(1.)

To the man
who should have spent
a falling star on someone else

I never meant for you to feel
like you were not enough,

when I asked you
not to fall in love with me

it was a declaration of war
against self abandonment

(on both sides of the gun.)

because sometimes red and blue
just don’t make purple

only dusk.

(2.)

to the man
who broke my champagne body
on his vestal skin
so he could be christened
something buoyant,

you said my body wouldn’t open to the sun
that mine could only howl at the moon
until my hollow
would become another void for her to fall into

because yours was a love of distraction
an apology necklace
a melancholy
a scorched earth policy
a vengeance

an uncompromising search
for an equality of lonely
stemming from trauma’s infatuation
with its unblemished reflection

and I was just the weapon
you kept pointed at yourself

a silence you could orbit
a depth you could drown in
a sad man’s back up plan

how I howled at the moon for years
hoping to expel you from this body
or be expelled myself

but all that ever flew from me
were glass birds
that sang your barren pasts to sleep
with memories of the tomorrow’s I’d lost

trying to prove you wrong

trying to convince myself
you didn’t win
every time another lover’s husk
blew the dandelion dust
from my scorched skin.

(3.)

to the man
who painted me
into his every self portrait

as a monument of shadow
depicting not the obstruction
but the memory of light,

my eyes
were never the color
of a cinnamon winter
nor an oak womb
nor the North Sea at night

my head
was not a sliver of Eden
behind an alabaster mask
nor a beacon
nor a poppy’s mirage of a barren past

I was not a phoenix
that bloomed from amnion ruin
nor the queen of a heathen’s
wilder epitome of beauty
nor a mountain’s golden bruises

I was just a muse

lucky to go unseen so by you.