Left Behind

Fading sunlight jumps from puddle to puddle
chasing clouds
The girl on the train watches
unable to catch up

Not My Last Letter

To He Who Was Briefly My Lover,

You will never read this,
and here I am,
with all the things I will never tell you.

I won't admit I cried myself to sleep
from missing you,
or that I wanted to call
when I stranded myself at the train station.

I won't say that I miss the way you smelled
like coffee,
or the movies we played
but never watched because we were too busy
with each other.


And I won't tell you I've moved on,
that I'm into someone new. 
We were lovers so briefly
before you were gone.
And now I will be too.

From Someone Briefly Loved

Sinners

My first thought
is of the sheer quantity of people
gathered to make an unpopular point.
We walk.

As we walk, I see my present
juxtaposed over my past
moving into my future.
Temple spires reach
toward a god I no longer believe in.
That god damned me for my decisions,
condemned me for my friends,
judged me for my lack of belief.

We reach the end of our march,
the top of a hill.
I can see more from up here. 
The journey is far from over,
but we have made it this far.
We won't stop now.

Criminal

I watch him scrape the ice off the railings,
boredom the only excuse for his crime.
I want to scream out at him to
Stop. Don't destroy the beautiful things.
They will end in their own time.
But I don't.
I let him have his destruction
and silently mourn what's been lost.

Yesterday I cut my hair.
I can't shed my lifestyle as easily as I discarded
those strands of myself,
watching the inches fall to the ground.
And Abby sweeps them up, throws them away,
never to be part of me again.

Ghost

Confusion,
comfort,
chest to back,
head to shoulder,
breath down spine,
against skin,
the smell of laundry
old houses
faded cologne
and marijuana
oddly comforting.

Shift in bed,
fear and uncertainty
the state of my sanity.

Not wrong,
but familiar.

Haunting.

Walk

          tread carefully
            over the bodies 

                     of the dead

     if you listen too hard 

    they may convince you
they are better off that way

                                or that you 

                               would be too

Anniversary

It's been 93 days since you broke up and apparently you're still not over it because you're still counting.
You still hurt.
You buy new clothes as though he'll see you in them tonight and compliment you the way he used to, telling you how beautiful you are before you undress each other.
You wear pajamas that are really lingerie and tell yourself that you don't wear it for him, but for someone else like him who will eventually enter your life.
You tell yourself someone else like him will eventually enter your life.
You delete notes on your phone. In an alternate life you would have kept them for sentimental reasons.
You wonder if he got the postcard you sent him and if that made it harder.
You wonder what he did with the drawer of your things at his place. You told him to throw out everything in it, but you don't know if he actually did.
You remember his chest pressing into your back, and the steadiness of his breathing at odds with the arrhythmic beat of your heart.
You listen to Taylor Swift breakup songs and convince yourself that you feel better knowing other people have felt this way too.
You don't delete his address from your phone.
You spend a night in bed with one of your high school friends. You curl yourself up against his body, you tangle your legs with his, you touch his face and let him touch yours. You know it doesn't mean anything, you know there's no commitment, you don't care. You don't want to commit either.
You tell yourself you don't wish it had lasted longer. You tell yourself that it's for the best. You tell yourself that you're okay. You lie to yourself every day so you can get out of bed.
You're afraid that you will try to heal your bruised heart by pounding it against a closed door or pressing it into the skin of a stranger.
You're afraid because this is as far ahead as you had planned and now you have no excuse to keep holding on.
You say you want this anniversary to be the last one that crosses your mind.
You think that it can't be an anniversary if it didn't even last a year.