Grief Written

There was a boy who had a penny in the cupholder of his passenger seat... I put it there one day when the sky was amber and he was laughter and my curious fingers flicked through the ashtray. The cool metal warmed against my palm as I pushed around the pennies, whispering the year as they fell back into the ashtray. Your hand rested on the steering wheel loosely like all would only ever be well and the other sat palm up on the console between us... You were always waiting. I pressed the penny into your palm and closed your fingers around it. For a moment a penny sat between our pressed palms, I looked away from you and out the window as I told you "it's good luck." I felt your heartbeat in the penny between us. I put the penny in your cupholder and each time I sat in your passenger seat I searched for the penny...and just like you were it was always there. One day as you took me home I stared out the window and you kept both hands on

Today I sat on the grass lighting matches and watching the flames get closer to my fingers, Most of them burned out before it reached my fingers, Others I dropped before they got that far. People are a lot like matches, If you let them get close enough they'll burn you. Some take longer to do it, But they will.

I miss you so much tonight that I feel like I can’t breathe.

We’re in between the lines, Roads stretching behind us And beneath us And ahead of us. You’re singing quietly, My mouth is a curved line, My fingers drawing circles absentmindedly on your inner thigh. IDAHO. Your knuckle lightly raps my arm and I laugh, We’ve been playing this game all weekend. Then suddenly your lips are on my arm replacing your knuckles, I can feel your lips pull into a curved line against my skin. You mumble against my skin, “Let me kiss you where it hurts” I’m slamming on the breaks because I’m caught off guard by the red light and the car in front of me and your lips on my arm just beneath my shoulder and my heart which is  Everywhere, Especially on my sleeve, your fingers pushing as you kiss up my arm. And I know you’re not asking a question but I’m ready with an answer when you say, “You’re perfect. Except your driving.” I’m grinning when I tell you to shut up, Searching for license plates out the window

If I could cut you out of my heart I would, But there wouldn’t be much left, And I can’t offer little to the one it loves next.

Once when I was a little girl I cried to my mother. She asked where does it hurt? And I told her everywhere. She grasped me firmly by the shoulders and told me I needed to stop, and I told her that I couldn't. That sometimes when I cry it feels like I'll never stop, That my heart just hurts and hurts and I can't stop thinking about it. I've got bandaids on backorder, because it tends to hurt everywhere often. Where does it hurt? Nobody's asked me that in a long time. A lot of people have been telling me where it hurts, Pointing it out on x-rays, and pressing on bruises. Where does it hurt? It hurts when someone says they love me, because it makes me think of everyone who's said that and left. It hurts when I'm alone in my bed at night and I can't sleep and my subconscious betrays me into thinking about you. About arms wrapped around my stomach and the comforting rise and fall of your chest. It hurts when I write, every damn wo

There's something to be said about a poet without metaphors. I don't have any poetry to offer you, The moon is just an astronomical body that orbits the earth, but somehow it's also anything that one could desire, look it up: that's the literal definition. The ocean is just a very large expanse of sea, and god even as I'm writing this I'm thinking of it's expanse and depth and how it's so easy to get lost one way or the other. But the ocean isn't a metaphor. The moon and ocean are just aspects of the earth, and both of them make me feel very small. My words just aren't what they used to be. but here's what I have to offer: I keep a box under my bed, it has almost everything you gave me in it. I have letters in my glove compartment, and I read them when I'm crying in my car. I can't keep crying in empty bathtubs and on kitchen floors and in cars over something that's gone. I have trouble sleeping at night

You’re sand, everywhere slipping between my fingers. Tracked in by my shoes, falling from my hair from the dunes before we knew we were doomed. The sky is broken into pieces. I am a pillar of salt floating in the sea, rushing out to touch you, only to be sent away.  Looking back. The city is burning. Everything is on a tilt,  A compass that never points true north. A ring on the wrong finger, The Heart of the Ocean broken instead of lost, never recovered in the wreckage. Tell Rose I'm sorry, and Lot's wife that I understand. Sinking or burning, Sometimes we can no longer hold on or resist looking back.

in case you missed it: i still smell like that perfume, mixed with sunscreen and i still taste the same, or so i'm told. my eyes are greener these days, but they still change. my friend likes to joke that they change with my mood, i wonder what green means? i can't look at people when they make me cry, but you know that. i still bite my nails, grind my teeth, and cry in my car. but i also sing in my car, with the windows down, sometimes with a hand in mine. the air conditioning in my car stopped working but i can't bring myself to sell the car. i still wear sundresses and lipstick but i also wear ripped jeans and scrunchies and band t-shirts. i laugh a lot more now, with reckless abandon and hair in my face, like i used to, or that's what my dad says. i got a promotion, and then another one. i got an internship, and then another, and then another. i have an executive position in my sorority, VP of Philanthropy. i also joined a debate team and

Beyoncé: Sandcastles Love Drought Taylor Swift: All too well I Almost Do Red The Moment I Knew Treacherous Kesha: Praying Sam Hunt: Drinking too much (8pm) The Head and the Heart: Rivers and Roads Kenny Chesney: Somewhere with You Come over Cage the Elephant: Cigarette Daydreams Dawes: All Your Favorite Bands John Mayer: Dreaming With a Broken Heart Daughters Fine Frenzy: Almost Lover Shane Koyczan: Let Me Go

My lips are locked, but not lip locked. I lost the key, I lost you. Maybe  you were the key. I don’t have anything to say, but if I did, I would tell you that  my grandmother asks about you, especially when I sit at the piano, my fingers trailing the ivory keys like maybe one could unlock something But the piano is broken, and the keys are flat.  I don’t have anything to say, except that maybe what I mean  is I just don’t have anything to say to you. 

Words are the waves on the page. Look: Ink blotches, and patchwork stained fingertips, Broken number 2 pencils and bleeding palms, Bandaids hastily applied both rubber and written. The tortured screech of writing as it drags, The smell of smoke as it skids on the lines, Like the air before a scream. Is it dense? Does your eyes flutter? Heart stutter? Is it gritty, The black of asphalt melting underneath soles? souls.   It looks like a car rushing towards you: flashing lights. Flickering a message in morse code, horns are blaring as it gets— objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.  Put your foot on the accelerator, meet it head on Melding yourself together and melting into the asphalt . How valorous you’ve been! Do not flinch At the grinding bones, hot metal. We’ll fall, apart. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust, return to the core of your being.  Find what hurts, and bleed onto the page.

The Butterfly Effect states that “small causes have longer effects” the term, coined by Edward Lorenz, comes from the metaphorical example of a tornado being influenced by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings weeks before; The theory itself didn’t seem plausible, Until I felt your eyelashes flutter against my cheek, and your hands softly touch me. You were more breeze than boy. Someday you would be a hurricane, and your soft breeze would wreck havoc on my heart. 

I never really learn That you should  Stop Breaking yourself To give  Pieces  That people only pocket Or plant  But never really wanted in the first place

Everybody has stopped writing poetry And I think That If I knew better I would Too