letterpoems

you think you’re an enigma and maybe you are maybe you aren’t. i think you laid out little road maps to decrypt yourself. gave us photos of your veins and waited for someone to bleed the colour of it in. from the snatches of your life you’ve written the person you were at seventeen the journals and the blogs and the fire that burnt out with its embers still whispering to you even if none of it seems coherent, none of it is the epiphany you were named for but you are waiting. you think you are an enigma and i love you for it, you need your “gotcha” moments, you spin out ballads of beauty and then end the poem wit

they say, if you don't keep it a secret it won't come true / but we've been wishing on stars & for the sun to come through / and pierce the ash clouds of the future we dreamed in our youth. she says there is bit by bit still reason to grin, to dance; we are smiling at fluttering vermilion and falling fire / pulling our collars higher, the warmth of a dream blooming in reverse to a sapling of hope. and yet yesterday night the moon was fighting for her right to self-determination / and hope, in any language, is self-sacrificing to the tipping point of tidal waves / i think hunger pains and deja vu speak for me more than they both used to

quinn, you were right about the shadows. the flowers my friends gave me after the recital still fill our kitchen with lily perfume and vibrant white-streaked rose petals, but they've started to drop to the granite counter, stem by piece and leaf by leaf. i gathered them and put them between pages of a textbook, to make good memories dried into silk scraps of pigment — lush red and candy pink. i'm not sure what i'll do with them, but while my mother changes the water in the vases, i don't need to decide quite yet. so someone i once loved and later killed is back in my life, leaning against the wall and offering a smile, and his applica

for charlie— hello, flower boy and feline conspirator. thank you for the chords & keys. you ask for a letter to the moon, but she's gone dark since last night. i traded red letters with my friends and offered my jacket so she could rest her head, and she asked for a knife instead. here are some new facets to my unpolished paradoxes in shades of crystal iridescence: black like obsidian, the flipside of my voice is a pitch-perfect piano, triplet strings tuned to lyrics in echo chambers. white like opal, my life is sailing a stolen ship on a sine wave, up-down-up-down days full of sun and then suddenly none. but maybe those stars

to a collection of days — great was your number, and the fear i felt within your walls. a small army, 365, yet i was utterly alone. battlements you had, to defend against your parent, but in folly you turned your arrows inward, now harming those within in the same narcissistic manner. i do not define you by those works alone, for they were learned, and i cannot fully blame you for that. i pray that your child will have learned better. o, that these days would not harbor monsters! o, that they would learn to speak, as you censored. would that your child gather all people gently to itself and weep knowingly for those lost. collection

oh darling dear, has anyone told you yet today that you are a little miracle? has anyone reminded you that you are unique, colorful, and new? you are nobody else, you are simply yourself and there’s simply nothing else to say.      (gd but i’ll      try, for your sake) darling, there are tears in your eyes but they’re diamonds, raised against the gold in your very skin. you are more precious than you know. my dear, there is fire in your fingers and quiet thunder in your footsteps. the wind whispered of your midnight walk and i breathed the fresh air in its wake.      (i couldn’t breathe when