I felt the pull of the poem before I saw him coming

This is how the big ones always start, isn’t it?

Dream-Boy has me waking up, thinking of his gentleness

Dream-Boy makes me want to curl into his arms but not kiss

Maybe we were sisters in another life before this

We sit on a throne in the back of the bar

He connects freckles on my hand as he speaks of the war

He assumes I will leave and my heart breaks

But I want to wrap him in warmth, I want to givе him his words back

“My mother is a master of medicinе, baby, it helps to have a genius on your side

If you roll with me we’ll do more than just survive this, I promise

We will feel alive”

He tells me, when he thinks about dying, he thinks, “Mission incomplete”

And I tell him that what we look for is exactly what we will see

And while the only thing they have ever wanted for me, for you it is what they flee from

So if we slip out of these two human shells we call bodies

And walk to the middle of the river where our souls meet

Maybe we could call it love

So I hope this poem is not me breaking my promise to him

God, help me fall in love with the person and not the potential for a book

And I swear to find love in the most unlikely of places if you give me the courage to look

So what do I do now with this big huge beating thing inside of my chest

I have a thousand new arteries bursting with life and fresh blood flow back into them

I take my lover back home to the coastline

Pluck the crescent moon right out of the sky just to eye-drop it into the two earths of his irises

I walked him down to where my soul meets the sea and introduced him to the Pacific

As the beautiful blue eyed masterpiece who fucked the fear right out of me

The first week at his sister’s house

Settling into a warmth we never knew we had missed

Picture this

Eyes like the deepest blue of a marble

How they soften around the edges like melted snow when I speak

I thought I would never write myself a river again, yet here I am in the heart of it all, wrapped up in a humanness so tender it aches

Hummingbirds take oaths inside of my chest when he says my hair smells like wet clay

He hangs a Christmas ornament on this new part of my soul, like a flag on the moon to tell anyone after him he’d gotten here first

The man splits open my soul and I’m pouring out fuschia

He traces his lips down my jaw like he is the god that created my coastline

A sweet savory patience taking twenty-five minutes slipping socks off the ankles

Oh, the sensories that exist in the tip of each fingernail

So call up my creator, tell her the books about magic won’t work

Call up New York, tell her I’m coming, we’d snap a photo to remember

He makes a comment about how is cheek bones are beginning to fill back up in their hollows

The light bulbs in his eyes are sparking up, and I am not self-indulgent enough to claim that I am the cause

All I know is that it has been the greatest privilege of my life to watch

How the angles bend so I can see you right

A head tilt to the left, a refraction of light

Tree branches stretch out from where the earth of your skin once parted

Darling, dial up your demons, tell them I have lullabies for them

Tell the darkness I am coming for anytime it tried to swallow you whole

As if it could blow out your stars like birthday candles without having to answer to me first

Man made of one thousand mirrors

Two souls reflect back to themselves in reverse

So what do you do now when falling in love is not imminent with a man who equals more than the sums of his parts

Let me lay these intentions on the table

I will love every part of you that the world has deemed unlovable

His heartbeat was a satellite tower searching for a signal until the day I met his mother over coffee

His sister in the sunflower portal

Just hear me out, for the man carries constellations on his back

And while I have always been a starling folded into herself, I traced my fingers down his spine and thought, “Of course…of course, of course…I have found my home how”

I lay my head on his chest and hear the ping of every penny thrown into the wells that wished for this, it’s like I’m coming alive again

He makes me want to paint my nails red

Or 'Looking for Alaska' electric blue if it fits

And it seems I have made it through the men made of ghost water

Drinking my spirit only to turn themselves back into flesh

So bless this bare skin and magic and medicine

For I am filled gently at first, then all at once, with the most beautiful notion that I will never be alone again

These days I wake up in my lover’s king-sized bed

These mornings are healing me gently

All this tender touch, and laughing

How it imprints, into me

And I’ve always preferred the word etch as opposed to carve

How it is softly permanent, like a painting

Like how this kindness has colored me

How these moments I am experiencing will be the sentences underlined in the novel left behind of my life when I’m gone

As if to say, “Please pay attention, this chapter is of the utmost importance”

For once upon a time there was a girl who wrote poems about stepping out of the darkness

And just like Shakespeare, she was never famous until seven years after her death

Adding seventeen-hundred new words to the English language

Where men once bit into the peach but never savored the fruit

Two souls planted apple trees that took root in their counterpoints

So maybe there really is life in this place

I count my sunrises like Halloween candy now and sort them out by color and taste

He tells me he doesn’t believe in soulmates

I assume he will leave and my heartbreaks

But then he tells me my name would ring out if the starlight had sound

He tells me my eyes look like butterscotch

And I feel better now