oh, love they named me so many things I am not and I carried their namings shoulders besieged by the weight footsteps heavy enough to crack concrete till you plucked the words like harp strings and made me light and music you asked me which names I actually belong to and let me rest there #poetry

Poem by an autistic woman: I have not eaten the Tylenols* that were in the icebox and which you are probably using as a smokescreen for illicit purposes *but if I had it would likely be because many autistic people also have connective tissue disorders which cause severe pain you fascist scumbags

autumn tucks us into its pocket as it gilds the world with its gentle umbers and golds its breezes whispering hush to our long achings as we are held we are held #poetry

oh, love the way the light within murmurs across your skin and the zephyrs dare to tease at your hair I am lost, I am lost to the realms of reverie #poetry

she’s a star-shard kind of person all sharp angles and cold-soft gleamings distant yet connected by constellations of silent hope #poetry

oh, love slow down now for just a little while match pace with my weary way my steps aren’t as light as when we first met my footfalls heavy with all I can’t ever forget #poetry

her every breath speaks of wings #poetry

she tries to hold this fresh grief but her ribs are nothing but s i e v e s #poetry

there’s moss in her marrow and mushrooms in her hair a stream strums her sternum the sun has bleached her bare her wrists wrapped in wildflowers her limbs bedecked with leaves the wood has claimed the soul of her there’s nothing left to grieve #poetry

there’s thunder brewing on her tongue her bones are beating drum, drum, drum all their training’s come undone there’s rage in her ribcage and lightning in her lungs #poetry

what if fallen leaves truly are sheets of paper, crinkled and discarded — love letters summer wrote and then thought better of #tanka #poetry #TankaThursday

he pretended at tenderness but he was fire and he taught her how to be wood taught her to burn as only he could #poetry

the wind waves hello through constellations of salted beach grass before unraveling the clouds with i n v i s i b l e fingers #poetry

alive with wanting him is the stupidest thing she’s ever chosen to be she’s Superman craving kryptonite she’s a lemming craving the sea #poetry

she speaks in shades of s e r e n d i p i t y and her lips are stained with p e t r i c h o r #poetry

oh, love the music of your pulse is a siren’s call to a dire, dire dance and my resistance is as flimsy as starlight upon the sea #poetry

she lives in the place where the bone-flowers bloom where the whippoorwills call the moon the air seethes with the sizzle-fizz of all her wary wishings finally daring to dance gravity sulks as they tug her with them across tightropes of tender moonlight into the the light-stitched sky #poetry

she is a collector of bones and other marrowed matterings she borrows them from graveyards and libraries —the places where life goes when it most needs to rest then kisses them the way mothers kiss foreheads and they sigh like a lonely autumn wind who’s finally found a home #poetry

she is spacklings of sunlight and specklings of shadow her arms are transmutations of ache and she has gathered the whole of the sky into the tender crook of one wide elbow [she’ll hold you too, if you’ll let her] #poetry

we thought we were playing f o r k e e p s this time but we were only ever playing for the ashes of all we couldn’t climb #poetry

oh, love I have lost myself entirely to the mad, mad notion that these miles between us might dissipate entirely too #poetry

she is a megaphone for the hush of hope a weaver of the whispers that come apart like m i s t between questing fingertips she is an answer to the quiet question: oh how, oh how can we bear this? #poetry

I keep trying to say the exact right thing the “maybe THIS will change everything” but all that comes out is poem after poem all that I’ve ached all that I’ve sown I keep trying to be the exact right thing the “I’ve just got to do SOMETHING” but all that comes out is poem after poem #poetry

her eyes are wet paper and their ink blooms like dying stars #poetry

I tried not to write a poem today [surely I’m due some time away] but I’m an ocean woman moved by a musing moon words bound as wave to shore as a songbird to its tune #poetry

she has a garden heart m a p p e d o u t by tender tendrils seeking root in the breath of her being her lung lobes q u i v e r with the rustle of tiny leaves that have never known the sun #poetry

dearest, there’s a poem in the way you say nothing when I need s i l e n c e most of all #poetry

it’s an omen the way the birds claw root and horizon cloud and branch wind and soil it speaks of beginnings and the ending of things of the many ways life scrapes its b r e a t h from sinew and sky #poetry

oh, love can’t you see? the way the world [weary of being so vast] f o l d e d i t s e l f like so much origami to shrink the distance between you and me? #poetry

A little girl invites the ocean to her birthday party. At first she thinks it isn’t coming, but then a soft rain begins to fall. And she smiles because it smells of the sea. #TinyStories

dearest, my arms are heavy things borne down by the ache of too many quiet reachings #poetry

A conclave of rubber ducks meets in the deep woods once every decade to discuss their centuries long anthropological study of the human race. #TinyStories

oh, love the sun aches to skate your skin with the edge of its hard light and tender-soft gleamings #poetry

she is a raucous river within the wind a flickering flow of wave and shore shaped to hold the sun and mould its tender glow #poetry

she fit herself to a dire wing and hummed a savage song the earth fell away like stars—like empires as she a s c e n d e d to the soaring throng #poetry

wonder-tickled but h e a r t s o r e she pushed through tiny pieces of who s h e u s e d t o b e falling behind her like b r e a d c r u m b s #poetry

find me, love oh, f i n d m e feather the ferns and topple the toadstools weary the woods with your calling till even the moss learns the shape of my name upon your lips #poetry

she is the silent pulse of a universe gone gimbal a throbbing of light and longing and we mere mortals—basking hopeless yet hungry for the warmth of her reclusive star-shine #poetry

September scuds across a spic-and-span sky long-scoured by summer’s silent scorching #poetry

oh, the way this wild and wounded heart calls the way it makes itself heavy with riddlings of silent hope what will it burst with when it finally falls? #poetry

fingers of light chase the rippled sunset across the long and longing lake water-cooled and weightless we can’t tell where lake ends and skin begins #poetry

she is a gentle happening in a world that aches to abrade #poetry

STOP telling me to suffer to be strong STOP peeling away all that is soft and lovely in me to praise only the shards STOP worshipping at the altar of my undoing I have nowhere to spend your awful awe no desire to rule from the cold throne of your perverse admiration #poetry 1/2

grief speaks in too many tongues to recognize all its tellings #poetry

she unfurls like the petals of a blooming sun #poetry

poems are pictures with their clothes off #poetry

oh, love the tides are turning their salt is a benediction we ache to believe all we know how to breathe now is the sea #poetry

dearest, I am alive with the risk of all the breaths we took apart and the reward of all the breaths we take together #poetry

[they told her to be less, so] she tuned the moon to match her mood strummed it soft and many-hued danced on rooftops hearts and lawns then chased the sun through all its dawns #poetry