time won't tell a new story.
you wouldn't. but,
i will.

and do they come out: 
erase.

You called me Kris and that meant something, keeping our parents' lines tied up every night for hours, "A few more minutes!"  You'd pick me up, cavalier, in your Elantra after dark and buy me smoothies; we'd sit in strangers' steep gravel driveways overlooking our small town's night lights and talk for hours. Afterward, I'd walk through the front door and my mom, crocheting on the sofa--her gaze affixed to the fluid flicking of her wrists to swoop the sequential loops--would grin. It wasn't too hard, you know, hiding.

we were caught up
in our own nets & traps
the tangling and the strangling cinched us closer
 

and so i took it back. i took back our telling
and my dwelling on the missing
and the need to analyze and finalize and file our things dissolving.
i took back the time, the mystery, the references to things unspoken in terms of terror and plight
and though your gaze becomes my starry night, in the day, i stole away with them.
i took my opening to a desire once disintegrated,
and hid it away so you won't find it, again.
i took back my first hello and the lonely pause of waiting for another in its stead.
and i turned around, and away, and the further i distanced myself from the outer edges of our amounted things, 
the easier it became to grab hold of the pieces and work my way inward,
recycling each to the kind resolve of unmemory
and i took it all back--every last piece--until i arrived in centro, again.

what i've done has never burdened me with many regrets,
it's always been what i'm capable of
that causes me great despair.

She is Supernova and he is the muse.
Were it not for the writing he's lavished upon space of stripe and sound,
were it not for the gentle gradient of expectation
and evidence as it manifests, in colors of frightening potential,
the devastation of chance and the taking,
she'd again find herself ensnared by entanglement and treason
and seared to her coeur.

V.
I'd contracted chickenpox. After a bath, I stood on the bed so I could see my naked body in the frame of my dresser mirror, covered in pox, curious at my flesh's scheme to plot the spots like destinations on a map all over me and without my knowing, without my approval. I stared longingly: a mature admiration of the rosy specks spanning across my youthful and pale skin--meaningful, intentional, romantic, even sexual--too, so for a nine year old. That was the first time I ever really saw my own body, a part of me I had no control over, a part which had its own desire and will separate from my own, in full.

i know i'll experience electricity again and i'll experience more. and it'll surprise me. it will. it won't surprise you; i've felt your hoping for my hope (this time of whole, darling). remember, we took a drive, windows down, and set our nightsecrets free and you said you'd never regret me. it doesn't get any sweeter than this--to bless my finding with our letting.

(thank you)