I want to swallow you whole—the seeds, the rotten pieces, the pith. The days keep ticking down and time is never going to stop. Might as well use fingers over forks, teeth over knives. Plans to devour you are always in my pipeline. I want you flossed in the split of my tongue, tethered to me indefinitely. I want everything, or nothing at all. You are at my mercy, signing the deeds to your heart over to mine. I am not thawing into a new year—I am reviving old ghosts in unfixable fixation. I am roles in reverse in reverse in reverse, drowning you in tides of uncertainty. December is for forgiveness, and I have absolved myself of self-induced starvation. I will do anything to make me happy. I will bleed my hippocampus of memory just to gorge myself on you.

after Taylor Swift

I see you in my rearview mirror outside of nowhere and everywhere.

My heart has become a broken home for no one. I burn for you. Trail embers

and ashes like a wedding train over burgundy, dress the seeping wounds

with tinsel. Am I supposed to go on without you? Cut caffeine for hot chocolate?

Benadryl for snickerdoodle? Yesterdays for tomorrows?

Snow falls like memories—seven inches of heartbreak and regret and boy grins

Night unwraps herself of paperwhite and cellophane. The smell of winter’s arrival lands like a starling on my shoulder, lingers like chimney smoke in my hair. Permanently branded in a script rehearsed too many times to be true, I bury the echoes of my sorrows in the quiet. Snowfall and nostalgic lamps cradle me to sleep. Winter blanket as a sacred rite. Instead of killing myself, I wrote this poem. I silence the porch light. I hope you get what you deserve.

A white expanse can either reel in a lion fish or a sturgeon from a deep well, or baffle the poet to her knees.

If the latter, the poet freezes solid, waiting for spring to thaw like a miracle, a hole in the ice, an aha! of house sparrows returning home

to rebuild their nests. The tomb-bound poet confides in the moon that listens but offers no answers. Silence beckons like a small mercy.

Rest.

To give to dark tides, take advantage of more time spent with the stars, tune in to one’s circadian rhythm, and turn in early, lulled to sleep by lunar lullabies and celestial noise.

​​        (My secret is a weighted blanket, ​​        a low-spun ceiling fan to ebb the heat, ​​        a pair of crew socks, ​​        a Benadryl.)

Retreat.

To build a nest of fleece and pillow in front of the hearth fire, circle three times, and settle down with a fantasy fiction, knitting needles and yarn, a bowl of yam and lentil soup, one’s own thoughts and a pen.

Every man was a weapon. I, a vegetarian turned cannibal to survive their machetes and unzipped denim.

What does it mean when the dream version of a gentle lover from your past hunts you with a knife and a Bible

in a war-torn country? Who can you trust in a kidnapping when everyone giving you orders—even the one begging you to trust them,

eat the plum you’re supposed to feed them but hide the pit—are men? In the dream, I eat fried octopus, and I like it. In the next dream,

I am unbearable and unhinged. I cannot hold my tongue back from its urge to mock and trill, my throat from spewing its song vomit of improvised musicals—so one-note and limited in vocabulary, but a songbird all the the same. I am made of maybe and almost, saving all my finish lines for overdone daydreams and underdeveloped poems, but I can entertain myself for hours and long weekends with only my words and imagination. I’ve lived such a fortunate, average life, I have to rely on secondhand sorrow for a good cry, someone else’s someday-maybes to convince myself to stay. My seasonal affection disorder never really goes away, which is to say, I can burn like the last candle on the longest night of the year and blizzard in July. I am heart-shaped marshmallow twinkling in a coal eye. I am a broken clock refusing to be abandoned. I am setting down the minutes in my own time, never caging the barn swallows and loon songs that bloom like arias from their seeds.

after after Kate McCallister in Home Alone

Cinnamon stains for life, so tip it over, wet your hands, coat your fingers in the umber, and trace me from freckle to freckle so I become a sky of constellations on nights when the moon hides her face from the stars. There’s a fine line between poet and muse, and the dark laid out like a sequined cape on snow skates right down the middle. If the perks of long train rides are setting albums to the shifting countryside or tucking into a Victorian gothic novel, the perks of longer nights are more hours to dream of sun. More time to catch the starlight beading in a metallic tang on my skin and seal it in a jar before it vanishes into dawn’s dull grays and watered down tangerine. I’d live in winter’s oil fields forever if it meant holding onto these auroras, these death lamps, this lunar lantern in my palms for a thousand graves and thousand and one lifetimes.