#requested poems

[2wentysixletters]

ON A LOVE FAR AWAY

sometimes i just want to kiss my phone because that’s where you are most days and i wish i was born from the sea because it would make this distance easier and maybe if you were born in the sky we could always meet halfway turn the world blood orange twice for good luck.

and if not now then later and if not in this life then the next and the ones after that.

listen in every life i’ll find you in every life i’ll love you.

[2wentysixletters]

GIRLS

i. June comes at me like a monsoon— I have never known a girl that isn’t a season. And she is all of them at once: the glow, the rubble the strength, the bloom; a continuous cycle of surviving.

ii. Morgan wears a bright pink bra and dances like wildfire around my kitchen. She smells of coffee and freshly cut grass and all your best days. It’s a Sunday morning; it’s always a Sunday morning. She tells me i’m in love and i believe her every time.

iii. Max is a soft mouth testing the curves of NO on her tongue. She has learnt that nothing can be undone but soap helps. She is learning the only place for a fist is at the end of your wrist.

—A.Y.

[2wentysixletters]

THE TRANSITION OF COLOUR

you yell out i love you and he looks back at you his laughter caught between the stick and heat of summer and says i know. the breeze catches in your throat because he knows but he doesn’t know.

and what he knows is simple: there’s a certain kind of love between friends a kind that turns the world golden and makes it easier to live in.

and what he doesn’t know is sometimes it changes colour; that there are hundreds of types of love and you want to experience every one of them with him.

before it was just i never want to live in a world without you. now it’s if i die without knowing what it’s like to kiss you i’ll live this goddamn life twice. now it’s love me back differently. now it’s i love you in a way we’ve never known but maybe the one we have right now is enough. now it’s all blush and crimson.

there’s so much red you can’t unsee it. you can’t unfeel it.

—A.Y.

[2wentysixletters]

WHEN YOU FORGET ABOUT YOURSELF: THE SIDE EFFECTS OF HAVING A GENEROUS HEART 

You cut off your hands and say, Here, this is for you. I am giving you everything I have. You cut off your hands and they don’t thank you. Instead they ask for your ribs, your gut and all her feelings. And you’re about to ask, What about me? What will be left of me? But you don’t because they tell you this is love.

So you give it all to them. And what’s left for you? I’m too afraid to say Nothing. Instead I will make a list of everything you still have: your skin and all the blood you carry, your lungs, your spine, your tongue.

Draw a line. When they ask for your heart, curl your tongue into a No. When they ask for your heart, crack your spine back into place. When they ask for your heart, add smoke to the fire with only your breath.

Take back what’s yours. This is holding yourself in your own arms.  This is giving yourself back  everything you gave away.  This is the journey home. This is learning that love with other people is a two-way street.

– A.Y.

[2wentysixletters]

LOOKING BACK IS FOR THE NOSTALGIC 

you are packing everything about this town – the rooftop of the school library where you discovered the land of ‘firsts’ with that boy stitched up with everything you thought you had wanted, the small roads that lead to the hills where you could see the world as you knew it, the quiet nights that echoed back your secrets about leaving – into a small box that you will keep in the wardrobe of your new home a thousand miles from here. your heart has grown to twice the size of this town. nothing fits right anymore here. you don’t look in the rearview mirror when you drive away. you don’t call this leaving because there’s nothing left to leave except remnants of who you used to be.

– A.Y. 

[2wentysixletters]

THE CRUEL TIMING OF THE UNIVERSE

We were always in a fist fight with Time, even from the very beginning. 

In 1991, conceptual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres hung two identical clocks on the walls of MoMA. Hand-in-hand, they were harmoniously synchronised like Perfect Lovers. The cruel and tragic truth about this artwork was that these clocks were destined to fall out of sync with each other. 

Our knuckles are bloody,  and there are bruises  tracing down our bodies.  We have lost the fight. But not without dancing first.  Not without loving with hungry hearts and desperate hands. 

We are two trains departing the station in opposite directions.  And the passengers mourn for us; for what we could have had. 

– A.Y.

[2wentysixletters]

HE LOVES ME, I LOVE HIM NOT / I LOVE HIM, HE LOVES ME NOT 

our love was like this: indecisive.  it fumbled between us, a wanderer and a nomad hand-in-hand travelling with no direction. i tore my mother’s garden apart trying to find answers, picked off every petal. he loves me, he loves me not. he loves me, he loves me not.  he loves me.  we had the four-seasons-in-a-day kind of love.  in the morning, it was summer and we planted sun-kisses on each other’s skin so we could grow like vines; always intertwined.  by the afternoon, it always got cold. we were storms and hurricanes destroying everything we had for one another. and when night came, we never knew what we wanted. but sometimes in the middle of it all, i’d hear you whisper, please, don’t leave. and so i stayed. even when you decided to go. now, my mother is tending her garden back to life  and the seasons are telling me to move on but, some mornings i still wake to find old flower petals in my bed,  and i wonder what it all meant to you. 

– A.Y.