I am eating Nutella in bed.
I am reading messages from men OkCupid.
I am not responding to them because in this poem,
playing hard to get online is easier than IRL but it’s still good practice.
I am taking photos of myself using my Macbook webcam and I am
adjusting their contrast in Photoshop.
I am telling myself it is not narcissistic to place my body in a poem
seeing as this is the only body I have.
I am drawing diagrams in my head of all the emotions I have felt today.
I draw my emotional body. It seeps into the carpet.
I am color coding instinctual responses and habitual behavioral patterns
and filing them into folders entitled ‘yes’ ‘no’ ‘maybe’ and ‘stop’
Before I was writing this poem, I had saved a photo of a person I miss
to my desktop.
I am looking at the person in the photo and this person is looking at me too.
We are making eye contact and in this poem it is not uncomfortable.
I refuse to be the first to look away so we do this until the battery dies.
I am lying on my back and looking at shapes and indentations in the ceiling.
In a poem I used to be a child in a national park with very Big Trees.
In a poem I was four years old and I bathed with my mother.
In a poem there are only blue things.
In this poem I do not live alone. I fling the doors open.
I remember how you are when your body is in front of mine.
I reconstruct you to be how you were when you existed near me.
After I write this poem, I will zoom in until you are not a person anymore, but
blocks of color like
melon and dirt
and urgency
and lack.