It’s cold out here.
It’s cold out here, and you are warm.

You are warm, your
softness, your solidity, your
burning fingertips
around me.

Your skin, bright like the
winter sky, blanketed gently
with new-fallen snow.
I trace your constellations.

Your eyes, threaded
with scraps of sky,
twilit, electric,
cloudless and kind:

you shimmer
like stardust, shine
like rain-polished,
streetlight-streaked
sidewalk, alive
in the dark, new
every time.

And the kiss: softer
than I expected, and
everything
is deep and dark and full with
the feel and scent and taste of
you, and
everything
is warm and
everything
is you.

by A.J.

wild joy pressed between your fingers, the space
between your bones, alive, electric, a streak
of gleaming white speed about to begin
its becoming,

your beauty, soft lines painted by
the roughened scraps of twilight that
settled in the coolness of
the seats,

the rare and wondrous quiet daring, sharpening
the secret corners of your smile,

and loving you
is the easiest
thing i’ve
ever done.

by A.J.

I run my fingers along the jagged edges of your laugh.
I imagine the taste of it, pink-smeared, bittersweet,
like chocolate only used for making something else.

Your watch will drone its gleaming tick,
its face so cold and delicate,
filling your shape with whispers of weight.

But your hand is warm in mine, and I smell rain,
darling, there’s something growing.

by A.J.

It’s time to talk about the dead girl.

The one you’ve shoved
into a bathroom drawer
among the dental floss and never-used mascara
in the space
where the sharp edges used to be.

The one who sits crooked somewhere
beneath the flowered carpet
that has always sunk
its roots into the bedroom floor.
(Her bedroom floor.) The carpet
that our mother has since replaced
with something blue and earthless.

The dead girl told you
once
about that carpet
that used to be hers.
Sometimes she would lie on it, when
the blankness wedged in her
chest carved away
her steadiness.

She would stare up at her ceiling
with its strange adornments:
the smear of battle-beaten moth.
the air vent that never has blown air, just
a square shaped collection
of dust-choked cracks.

(It was November. A Friday night
the night you found her.
A Saturday
the day you told the first lie that would ever matter.)

More would follow.
You didn’t miss a day
of school
till spring.

And now it’s time to feel her, the dead girl.

(You remember her
don’t you
in the hospital bed.
She was small.
She has always been small.
You stroked her hair, its shortness
devoid of spiked
defiance then, just softened
curls half-flattened
by some ambulance contraption.
You sang to her
of sunshine
low, off-key

but she felt like
she had already turned
to ice
or stone
or gold.)

Let’s talk about the dead girl.

It’s time to unstring her
from the stars
where all the old gods
put the pretty things they’ve broken.

It’s time to plunge your hands
into the silt of some old pond
(you know the one)
smash the toy boats
toy leaves
toy stones.
Hold something brackish, something
round and cold.

It’s time to wake the dead girl.

It’s time to pick her up
so gently
like a bird, or
like an egg, to
place a fluttering,
flickering
form

back into
her breathing shape.

by A.J.

My friend,

Sometimes I see you reading in the grass.
I see you splayed out beneath the fire-white sky, like the petals of a flower, or a new-broken window,
refracting fractals of light and shadow and brutal, breaking, broken edges and edges and
edges on end, the end.

Fuck that. I’m a liar, and you know the endings I have told. You
don’t end with edges, don’t end
with broken, don’t end with your legs carrying you
to the door.

Friend, your jagged tongue comes from somewhere,
from eyes that see into the bottoms of things:
the cat’s belly, the gritty pond, the cobblestone, dust and ashes

The world’s another strip of life-hatched
leather for you to stitch into
something beautiful. I see the lines it
forms beneath your fingers, threads of rocks and rivers, blinding
for a second in the setting of the sun.

I see the ragged endings tucked away.

‘Cause friend, you cannot fix the world by shouting
at its bent-up bits and pieces, peace
is no dove, nothing light, my love; nothing
to fit on your shoulder and sing with you
not in your voice, not every time.

You, a storm in the desert, a mighty
redwood among the plastic palm trees
sometimes it’s braver to touch the Earth
again. Sometimes it’s braver to arm yourself with someone else’s noise.

I ask the impossible, I know, I know…
I know I don’t. I can’t.
The world has fed me roses and
it has fed you broken glass. But
my friend, I will boomerang you a smile; I will wrap up your scraped knuckles with crackling-thin hope; I
will pour my quiet, my waiting, my different kind
of crying on the burning, burned-up places. I
cannot be the avenging angel curled inside your splintered altar but I can be a soft place for your knees.

I can let you rest.

by A.J.

There will come a day
when a wire hanger will become
the bony pair of shoulders
that will bear
the worn-out weight of you.
It’s the weight of
a rope in the hangman’s hands
and also an embrace.

You will smell
like spiderwebs.
You will taste
like the tear
that landed
on the collar long ago
unfurling
into the whiskers of dew-strung grass
my fingers chased
my lashes brushed

it’s quiet in its drying.

It lives in your zipper,
The stinging salt
of memory
the sun slathered
on the trees
and when I glimpsed
the fear in their laughter.
This weight.

It’s heavy and heady and
so are you and one day

we will rest.

For now
though
I’m your bony pair of shoulders
till even you
can’t hold them steady
when they tremble.

by A.J.