Honeybee

by Mateer, Trista;

  Yesterday I sat at a bar with a stranger and we practiced swallowing each other’s accents.

  Before I left, my mother said that she didn’t care what I did in Australia, as long as I didn’t get into the ocean because she’s worried about great white sharks. Today I walked straight into the Pacific anyway. There are a thousand ways to get caught up in something’s jaws.

  Someone told me that despite the snakes and the spiders and the poisonous marine life, if we’re judging by deaths caused per year, one of the deadliest creatures in this country is the European honey bee.

  There’s a constellation here called the Southern Cross that you can’t see from the United States mainland. Every part of my life has pieces of you in it but this one.

  Melbourne

  I wish I could fall in love with this city

  the way that I fell in love with you:

  quick and over coffee.

  Palm To Palm

  I am not sorry it’s over,

  but I think my hands might always ache

  for the symmetry of yours

  and I hope you understand that now

  as well as you used to.

  Luna Park

  I know we are both struggling with recognizing bad things and letting them go but I need you to know:

  I am the bad thing. (I was not always the bad thing. Sometimes it was you. Sometimes it was just the two of us together.)

  There were nights I was so jealous that the thought of you on your knees for Jesus made me upset. Baby, I don’t think you understand the level of insecurity it takes for someone to want to write God angry letters.

  Do you remember the days you were so afraid to lose me that you wouldn’t say anything honest? You lived on eggshells, all pent up anger and swallowed arguments. People can’t function like that.

  A few days ago, I was walking past this amusement park by the beach. The front gate was the wide, smiling mouth of an enormous sun.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been happy.

  Gum Trees

  The first time I drove through

  Australian bushland, I saw scorched

  trees twisted up towards the sky.

  Everything was black and brown

  and gray and green. There are plants

  there that need fire to germinate, to

  crack their seeds, to grow, to change.

  Heat thrust through the soil can stir

  up things that were lost years ago.

  Everything comes back after a bushfire.

  I could start over after you.

  For Everyone I Meet With Your Name

  I’m sorry.

  Avant La Haine

  The best version of us is caught in a photograph where your arms exist permanently around me. Everything drips pink and gold in the sun as you laugh with your head back. I wear a dress covered in sunflowers and you hold me like a bouquet. Here, love gets to be hungry. Here, love never has its fill.

  What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Leaving (What I Can Tell You About Leaving)

  It is as hard to be the one who goes as it is to be the one who stays. People always talk about getting left behind, but nobody talks about how difficult it is to pack up your books and dig your bobby pins out of couch cushions. Every time you leave the house, it gets harder to walk back in. One day, you won’t be able to.

  That is okay. It is okay to leave. It is okay to feel smothered by the weight of a life you didn’t want or a relationship that doesn’t taste the way you thought it would. It does not make you hard or disagreeable or unreasonable.

  Some people will leave. Some people are born flight risks. It is no shortcoming of yours that they cannot keep their feet on the ground. It is not your fault that they cannot seem to stand in place. They are not leaving you; they are just leaving. Realizing this does not make it better or worse.

  Some people will leave you. It will have everything to do with you and nothing to do with outside circumstances. You cannot sugarcoat it. You cannot dress it up and make it feel sweet or soft or warm. And it’s going to hurt you. I know your instinct will be to beg them to stay, to unpack their bags for them, to curl up by their wandering feet—but people are going to leave you. That is okay too.

  Whether you are coming or going, leaving or staying, you’re a moving part of something. We’re all moving parts of something. Sometimes other people will sync up with us for a while, but you’re still on the right path for you whether you’re ticking along it alone or not. You are not defined by the people you walk away from, and you are not defined by the people who walk away from you.

  This Has Nothing To Do With You

  I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking for the last

  three months. I am sick of the length of my hair

  and the reasons I have to keep my nails short.

  I keep forgetting how to breathe.

  I keep forgetting how to be kind to myself.

  I need to remember to berate myself with my

  inside voice, to pick myself apart quietly

  instead of making such a big fuss about breaking.

  This Has A Little To Do With You

  Today I bought sixteen mangoes.

  I accidentally left the house without a bra on.

  I forgot to wash my hair again.

  I am having some trouble keeping it together.

  I Have A Postcard Mouth

  All it ever says is:

  wish you were here.

  What I Would Tell You If I Were Not Stubborn

  You are not the moon or the sun, a planet or a dwarf star. I am not stuck in your gravitational pull. You are a girl too far away, with chapped lips and messy skin and yellow hair—and I love you. Maybe that is the same thing.

  I am sorry—yes, because things ended—but also because I took your love for granted, treated it like a thing that you could never yank away from me. When you took the scissors I had pressed into your palms and cut our strings, I slipped out of step like a ruined marionette. I did not know how to cope with myself, did not know how to handle me-without-you.

  I took three years of Spanish in school and still remember the basics. I’ve had twenty-two years to figure myself out, but after you, I need a crash course in my own body language. I don’t remember what to do with my verbs when you are not around to conjugate them.

  You were right when you said I’ve only had bad examples of love. I grew up thinking that it was a chore, that it did not have to be easy, that it was okay to be hard.

  But ours was the exchange that defined “love” for me: unconditional even when it was distanced, never arrogant, always kind. And then one day there were conditions. I never planned on you being one of those bad examples.

  After it was over, had been over for months, I told a friend that if you ever called, I would come running. And he said to me: well, I guess it isn’t over then.

  I know I said some things about needing space—but you are not the moon or the sun, a planet or a dwarf star. I do not know if distance from you will ever sit right with me (even if it has to).

  (I think it has to.)

  Daily Untruths

  Things have gone too far.

  There’s no coming back from this for us.

  My heart barely trembles

  when I shove it toward a stranger.

  Wreck Of Loch Ard

  I do not know if you were the coast and I was the sea,

  or if we were the ship and the rocks were made of distance,

  voices stretched thin, hearts that grew too hard

  to say stop and too stubborn to give out.

  All I know is that there were no lifeboats except for your arms,

  and once, there existed depths that did not swallow us

  but spit us up wet and willing to run right back in.

  Semi-Factual Thoughts On Space

  Did you know that when a star implodes,

  for a few days, it can be brighter than an entire galaxy?

  I
still have light in my eyes from the way that you left me;

  I still wait for my core to collapse like a black hole

  and suck everything into it

  when I meet someone else with your name.

  Moons And Stars And Second-Guessing

  Sorry I’m still writing about space when I think of you.

  Truth is, I’m still trying to convince myself that we need it.

  I called you honeybee for seven years. Now the bees are disappearing and so are you. I’m trying my best not to find this poetic.

  On Every Body That Came After You

  There is an emptiness here

  that I swear was not there before

  and I am doing my best

  to fill it.

  Forty-Four Sunsets

  Last night, I curled up in the mouth of a man

  who kept a copy of The Little Prince

  on his nightstand.

  I keep trying to lay myself down next to people

  who understand the taste of loneliness

  and don’t mind it in their beds.

  Most Days I Pity You More Than I Love You: A Short Study Of Bigotry And Hypocrisy

  When a girl who used to leave her heart in my teeth

  says I can’t seek out happiness or truly know myself

  as a person without first knowing the “real love” that only

  a man can provide, I wonder how many days now sit

  stagnant between the last time she called me her soul mate

  and the first time she called me a slur. I want to ask her

  about those nights we fell asleep inside each other, about

  how much she must hate her own tongue. Her own hands.

  The ticklish bends of her knees. All that skin I put my

  mouth on. Amazing, all the things you can look past when

  Christ gets involved. Amazing, all the things you can’t.

  My worth is not defined by a man and neither is yours.

  So We’re In Bed, Right?

  And he leans over and says to me, I’ve been reading your poems. You’re proper heartbroken, aren’t you?

  First I curse at God, then at OKCupid, then at my own easily Google-able name. Then at this man who has the audacity to start talking about the state of my heart when I’m still naked in his bed. Someone else’s bed. With the wrong fingerprints all over me and salt in my mouth. I twist out of his sheets to find my clothes and he

  asks what your name is.

  A Brief Note On Biphobia

  I’m not

  going through a phase

  using it as a stepping stone

  more likely to cheat on you

  just greedy

  secretly actually gay

  secretly actually straight

  inherently also polyamorous

  promiscuous because of my sexuality

  only into and always up for threesomes

  still trying to make up my mind

  attracted to all genders equally

  attracted to anything that moves

  experiencing less discrimination

  benefitting from “passing privilege”

  more likely to spread STDs

  heterosexual while I’m dating a man

  homosexual while I’m dating a woman

  transphobic

  or confused

  but I am

  tired

  Here’s Your Permission

  It is okay to spend your grocery money on wine and hair dye. Sometimes you have to.

  Sometimes you have to drink shower beers and go out with strangers to places you never would have gone before—like an amateur comedy show in the basement of a hostel or a Monet exhibition at an art gallery. A silent disco. A poetry reading.

  Go on vacation with someone else’s family. See the way they treat each other. Remember how you would like to be treated.

  Sometimes you need to run away from your problems even though you can’t really outrun them. Move house. Change cities. Change countries. Take a trip. Breathe in air that has never witnessed your heartbreak before. And then let it out.

  Keenan

  People enter our lives in all sorts of inexplicable ways. They leave like that too but for once, I’m not focused on the leaving. I’m focused on the pack of fruit punch on your bedroom floor and the Chuck Klosterman books on your dresser. The comfortable warmth of your body next to mine. The night you said you didn’t want to complicate things, so we shared our worst internet dating stories instead of kissing. The odds of me flying across the world to just end up meeting another American girl with the same name as my ex. The way I’m always gravitating towards home.

  Bless My Bad Roommate

  Bless the jacket I left on the plane.

  Bless the parts of this heartbreak I left in an airport.

  Bless the airport and their $14 salads

  and the swelling in my ankles.

  Bless the bank that botched my international transfer

  and the two weeks I spent unable to feed myself.

  Bless the fresh kiwi in someone else’s fruit bowl.

  Bless my bad roommate.

  Bless her cold shoulder.

  Bless the mattress on her bedroom floor

  and the night she kicked me out.

  Bless the house on Chaucer Street

  and the girls who slept there.

  Bless the chickens in the backyard.

  Bless the fold out couch.

  Bless the anxiety that got me up in the morning

  even if it was just to make sure the door was locked.

  Bless the whiteboard in the kitchen

  and the hand on the dry erase marker

  and the voice that said,

  I know this isn’t what you wanted it to be

  but you can still make something good out of it.

  Bless all the good I made out of it.

  Johannes

  Maybe it was unkind to feel comforted by the emptiness in your apartment, to treat your heartbreak like a thing I could crawl inside of; but I did anyway and it kept us both warm at night.

  Now I can say there are people I’ve slept with just because we hurt the same way.

  Coming Home

  It took me too long

  to realize it was

  not

  romantic(, tender, or healthy)

  to love someone else

  more than I loved

  myself.

  A Resolution

  I swear every poem I write for you is the last one.

  I swear this is the last one.

  Baggage

  I said I’d never write another poem about you,

  but everything is a metaphor for the way that we left each other.

  Birds flying south for the winter. Rivers running to the sea.

  The moon stuck struggling in its orbit

  and never really going anywhere

  at all.

  The other day a coworker asked me how you’ve been

  and I thought that he was joking. It took me

  a full minute to put it together.

  I’ve gotten so good

  about not flinching at the sound of your name

  that people don’t know I’d still throw myself

  mouth-open into the ocean

  for the chance to drown somewhere you might see it.

  A Clean Break

  I wear rubber gloves around my house

  for fear of contracting germs

  or coming into contact

  with some part of this place

  that still has your fingerprints on it.

  When I find your lip print stuck to a coffee mug

  tucked away in the back of my cupboard,

  I pull the mug out and leave it

  on the kitchen counter

  just to stare at the absurdity of it.

  I think maybe I don’t have to get rid of it.

  I think maybe I’ll take care of it later.

  I think maybe I�
��ll just leave it there for good

  and wear the gloves a little longer,

  get some more disinfectant,

  wash my own mouth out with soap

  for almost saying your name.

  Just Like You

  The first time I deleted your number

  from my phone,

  it felt like my veins were full of

  syrup. Everything felt heavy,

  but everything was

  sweet

  sweet

  sweet.

  The Second Apology

  I’m sorry for trying to love you

  before I knew what I was doing,

  before I knew how to be wanted

  in the light by another person,

  before I knew how to look in the mirror

  and see something worth holding onto,

  before I knew that wanting you

  had a name

  and that it was okay to say it.

  This is no longer an apology to you.

  It’s one to myself

  for the times you said kissing me was

  just friendly,

  for the months I fucked boys

  and thought about your mouth,