Madeline Augusta Turner

i broke my ankle on the welcome mat and am begging you to come and eat

i’ve never been happier[1]
than I could be[2] 
in our stupid little home.[3]

 [1] but in this domestic kiss of fall and preemptive nostalgia my hands are too cold. so happiness becomes anxious tenderness, the act of holding tightly to a collection of hands that are only holding back because holding means we are more than this moment of unhappiness. the fall never comes but I’m still braced for a glistening impact, gripping at the sleeves of sweaters already unwoven. when I’m mean to you, it’s not about you but about me and everything I’ve never been.

[2] or, I could be happy. maybe I am happy but none of us are ever quite happy. so we drink cheap beer as if it pours from the always dripping faucet and play music on our phones because it’s too hard to hear the quiet. if we go to the bar, you’ll sprawl across the table and tell me about what you ate for breakfast on Sundays as a child and how you’ve thrown the ornaments of suburban life (a shoe, a plate, a vase someone loved oh-so-much) at heads and hoped they might hit. you never tell me whether or not they did. and we are ourselves and each other and no one. I’ve never wanted anything other than the monotony you are, your child spit soaked shimmering life, a dirty sedan or hatch back of which

[3] there are four. four Subarus in our driveway, forty five pairs of shoes and at least three broken hearts at any given moment so I make dinner again, cutting through the discomfort of togetherness with a neat but dull knife. and I have never known anyone or anything to be more beautiful than this. is this what it feels like to come home? I promise I can’t feel your pain for you but lord I’ll keep trying if you promise to do the dishes. we chose this messy bliss, this entangled life, this perfectly mundane chaos. I promise to promise. if only the air, when waking to the ecstatic hum of being, will always feel this good.

love letter to a space cowboy at the end of the world

if it isn’t Venus I don’t want it.
bring me each of the celestial bodies in your reach
and let me return them to you, my diamond eyes
frantic, looking at the beginning world
but believing it is ending. tell me,
what does the moon look like in Massachusetts?
you know this without knowing how,
like how I know stars somewhere are dying
as their beautiful and empty hands reach  
towards each other, towards nothing, towards us.
a cowboy can sleep under the stars but can’t touch them
or be them though you’ll still chase them
as you do again and again each time the day ends.
give me beautiful impermanence. look towards all of space
and know it is not love or stars I need, just a body
akin to earth and all of my own. I will give it back to you
in the spaces between light fractals, rinse it from my sand hair
in an ocean of celestial dust, the honey in your eyes
closed at last as I sink through your rhinestone collarbones
into the light waiting in your chest. this, too, is a beginning. 
the moon’s light as intimate as a thumb pressed against closed lips.