I spent this year looking over my shoulder
at the last.
I once read that doorknobs are the dirtiest thing
in a home
so I stopped turning them to close a door.
Now, there is a midwinter draft that courses through my veins and in the arteries by my ears.
It icily whistles little fragments of arguments
that date all the way back to March.
I never caught drift of their content,
but each word was its own bee sting.
By the end of the month, I had been abandoned,
staring up at an empty hive with a thousand
bees at my feet – stingers all bent and broken.
I spent this year polishing sharp glass.
I fought countless bathroom battles
with the Medusa in the mirror,
and by July we’d fallen into a full-fledged war.
All it took was a few missteps and a miscalculated glance into her eye,
and she turned my body to stone, grew granite
in my heart –
pink and gray crystals of love hardened,
and my blood immobilized.
I cried tears of melted rock and apologized
with earthquakes,
drawing fault lines in my figure, cracking
the surface,
crumbling, crumbling, crumbling.
Anything to move again.
In late August I sent a rapture that shook the sand from Medusa’s ears;
we signed a truce in the mud made from my tears.
Later, she helped chisel away
the stone she had marred me with
and I asked about her childhood.
I spent this year learning the language of love.
I learned that it has soft ‘e’s and is comprised
of an alphabet with a million characters inside, all the kindest ones
that make the sound of ringing bells or chimes,
or of wind singing through the crack
of an open car window.
I learned that love grows inside tree bark and lays underneath fingernails,
it dances in the empty space between crooked teeth or where two hands meet.
I was taught that love is a song that is sung
in thousands of different ways:
‘Be safe’ is my personal favorite,
and the one I hear most frequently.
If a surgeon were to cut out skin grafts
from my forearms,
he could sell novels from the goosebumped braille
that decorates the places where I’ve been grazed by a living god.
The phrases on the final page would read:
Come home. Come home. Come home.
And close the door, honey – I’m getting cold.