Myriad Memory

We are mismatched cobblestones, smooth and beautiful, those leaves that sear from orange to emerald in the span of an inch, constellation storytellers, bandits of pages in textbooks of foreign places we’ve never been, midnight-breathers, and creatures who together hold day in the palms of their hands.  

My mouth is stinging with you.

Yours balloons like a blowfish 

with words and jeers

and pouts mine with 

a stagnant kiss.

Your eyes expand to buttons

and you hold together.

I could never win,

trying to study the items 

blinking on the bathroom counter

confining my messages to you

in a game of internal ping-pong,

the little white ball 

light enough for fingers to grasp

bounced like the Energizer-Bunny

between my teeth

hit the roof,

shot into the sink, 

and quickly became 

a radioactive blue.

I like watching you garden 
with your back to me in your purple bathing suit: 
your back is my favorite part of you, 
the part furthest away from your mouth.

You might give some thought to that mouth. 
Also to the way you weed, breaking 
the grass off at ground level 
when you should pull it by the roots.

How many times do I have to tell you 
how the grass spreads, your little 
pile notwithstanding, in a dark mass which 
by smoothing over the surface you have finally 
fully obscured. Watching you 

stare into space in the tidy 
rows of the vegetable garden, ostensibly 
working hard while actually 
doing the worst job possible, I think

you are a small irritating purple thing 
and I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth 
because you are all that’s wrong with my life 
and I need you and I claim you.

psssst, hi Rye-um :D