Arranging by Chance

Seventeen year olds are too

honest Call me:

Mountain

Saint

Loaded gun

Redwood

it’s simpler. 

You make intimacy an asymptote

reaching when it’s me

handing you a hair tie.

Shiver at my touch

the way you walk out

of rooms when I’m in

a skirt. You threw up

in the bathroom after

your favorite song came

up on my screen

you think too much

about function 

I am 300 miles in

thinking about the slant crossing

out the name pressed into the page

the brows raising, which means something.

Seventeen Magazine said that you loved me, and that I was not

a child and keep you

to prove it. 

Tree, I see you now

painting this table

white with dancer legs

bruised I want to fall into

your digital squares

Tree, I shake you.

Clean slates will get crumby

then bloody, a hairy mess

Tree, he opens the oven too soon and too often-

Run Tree. Do not finish

the table

your sentence 

a loaf

goodbye

Run Tree before he strokes your

eyelids closed and calls your love forever

for now believe me Tree before I can teach you

middle fingernail into center of palm thumb on knuckle

no gaps no space no room just flesh-

fists are complicated

heart-sized and cannot be taught so

Run Tree, don’t let me teach you

not to gift a white page Tree run

He said if I was thirty he would cut me

around and around

my finger Tree, he wrote three books for me

in my blood I told him

it doesn’t make good ink

I read them when I was seventeen

and angry at being

called

Mountain

Saint

Loaded gun

Redwood 

Tree,

I was seventeen

and convinced

I couldn’t understand asymptotes

convinced I was more than girl.