(It won’t format properly no matter how
much I screw around with the HTML so the flow
is all fucked up but I’m the only one bothered by that
so whatever 4 ever)

 A Partial History on the Things We Don’t Talk About:

Having a little fun at nineteen
turned into having a couple drinks at twenty.
On my birthday that year, you truly
put your hands on me for the first time.
You said I was so elusive, very mysterious
and yet, too honest
how unsettling it was for you
after all those years alone
I was always talking, you professed
and never saying much of anything
with one foot out the door, beer in hand
and the only way you learned
about me was by really watching
and still, even then.

After making love, you’d turn
the lights on just to grab my chin

and look into my eyes
those damned eyes

You’d shake your head
turn off the lights then
and let me sleep.

We were always meeting
in strange places
on the steps of the Art Gallery
in the middle of the city and
under it’s bright lights
you wrapped your arms around me

in front of a poem all about
lust you told me you
couldn’t understand the damn thing
and I laughed.

Then you carried me into
the elevator
with a nod to the curator
and dragged my feet across
the marble floors as soon as
we were shut away
as if to say, almost a gasp
but this with you

I do know
to press me against the wall,
just for a second, one kiss
only to be released
from your grasp

once we hit the lobby.

Some time later and on
our last night together
you dressed me
so carefully the next morning
Pulling each button through it’s eyelet
up the base of my spine to my neck
and on the edge of the bed
twenty and twenty-six years
while you rolled my socks up my thighs.
It was the first time in my life
that I realized people say
“I love you” in a million different ways.
Yours was, “This dress – only you would wear this”
On the very day I told you
I wasn’t yours anymore.

And you traced the outlines of the flowers,
moving the dress up just enough
so you could grab the lace slip underneath
with bunches of pastel pink fabric
in your fist as you tied the
matching ribbon around my waist.

As I was leaving you told me
I was made for someone
who better understood poetry.
Someone to push me without
needing to tie my hands
behind my back first.
You were running out of rope
And ways to stick
mathematical equations
into my head.

This was more than two years
ago now and the last time I saw you
at twenty-one, in the middle of the summer,
I was visiting Toronto for only a moment
before flying home.

I sat there in the booth at Nirvana,
wondering whatever it was that
I could have seen in you
as a man
so full of things I didn’t care for

The nineteen year old heart wants
what it wants, I suppose

and you kept on staring at me,
waiting for the first word
to be history
while we split two pitchers
between us

You didn’t even fuss
When I picked up the bill.

The Selected Morse Code of a Writers Past

Three years ago almost, an old series of photographs
to go with my dusty, old poetry.

I’m feeling nostalgic today. Particularly honest.
Most of this old work is ridiculous but it’s all
a part of me.

---

1.) June 27th, 2012

Sometimes, I  really envy people
a glass of wine with dinner
you replaced your margarita in
my favor and sometimes,
I go months without writing anything

we must try, our school teachers told us
if we want to become anything
but I am sitting right now and
lamenting one of those days
where nothing and everything
are the same thing

five days ago,
I was sitting on the balcony
11th floor, warm LA
crying to my mother

over a long-distance phone call
I still cry and phone my mother even though
I am 19 year old woman,
I am,
I am
but sometimes she doesn’t answer her phone
and sometimes … I …?

---

2.) January 1st, 2012

Thy Flesh, Thy Bone

I don’t know where I am going or how
I will get there
but I know that I am leaving
before the sentence can finish itself

I have my fingers on the map
and my feet out the window
of the second floor building
in the room where we used to
slow dance in our underwear to a symphony of shadows

truth behold, I am always looking for a way out
before I have even found a way in,
oh how this restlessness used to bother you
to no end

I brought you to your knees
slowly until you were kissing the ground with the very
same elbows that held me, cajoled me so many nights
into sleep

this is the secret, small and barely recognizable
only felt in the evenings
when I am very much alone

I cannot throw you far enough away from me

I think about your body and how your muscles arched
to rise and fall
with each breath
like tiny roman empires
surrendering themselves fully to
defeat, the scent ever present, of lust

and in the mornings, too tired to say much
of anything, we excused
our flaws and let our eyes betray us

and you say I am so
full of secrets, that I am a language
you could spend lifetimes learning

but I fear lately and with age, that I have
become a magazine with missing pages

there is nothing of me worth knowing
the small of my back, the spine and its vertebrae,
are common features
to your average woman,

you will
find pieces of me now
everywhere that you look
oh the torture! but nothing useful
in describing

except the tact you use
when you are ripping out the paper from the
bindings

just for a tiny gasp from my mouth

to make me say the things you want to hear

and I am losing density, soon I will no longer be
strong enough
to hold onto this name, nor place and age

So that when you try to find me, years from now

You will ask yourself if I was
ever someone real

---

3.) February 2011

when you left me, I started writing notes to myself
little notches to measure the time in which
we were apart

first it was just a word, then a sentence
in pen on the palm of my hand(s) then to
my wrists

eventually, I understood that the silence
was everything and they became tattoos
without even really trying

I forgot your first name but every so often
at night, I’d wish to be something more
than a girl, my bones wanted to be called
woman, freedom
and I’d hear you as if you were right there

Instead of in another bed, far away
and with another lover

for another year, another lesson

I am the girl always leaving and never really
knowing how to say goodbye

---

4.) June 29th, 2012

I am sleeping on the wrong side of the bed
even though neither side
is really the right side
when you have the whole room and your entire body
to yourself, every night

a quarter pack of bobby-pins later
rain, dropping into
the ocean
in a town where everyone pretends
to know me,

the real strawberry blonde
five stray
palm bays later and your bow-tie
hits the soft parts of my thigh
And I want you to know,
that I don’t have much to say
about you, to you,
for you, anymore

and I paint my lips red
because a best-friend once said,
that the best colour
For a sallow girl,
is bright and reckless
just like all my summer freckles
I draw maps in my sleep
on your hands
in an empty bed

in front of a dirty vanity mirror

and I have booked my flights out of this country
with a valid passport

and a different first name
than the one you used to call me

---

5.) May 10th, 2013

The Great Lakes of Canada

On the fourth day, I begin looking for messages
in my cheerios, drinking almond milk
with tingling disgust so that the
boys won’t notice

how often my body trembles
alone in bed at night, like
a frequency, barely picked up
by the human ear and
although i have scrubbed your
name from my skin, sat long and
hard in the sun, dried out the
pieces like fruit, bittersweet
on the end of my tongue,

I still know where to find you,
at the edge of my bed, with your
hands in my hair
like hooks, digging into my flesh

I could make a map out of this
place with the consistency
of your bite marks
on my flesh

but,

today, your last bruise fades
from my shoulder,
today, you are in the wilderness
on the outskirts of a city I do not
know well,
will never come together
again

so, I am falling out of sleep
and into the daylight like a bird
flying toward the horizon
because I have no where else to
go, you are paddling the great lake
in Algonquin park

with nothing left of me in your blood
and I am pounding my fists against the
wall, the lonely whale in the ocean
who cannot be heard by anyone
but herself

yet still, I am eating my cheerios
quiet and slow,
floating in this god-damned almond milk
soaking up nothing but the way
my love bloomed
and was cut down
by the raging waters of
Ontario and how distant
your body is
in relation to my heart

---

6.) March 2011

I want to kiss you with my eyes open
I want to read to you,
lines from books that I don’t remember
that have somehow pressed themselves
like drying daises between my muscles and bone
the same way you press yourself
between my lips and hair, falling asleep
as a boy that I am not loving with 
all my heart because my excuses for our escapades
are tiny and quiet
like the wings on a bird, so fragile
and if our tongues were made of glass
maybe we would be more careful
with speaking but
we are made of different metals
fused together and could you think of all
the jokes, we may or may not have
shared over the years?
how does it embarrass you to realize that we have spent many
of our nights the same way, so in love that it hurt
and pulled apart our veins, felt like nails
in our skin, pressing down and onward
used up all our declarations of innocence
other snaps of identity that
grew and displaced themselves
flowers in jars
smaller than their roots
and as the years went by,
I became less of that woman
and more of my own
with no one particular, an image, a smell
swimming through my veins
at the mention of late night binges on letters
handwritten, you left by my window
and secrets colder than air that seemed to stall our actions
but all of these things are relative,
somehow subjective
and your diction isn’t loud enough,
you’re too far away
the truth is, I never wanted you as much
As you thought

---

7.)

February 27th, 2013

I bought a pack of Malboro lights today
for myself, for emergencies

this isn’t really a poem, so much as it’s
working guilt into never opening the

pack of cigarettes that I have for no reason

---

8.) May 1st, 2013

Stay.
I have invented a new language
full of just that word
and my body begins
slowly at first, in the mornings
naked with your fingernails
tracing my ribs
to betray me

this compost heart
ragged
hums the word
over and over
the silent prayer
until I am made of nothing else
but for holy sorrow
and the way you kissed
my mouth
on that first night,
how our bodies broke together
like panes of glass
sharp enough to bleed
and now I’m jumping from cliffs
with my arms around
your neck
up in the early mornings
worshiping the sun
in your place, my bed empty
my arms outstretched, aching

I never wanted you
the way that you thought
until it was too late
to cash in the flights

you’re made of money
not of time

and I don’t want you to go
but you’re already
far, far away
even inside of me
that place sacred, your eyes
clouded with hopes
for a future
that does not include me
and still

this tired heart beats
stay, stay, stay
because it does not know
what else it could be

I’m exhausted, so heavy
with the things I cannot change
the men I will come to know
with fingerprints and tongues
I have no interest in anymore
just you

I am standing endlessly
back straight, spine-tip topped
pouring hot tea on your lap

and these life lessons, designed
to make my bones steel
my kisses lighter..
one after another, as I watch you
pack your things
and walk out the door, I wonder
the use of destiny, cursing God
or natural acts, sins
because I have committed many

I need something to make me weak in the knees,
it would taste and feel
so much better
than your body, on top of me
swallowing all the words
I will spit up later

---

People will always try to take the salt out of you.
The truth is, you can’t let them
no matter what.

Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light.

Forgive.

Write often.
Never apologize for your strength,
your beauty,
your potential.

Not everyone will understand you.
Not even you sometimes.

Love,

Zandria