yet it’s just me here, mapping velvet plaid over cake white bed sheets

clumped around my fingers. is it ingenious or ingenuine 

​

how the moon cracks around the navy paint van gogh 

made it quarter, how i keep missing you even when you’re busy. 

​

so this is long-distance. so this is incoherent 

timelines and not knowing what needs to be left unsaid. 

​

i can’t touch you through state-thick highways, 

hotel-skipping from cheap ticket to cheaper ticket. homesick 

​

for a kind of summer, not a kind of room. i visited princeton today and saw

dusk kissed yards with benches just wide enough for two people and i 

​

can’t believe we’re only seventeen. skipping like pebbles, but staying on the grid. inviting,

always, that last sober moment before midnight. imagining 

​

the dragon fruit of your headlights, that the two coasts 

would touch like a tesseract and bring me everything 

​

too young. this morning, i traced a photo of your profile, 

wished i could kiss you through laminate and laser-jet ink. 

​

your bucket of contingency that tripped over my wall of lucid dreams

and forgot to peel from naive glow-in-the-dark stars. 

​

this room’s lamp glows as a forbidden sun that threatens to fuse, 

and i beg it to keep going, beg it to wail 

​

like i beg to go home. go home. go home and take everything for granted,

collapse like all i needed was a telescope and your second-floor windows 

​

and the weight of my hips falling into the mattress like a wormhole sucks in light,

these roadlines just strings waiting to touch. here, i theorize: 

​

              call you / answer the phone / call me and ask if i ever loved 

                                                                                                                                   you 

​

see if that overrides my inertial fear, if that could escape 

my blanketed vision. beg me to stop tunneling. i missed you 

​

by the milky way. i missed you by cassiopeia. i miss you

right now, like a broken moon without a center, like an asteroid 

​

made to stalk passing debris. i miss you with everything and anything but my eyes closed.