they say She doesn’t accept good poems, only ones written at 2 am when you’re desperate & your life is falling apart, or when you’re desperate for your life to be falling apart so you can write the goddamn poem already. they say She’ll only accept poems with phrases like “my life is falling apart,” or “it probably shouldn’t hurt so much to poop,” or “I feel like what my mom did wasn’t quite emotional abuse and I’m not quite depressed but what do words anyways, asdflakdfa; df;;;;”
You who have traveled here by hound bus and solar sail set for diamond seas
You who felt the breath of a dying star on your cheek, kissed an atom awake, painted
they say She’ll almost certainly accept decompressable holoframes of cat gifs. they say you have already met Her before so it doesn’t even matter anyways, still, they say thousands pilgrimage to Her each year, still, place their offerings in one of Her thousand and one mouths, in the black hole between Her thousand and one metallic teeth,
utter a quick, desperate prayer, leave their shadows for dead,
sometimes they are swallowed, sometimes they jump
the arched broken spine of the world in ink before it shattered into planets of memory and teeth shaped vertebrae, You before
you think you have prepared as well as can be expected: a jar filled with the burst of warm bits from your laptop when a friend chuckles and says Well the upside of having a panic attack every day for a summer is that you’re kind of an expert. scraps of poems written at 4 am in which you tried, unsuccessfully, to connect the pain of an iud insertion with when your mom said Gay people aren’t natural. engraved marbles plaques of texts you sent her I love you
gravity, before time took You as their lover in an unapologetic
thrupple with Death
love, it’s 2099, you know that now love means stretching wide as a redwood, linking roots at the planet’s core and sharing memories and cat gifs like water, means drinking stories at a trinary star sunrise and dancing beyond the possibility of burial, but you’ve always had a taste for the old fashioned. so, then, love, love letters to your shame. love letters to your panic attacks. love letters to your stillness. love letters to your love letters and love letters to Her and you take your shadow’s hand and
You who have come to pay Your respects to me
Listen.
you listen, a sunrise on your tongue.