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HOME © 2021 FRANSIVAN MACKENZIE

 Fiat —
Thank you for loving me as I am.
Hello there, lovely. Wow, your skin glows brighter under the pastel skies. Just the
lighting? The magic of the nightfall? I don't think so. Perhaps, that's finally happiness
warming you from your core to the dermis. Talk about being engaged, after all! I don't
know, dear, I haven't heard from you in a year.
Please, come in.
Sure, you can leave your boots right there. No, I don't mind. Let me take your coat. Winter
is still here, huh? Some things stay longer than they should. Some things don't clock out
with time. Like young love, you know? Like loss. I still have not repainted the walls that
bear my sister's height marks. Yeah, she's fifteen now with a dream she's lost and a
heartache she can't nurse.
Excuse the scars on the leather. I keep telling myself I'd buy a new couch but I don't.
Please, make yourself at home.
Oh, that's Baem. Springer Spaniel. Huh! He seems to really like you. I'll get you his treats
in a while.
What were you saying?
The curtains? Ah, yeah. Do you remember Dom, the exchange student? He sent that to me
all the way from Perth last Christmas. No, I still haven't changed them. He's got a fiancé
now in Calgary, though. Jealous? Why would I—Dear, I'm still in love with that boy in High
School who wore his sadness like a German perfume – the one I got intoxicated from. His
name still escapes my mouth every time someone asks me for the definition of love. Geez
no, I did not mail any of those letters. They fodder for good stories but confessions such as
that would waste what we had. I think he really loved me, though, you know? Loved me as
a friend, with a heart as innocent as a child's. How dare I ask for more? Isn't love
demanding something back not love at all?
Hey, would you like a drink? Black? Are you sure you don't want any sugar or cream? Oh
okay. Lately, I prefer mine with too much milk. So whenever I make my coffee, I pretend I
see the galaxies once mirrored in his eyes. They were always ripe with hope and grief. I'm
sorry I keep talking about him. I've really been missing him a lot lately.
Here it is, friend. Help yourself. Do you want me to turn the heater on? Do you want to
finally tell me how that man you call yours silenced all the sirens in your chest? Do you
want to try and make me believe in love again? I can't guarantee you anything but—I
mean look at that ring, glinting under the chandeliers. And look at my neck. I still wear his
mother's necklace like a promise he can't keep.
What were you saying? Ah. No, I don't mind. You can stay here for as long as you want. I
have an extra room. I always have an extra room. The way I see it, dear, a woman's heart
can never be too full.
What's that? Oh, no that's not a lamplight. That's Luna. She's beautiful, yeah. She looks
extra drunk tonight.
I will stay the same in the letters I tucked here –
inside thin envelopes painted the color of where I fall not for the high of the free fall
dusk but for the safety net,
sealed with love or whatever I thought it here –
was. where I love you and I need you doesn't
share the same bed.
But this version of me cannot exist right
beside you, You loved me at a nightfall, perhaps,
here – but the sun has already risen.
where every mole of my soul is no longer
an atom of your salvation,
here –
where your shadows don't need to hover in
the fading light
because I've finally made friends with the
dark,
I know you said you love me
but boy,
I still have hollers packaged in my cells
so every touch that makes your heart sing
has me captured in the jaws of a flinch.

I know you said you love me

but boy,
there are certain wounds not even time can heal
that you're trying to patch with kisses planted illicitly
when my mouth is too bloody
to taste the red promise on your lips.

I know you said you love me

but boy,
I don't know how to dance
with your hands on my hips
when every palm I've ever known
has heisted my skin of music.

I know you said you love me

but boy,
you are pulling all your strings
to tune this siren heart into safety's melody
when there's nothing in this cop car of a body
except alarms so arresting.
I know you said you love me,
but boy,
I am true to history
and every lover in the past
who tried to rescue me from me
equated my salvation with their exits.

I know you said you love me,

and boy,
I think I love you too —
so much that I can't let you in
just to watch you leave
when you finally figure out
I'm not worth it.
 Because you deserve a place in my poetry,
I will write about you
and your eyes that never opened,
your fingers that held on to me for as long
as they could,
your lips that was a pink bow pulled into
the slightest smile,
your veins a map to a paradise you came
home to way too soon.

Because you deserve a place in my poetry,

I will write about you
and your heartbeat that had enough bullets
to fight a forty-minute war,
your bloodstreams that sang an anthem of
fight and surrender,
your innocence a fragrance that hung into
the paleness of your skin,
your visage a white flag to silence the gunshots in me.

Because you deserve a place in my poetry,

I will write about you
and your warm body against my shirt,
the same bump on my stomach a lifetime ago,
the same pallid flesh that we buried into Earth
deadly rich enough to make a garden of tulips grow.
 Because you deserve a place in my poetry,
I will write about you
and how I wouldn't have you
any other way past these pages,
beyond those dreams that woke me up haunted,
how I can't bear for my memory
to be the only place you dwell in,
even years after you've traded
the crook of my arm for a palace in heaven.
Old friend whom I call lover
in dreams where marigolds don't wither
and where afternoons aren’t as cruel
as they are in this spot in the map
next to the sun,
have you heard where time has taken
this broken, barren land?
What once was a desert has now
become a gray stretch of
cityscapes beneath the blue.
Our mountains have lost their hue
in a snap of a finger.
The winds have gone fiercer, then gentler,
and after causing enough damage,
has reverted to its nature
where every knee bows
before the white heat.
Everything has changed –
thanks be to the seasons,
but my heart has not stopped
beating your name's syllables
and your shoulder blades
that would grow
wings hadn't planes
and exchange programs existed
to bring you to me
and then take you away.
Truth be told,
the longer I spend in your absence,
the more I learn to unclasp my palms
for those that I can not beg to stay.
As time sings psalms of
calendars flipping,
the engines on my chest rust
on the idea of having to wait
for someone who comes
and goes in the first place.
To be yours this innocently is a blessing and a curse –
to be all that we are now,
dancing around the shadows of what could be,
hauntingly beautiful phantoms tiptoeing to an unsung melody,
doomed on the prospect of becoming real.

Both of us are twirling on the eggshells of possibilities,

daunted by the breaking of whatever this is.
But what is this if not cowardice?
What is this if not a risk worth taking?
What do we know of love except
our arms are too full
of each other to even embrace it?
Of course, we're just friends
and whenever I speak,
your dark brown eyeballs glaze my lips
and whenever you're with someone else,
all of my insides twist.
We'll never know what the future has for us,
will we?

We're too busy pretending we're happy

in this realm we live in
we actually lose a grasp
on the concrete truth of bricks
our hands can use
to build ourselves a home with.

Of course, we're just friends and

I'm the one whom you’ve given
your late mother's necklace to as a gift
and it's you that flashes in my head
whenever they ask me
who I want to spend the rest of my life with.
By the way,
I like the way you say my name –
like a predawn invocation of melancholia,
like a wish unsent to Hailey's comet,
like a prayer addressed to the patron saint of lost causes,
like it is the only thing that fits your mouth other than mine,
like a promise you are terrified of keeping,
like the sacred laughter of a child with his head thrown back,
like a painting whispering a secret to your eyes in an underground museum,
like the ocean teaching the skies how to be beautiful and blue,
like a lover's fate being dismantled by the map of the stars and the moon,
like an unspoken truth you'll divulge for the very first time,
like I like you.
By the way,
I really like you.
When I was little, your hands were the only glow I followed and when you lead me
to the sun, I didn't burn. I learned how to revel in the blazing flames, to cackle
through the crackle of the fire, to radiate light on every creature I can reach.
Eighteen years later, my flesh is acquainted with the moles of the celestial bodies.
I have mastered the art of standing alone amidst the vastness of the unknown,
trusting the rest of the world to get along with me. I watch sprouts grow from the
dirt and hope bloom in the cheeks of those who roam the streets I sizzle in sum-
mers I can't be gentle.
I swallowed the sun, indeed. I'm all incandescent now with the language of com-
bustion that you have taught me. I'm now powerful enough to reduce things into
ashes as much as I can heal. I have become one who is loved, needed, and
feared. At times, I am high in the horizon. But time constantly instructs me when
to sink.
No matter how bright I shine, though, I will always stay beneath your shadows. I
will always slide into the gleam of your beams. You will always be bigger than I
am and I will ever be.
In my eyes, you are the whole universe in which I'm only a speck of. But oh, how
you love me into infinity. How you love me so much I've also learned how to love
unconditionally.
The flickering lamplight on the corner
of your street throws my silhouettes
against the walls
as if the bricks
can map the entirety of me,
but it makes my insides feel less dark,
at least.
Your front porch knows my shadow
as much as it recognizes your footsteps
ten inches away from the door.
The mat doesn't need embroidery
to declare who is welcome and who is-
n't,
well aware of the sneaker soles
they ought to kiss.
The small decrepit cabinet in front of
your house
has held my secrets
folded in carton cards,
their dust acquainted with letters
only the pools on my pillow
are familiar with.
Your Christmas tree has witnessed me
limp on a sprained ankle
the night of your nineteenth birthday,
the lights wrapped around it twinkling
in my raw, broken presence.
The cushions across it
have carried my weight
through the laden schooldays
but I never once heard it complain.
Your kitchen table
has watched me toy around
spoon, fork, hunger, and fury
perched on this belly of a girl.
It understands the bottomless well
I keep drinking on,
the glass sweating in this spectacle
between my flesh, my bones,
and my unwanted wanting.
The chrome tiles of your bathroom
creak under my feet,
pleading me to forgive myself
for it isn't a sin to have a body
that always comes undone.
It has seen me whole and in pieces
and has declared through its cracks
I'm beautiful regardless
of the hills on my stomach.
The minute fissures on the mirror
hung over the sink
can paint you a photo
of me without eyeshadows or lipstick
or a brave face to put on without even
laughing.
They don’t bat an eye in my unbecom-
ing.
Your screened windows
have memorized the way
I sneak into the night of starless skies.
They speak the language of my hands,
my phone's faltering flashlight,
and my brother’s warning
to make a bloody ocean of my mouth
resonating in my skull.
Your dog's ears get a grasp
on my favorite anthem to deny -
the stray, lonely notes of my voice,
my reticent figure
taking the dance of hesitation,
so it barks hello before I do.
I know all too well
the mud this house is made up of
is not all there is to it but whenever
my limbs lead me here,
I don't think of the walls
and whatever they hold.
Whenever I put my fist up to knock,
I don't listen to the wood
and the mysteries they echo
but to my heartbeat singing
it's you I'm coming home to.
It's you and the refuge
cradled in the caverns of your bones.
It’s you who redresses this house
into a home.
And oh, how unfortunate it is
to be fifteen and foolish
enough to have fallen
over someone who can't pinpoint the difference between
love and bottomless oceans inside vodka bottles,
love and nicotine-branded nerves,
love and sparkly snowflakes into nasal cavities,
love and violet necklaces blooming out of fingertips,
love and the violent grips on steering wheels,
love and crimson crescent marks on closed fists,
love and a roadmap to hell inked on her wrist,
love and a bullet pressed against her temple,
love and the high of a free-fall ending up to sixteen broken bones,
love and the fascinating edge of bell tower ledges,
love and the everlasting evanescent of it all,
love and everything it isn't
but wish it were
to make the mirror look more of a monster
and less of a thousand splinters
of a girl.
Hey, I want to touch you. Not that way, no. But to just touch your face and make you feel the
warmth seeping out of me. Don't you know I'd swallow the sun to remind you that we can still
grow flowers from the cemeteries of our skin? Something inside you is dead. But something
remains alive and burning like a flicker of a flame in a candle wick.
Last night, I fell asleep painting a picture of you inside my head – the one I've memorized like
the first nine elements of the Periodic Table. Every detail of your eyes that are swirling with
madness. Your long lashes that touch the crown of your cheeks whenever you blink. Your
goatee I could only imagine scratching the bow of my lips when we—if we—finally kiss. It makes
me think of the pain and the itch your knees get while running through high grasses. That slash
of a wound on the right of your nose beginning to scar is an image solidifying inside my mind.
Did your cat do that to you? I mean the one that your dog always gets jealous of? Don't you
know I take note of every word that slips off your tongue? I can't take my eyes off of the pimple
marks on your left temple. I can't resist that tiny mole on your right bottom lip. I can't resist you at
all, beautiful human being.
Hey, I want to cradle your neck with the crook of my arm and feel your heart beating against my
shirt. I want to run my fingers through your hair as I hold your head, coaxing all the sadness your
body carries. I know you're terrified of everything. Me too. I know you're lonely and tired of being
left behind. Me too. I want to knit you a sweater of promises I know I can keep. To give you
velveteen blankets as a present so you'll never fall asleep in the dark again. I know you miss
your father. Me too. I know inside you lies a chasm you fell into. Yeah, I can relate. I know you
scream "BLOODY HELL" and you want to leave this world already and slip into another
dimension like every character in the narratives you tell me. Me too. I remember way back in
August when you showed me the brilliant ladders on your arms and when I looked at you, I
asked what they were for and the red letters just stared at me. "MASOCHISM," you said with a
devilish grin. I wish I knew then that I would fall for a man who couldn't keep himself from leaping
off ledges. I want to hold you so tight you actually believe the winters on your chest will pass.
I want to kiss the poison out of your lips even if it kills me. I want to tell you that before I turned
fifteen, I searched for love at the pit of a bottle. That I picked up the blade for the first time when
I was eleven. That it hurts in places I don't know the name of. Maybe we can map them together.
I want to tell you, I know, I see you, and I feel for you no less.
Hey, I love you so much it actually hurts. I want to build you a fortress that will shelter you from
this world that keeps dropping us grenades. Whatever it takes, I want to keep us safe. I want to
give you all this love that pulls me apart at the seams, paint you a heaven I've only seen in my
dreams. But oh, my truest boy, why won't you let me?
You terrify me in the best way possible
and by that, I mean
you make me love you so much
I forget the boy who trampled
over my heart eons ago –
the one whose name was branded on the
secluded parts of my soul
when he sold my body to the darkness
if it couldn't be his own.
Your presence is unlike any other
that after dancing with phantoms
praying not to be pulled under,
I can finally sleep without a Swiss knife
clutched on my chest.
This time, sorry doesn't translate as
It will happen again but you'll forgive me
out of love and out of habit
and tomorrow isn't a curse
clenched in a fist.
This time, I'll marry you someday
isn't a loaded gun
and every heartbeat isn’t a pull of a trigger.
This time,
violets blossom in my backyard
and not where
my collarbones and skin collide.
You terrify me in a way
terror has never been so pacifying
and by that, I mean
you make me love you
more than I'm willing to admit
after loving me ever so deeply first
that you've dirtied your fingers
while digging through the grave
beneath the floorboards of my bones,
your hands gentle and raw as
they slowly help me turn this
haunted house of mine
back into a home.
Being with you is being bathed in sunbeams. Warm but never enough to burn me.
Brilliant but not dazzling. Bright but not blinding.
When you pulled me close, the iceberg inside my chest melted into an ocean that
washed away the lover who once promised me forever. Inside your arms, time is a for-
eign concept.
When you laughed, it was deep, dark, and daunting for the future that threatened to
take us away. It's your way of saying that right now we're happy and right now that's all
that matters.
When you held my hand, I felt like being acquainted with the earth that bloomed divine
flowers in your mother's garden. Your touch was rich with kindness and tender with
care.
When you told me you love me, I didn't need to hear it again. There are some feelings
we can't box in a sentence. There are some things in this world too ethereal to be
spoken of.
Being with you is as easy as breathing. Sometimes I look at our photographs and think,
if gratitude had a face, it would be ours. If genuine delight had an expression, it would
be the boat of our beams.
Loving you is learning how to love myself too. And I can't think of anything more
beautiful than that. For once in my life, loving someone feels like freedom. With your
name tattooed on my lips, loving doesn't taste like fear. With your heartbeat echoing in
my ears, loving doesn't ring the same as leaving.
So how was it? Warm? Also strong? Yeah? Did you ever doze off? Well, if you did, I would
have forgiven you.
There's nothing slumbery about love, I guess. What's a clock but a piece of glass and
plastic when the air is brewing of our childhood whims and dreamy memories? I don't know
if you know but not once did I glimpse at my watch while you were pouring your heart out to
me. The second of knowingness could not compare with the feeling of being cupped into
your palms so dearly. You're so full of love and longing, you know? I wish I was, too, but—I
don't know, darling. Maybe, someday, I'll learn to loosen my grip. When I've written enough
poems. When I've learned to let go. Maybe, someday, I'll stop bleeding.
Oh, that? No, are you kidding? That's the sun. Look, the frost sparkles. The fences glisten.
Hang on, let me see the skies. Gorgeous. Golden. Of course, I am thrilled for spring.
Nevertheless, this winter is its own rebellious kind of magic.
When exactly are you leaving again? Sorry, gotta ask that to anyone I ever let in. Oh, not
yet? Are you sure? No, I'm actually happy to hear that. Maybe we'll have wine tonight in-
stead of coffee. Do you want waffles for breakfast?
Yeah, he's hungry again. I'll give him a snack in a while. No, he won't mind a cuddle. He'll
miss you when you leave, though.
We both will. But thanks for staying as long as you can, dear. When you’re ready, I’ll walk
you on your way out, pack you some stories worth carrying. Know this, though: my door is
always open whenever you want a place to stay in.