The Love Electric

I run the barbell of my tongue ring against my teeth

as a jailer would his baton on prison bars

and intimidate my voice into

giving up your name.

I demand the right to call my attorney!

You cannot make me

spill

I am going to hold on

to your name as though

it is prayer

to speak your name is to take it in vain

to write it down is to document it

there is a structural deficit in my medium of love.

I cannot speak of it nor write of it

there is an electrical transmission

perhaps I can email you my love with no attachments

Are you sure you want to send? There is no attachment included in this email.

Can you read between the lines? There are no lines to speak of

I fell asleep with shreds of paper in my teeth

fortune cookie futures 

all with your name on it.

I chew on remnants of hearts and souls and soul mates

and all the achy-tooth promises that you made 

when you were seventeen.

there's a space between 

what i say and what i mean to say

and no words to fill it. 

Maybe it's an electrical transmission

I'll leave it blank.

You can read between the lines. 

Maybe.

Adam

You are a bad writer.

You can't articulate, honey. I can see the words lodge in your throat. Every time you say you love me, your adam's apple swells

how dare you steal my apple adam. What would Satan say?

It's my apple. You try to talk around me and mine. Your words aren't sharp enough, nor acidic enough nor strong enough

to dislodge my apple. Damned to an eternity of suffering...yet here you wear my sin in your throat.

You told me you cannot cry

because your throat closes up and strangles your tears

what if I told you that my conscience lives serpentinely

and tightens its coils around your neck

every time I swell with guilt. 

Doors

My darling Westra,

When I was a little girl, I fell in love with doors.

I pressed my palms against glass walls and pushed because I believed that if I pushed hard enough, I could make doors out of anything and sometimes, I think, I pushed too hard and against too much and things...broke.

Once, I took my grandfather's sledgehammer and made a door between my room and his because this, I insist, is still the best way to breach distance.

My mother told me never to walk without my shoes but mom, how will I know where I stand if I can't feel the earth beneath my feet and my mother said instead to ditch the shoes and buy a few goose-down socks and take long walks on angel wings.

When I first put on my boxing gloves, I thought of what a shame it was to not be able to touch your skin for the next hour and ten minutes.

You hit me first with a thousand stars, with a galaxy of glittery hearts and the last thing I remember before I blacked out was the bright sun of a yellow boxing glove coming at me like a comet.

My mother told me you were trouble, that falling for you was falling too far down the rabbit hole and oh, dear Alice, your tears will do nothing but drown you.

Did you really think that I would sink down to my knees and beg for a first date?

I would have.

I would have swallowed my pride and locked my ego in the cellar with my dignity and gone down on one knee and begged you to marry me for two hours and five minutes till Friday the thirteenth hit credits.

Do you remember the first time you kissed me? It was dark and I was dark and we were black holes of need and the only light came from the fireworks between our teeth.

Four years ago, I tried to fit all my feelings into the box of chocolates that you gave me on Valentine's day and stuff them back inside my mouth because I was so scared.

When I left for college I took the little stuffed dog you gave me on our third date and the i'm-sorry-it's-not-real kitten from our two hundredth and built a white picket fence around them and called myself Mrs.Westra.

And then I cried for a whole year straight because you were the one door that I was too scared to push.

Last Christmas my sister bought me winter boots lined with sheepskin and I tucked my feet into the down and pretended that I was walking on the wings of angels.

On New Years eve I took my nephew's toy jackhammer and tried to make a door between your room and mine because, this, I insist, is still the best way to breach distance.

I'm no longer a little girl, but I'm still in love with doors.

Wallpaper

Two hours after my first love left me I
punched a wall
so hard that I could see
the first man and his lover etched in red
in the concave part
of craters carved by my knuckles. Cave art.
My mother wrapped my hands in wallpaper
and said
that some people have bricks in their hearts that need cementing
and some have walls that need painting.
I did not understand how to paint walls, only how to break them
or color them red.
Some walls aren't meant to be broken,
my mother said.
Some walls are there to hold up your soul.
Some walls just need paper.

White

Sochi stole her sister's silks and wrote a poem in clothes on her body.
It was not an ode to love. It was an ode to beauty.

When I saw her like that, under the moonlight,
she looked like a bride. Her skin was white, white like the moon
but the white was so bright
that her smile was just an eclipse.

Ma always said that mirrors were khatham, so i only looked in them
when it was dark.
They say Bhagwan sees through the eyes of children.
When my daughter asks me if he sees her eyes in the dark,
I am tempted to answer: "only the whites."

Metal

Mahum told me that her mouth tasted of pennies.
There are worlds trapped inside my soul, she whispered.
there were chipped cities in her teeth, scarred skyscrapers.
and when she yawned i swear i saw the world implode.
Where are the worlds? i asked.
I swallowed them, she said, and smiled the smile of a broken woman.
I pressed my fingers into the dental records hidden in apple skins and
tried to stay the shattered dam of her tears.
I thought if i plugged my fingers into the gutters of her gums, her screams would stop.
MY MOUTH IS MONEY she screeched
and with every kiss sold her soul
a little bit.
My mouth tastes of pennies, Mahum said.
When I kissed her, all i tasted was rust.

Pumpkin Spice

Someone once asked me why I hate pumpkins

and I said, “because Walt Disney hated Pocahontas

and watermelons never turned into chariots.”

Every Jack-o-Lantern has a shark-toothed smile

and there's a glass slipper at the bottom of every

Pumpkin Spice Latte.