umbrella

we’ll always be what makes us fragile. i’m lying on my back in the grass and an airplane carves a scar of white into the sky. it’s been years, and i’m still thinking of soft sweaters and her laugh. how i wrote poems about whatever empty she filled in me. how survival is the most primal instinct, and how survival is the first instinct i excavated, surgically precise, from the hollow of my heart. so pin down a moment in time where she felt like the answer. my hand holding the umbrella over her head, my shoes puddle-soaked, rain a silver cold against my skin. i’m a thing of folded paper going limp and translucent in the downpour. i’ve crawled to the shelter of her and called it home, knowing she will leave in the morning.

{ a.s.w. || love prompts }

[aikaleegrave]

silence has silver hands and the rain eats marble to softness. i stand in the old cemetery, slit open my throat to let the song spill out, an elegy for forgotten names unetched, erased. the years lichen and blur. but even here, the cedars stretch roots deeper every winter, lift branches higher every summer. if i stand still enough, i can hear the moss grow. in the downpour, the worms lift, joyful, to the surface i can’t get my tenses right: built/build, write/wrote, alive/dead. through it all, we’re an ongoing act of creation.

{ a.s.w. || find me on patreon }

[aikaleegrave]

i can be a person if you give me the chance

new beginnings look something like this: lavender growing in the deep green of a garden, the sun as a copper coin pressed to the sky. you can flip it and tell her what fate has decided for you today. the ragged edges of something torn free, a home you ripped out of your own chest to leave, like sailcloth drowning in an unending storm. what is severed can be threaded together, but the stitches will always show. a lesson you learned from a young age: your own blood tastes just as iron as anyone else’s. your feet haven’t stopped running in years.

brother, she says, where have you gone now?

here, you say, the lavender has grown, it’s springtime in a city made of flowers, and you’ve reached the edge of the ocean again, the waterside you always return to. it’s not softness, and maybe it never will be, but there’s a memory like home and a bloom that unfurls into the sunlight, undrowned.

{ a.s.w. || find me on patreon }

[aikaleegrave]

we are the dreamers / we roll the dice so we’re alive

the white roses have all cindered, ash in silver moonlight. in a city overgrown,

someone stands in the garden and touches the dead flowers and thinks of you, wonders

what home you’ve found, and if you’ll stay this time. this time, you’re fallen to gray

in a windless place, mouth smiling but no happiness on your tongue. you look death

in the eye and do not blink. in a sky too far to touch, the moon swells with light and

opens arms to welcome you home. there will always be another story to tell, another

world to be won or saved or loved. above, there’s a pale light, lunar and unwavering.

for the first, nameless time, you’re flying.

[aikaleegrave]

a different kind of holy

i write her poems about sainthood and wonder what the halo of her touch would feel like: fire or lightning or the calm after it all.

someone like me knows how to unravel a prayer into threads, then stitch my scars up with the fractured color. someone like her bleeds light instead of red. i’m darkening the snow with my wounding, unending under a winter sky; the light of her tastes like

blackberries and cold mint. there’s healing, and there’s remaking, and my hands stutter along the outlines of both. i write her poems about godhood and she swallows them whole.

for @7-weeks january prompts, day 14 

[aikaleegrave]

sectumsempra

death kisses you in the deep forest, heavy cedar air and white bones that snap under your feet. you sunder, you blossom and flame with dark.

your heart opens and red poppies spill out. what will you do with all these flowers? there’s an unending sort of wound in your chest, and you wonder where it came from, you wonder where you came from.

you gather the blood-blooms until your hands overflow. offer them like shards of memory. it’s all just mirrors and a last, quiet exhale.

spell series #5 // find me on patreon

[aikaleegrave]

three a.m. touches you like an old lover’s hands:

ungentle and needing. your face is three masks deep, your voice not your own. you know more about the shifting winds than the ice in your eyes, so you don’t look in mirrors anymore. the arterial intimacy of holding someone’s death in your hands. the bloodslick feeling of a heart stopping like the tolling of a bell. your longing unwinds into white ribbons spooling loose across stone.

but it’s night, and her touch is the first kindness: coming up for air after shipwreck, the stilling of a wound. your body is a resurrection; she’s the grave you dug your way out of, the death-raven with black wings that calls out a dirge.

you’ll never know where you come from. you’ll always know what you are. you aren’t comforted either way.

for @7-weeks january prompt #6

[aikaleegrave]

tender as continental drift

i mountain myself under january’s hands, turn to volcanic glass where my heat first meets air. there’s fine gray ash drifting in the winter air, falling between the nodding white heads of snowdrops. they’re early this year, january tells me. it hasn’t even snowed. they’ll freeze when it does. i ask her what kind of metaphor that is.

what kind of metaphor do you want it to be? she asks.

january has me earthquaked, has the rock of me folded. this time will be different, she tells me. this time, nothing hurts. i don’t believe her. already, the flowers are withering in the cold. they’ll grow back, i tell her. i know this because i have, too. and if they don’t, i’ll plant more.

for @7-weeks january prompt #4

[aikaleegrave]

we made those nights into secrets tied with pink ribbons and corked with wax, floated them out into the harbor to meet the dawn-winged birds, and

these days, i’m begging the sky to stop looking at me. i can’t stop feeling like she’s laughing. i’m still leaving footprints in the alleyway dust, but yours aren’t there anymore. i dream of a silver plain where the remnants of our lives don’t decay. i dream of planting flowers in a place where winter won’t kill them. it’s just that the horizon swallows you and everything else, it’s just

our feet in the water, it’s just the way you braided my hair, it’s just how the sky framed you above me,            it’s just how this all faded

and the sky is laughing, still laughing, our love the punchline to a merciless joke, our love a casualty of chance.

a.s.w. || @avolitorial

[aikaleegrave]

thunder sounds like your name

and i cannot keep secrets from you. you are the quiet after the storm, singing along so softly the lightning erodes your voice into silence. here, take my meteor-iron heart, magnetic and pointing only to you. a useless compass for anyone except us. the basalt tongue of the moon whispers your name, an oath of heaven, and her silver-slick light streams through the window where you sleep. no trace of the way entry burns even the stone of us when we plummet. no trace, when the storm sweeps out to sea and swallows the fire.

i want to follow the river so far east it becomes every ocean. will you come with me? i want to show you

this trembling adoration, shaped like your hands. this newborn thing, uncertain of its own name, daring to ask the water how it feels to love.

[a.s.w.]

[delta-breezes]

Daniel Casson | @dpc_photography_

[kxowledge]

Coton Manor  by @aaron.etc

[fish-wife]

Munich, Germany Summer 2016