Ava Ashtiani

I prolong the amount of time  I spend in  the shoes of my stress.  I’m learning  how to regulate  the silent  suffocation,  the laces on my hands. They are so full of things  I think I need to carry  but, ultimately, never can. 

and maybe that’s what it was I could never love you enough- not all of you. I was careful to avoid the sharp pieces of your personality and yet not careful enough. You pierced my skin with  every embrace and I grew used to pain, started piercing you back because it was like this you taught  me how to love. So, eventually, I embraced all of you while resenting those parts that didn’t hurt me and when I found a blade of my  own, I stuck it in the soft skin  between your chest and jaw so all of you could bleed and look just as red as me.

June feels like a whisper of something I should already know Half asleep under a sun that sets at the edge of epiphany Drunk off the heat of needing to be nothing June feels like a gentle hand against the pressure of absence Coaxing light through an open window for tangible hope Radiating in the understanding of a slow summer June feels like a mother to a child of impatience Singing a lullaby the pattern of time Rocking to the sound of rivers and moving things June feels like a worn out pendant of gold Warm against skin, soft against hurt Kissing my neck with promises of lasting people June is the familiar stranger who still feels like mine Dancing in the corners of possession  Allowing grief to remember its place in this home While I wonder what it is I should already know

I tread on water before your anger can break through the surface I hold my breath when you open your mouth but it doesn’t matter what you say I am already under water  I wonder if drowning would be easier than this We are already cold in this dead sea so what are we fighting for? You, I want to say that I am fighting for you but you are already gone You leave only your body and your words behind You breathe CO2 into my lungs with each blame and I let you, mistaking it for love You watch me die with a straight face Take all of me. I have nothing else to offer anyone this far deep in you

Deciding whether you were a coward or a saint never gets me somewhere solid. I think I would like you to know me now while I simultaneously think that I would not. It is painful, how much of a contradiction I appear to be to myself. There is much I would like to tell you. Where should I begin? I have finished a novel that made me sad. I am sure you would find some of yourself in it. Some things do that to people, reveal who they are without warning or consent. I forget how to ask for help. Saint. Oftentimes I do not know how to tell people I would do better to be alone. I am not sounding like myself. It isn’t my fault. I get this way when I have consumed art. I like that I get to feel like somebody else while still being me. It is just another contradiction I get to exist as. I am struggling to convince myself that I am stronger than my desires. It’s hard because I feel weak everytime I think about you. Coward. I am so used to turning against reason simply for the sake of doing that I ...

I suffer in this silence of mine and wonder, stupidly, if you can hear me. If the sound of my heart stilling will be alarming or welcome. I often dream of you saving me. There exists a dull ache in my body that reminds me of yours. When I think about filling it with someone else’s, I feel faintly sick but never more so than when I think of you. It is a pressure that intensifies when I remember its permanency. I wonder if I will ever have to miss anyone the way I miss you. I hope I do not hate them as much.  My mind is dizzy with memory and emotion I assumed would fade by now. Nothing has ever been so obvious to me before. I think I might find somebody else and they will be kind. They will never do anything to upset me. They will let my tongue argue against theirs because of love. I worry sometimes that I will be bored of this and I will wonder if being hurt by you would have made me happier. I can not see straight. I don't know if I have written a poem or something else b...

that’s how we felt: like a broken bottle on the floor of your apartment left there for weeks because we were too busy or just pretending not to notice the shards had gotten our feet. walking over the mess and leaving trails of our blood  everywhere we stepped. it seeped together until i couldn’t tell the red of your pain apart from mine. i started painting. drawing scenes out on my skin for you to see. “where’d you get the paint?”  i pointed to the floor.  you didn’t understand it, wouldn’t ever be able to feel how much i needed you to. so i cleaned up the glass  but left the rest of us on your carpet. it wouldn’t have come out anyways,

Trumpets sound in my ears, innocent reminders of  no escape from myself. My own being so foreign to me I can not hear above them.  And yet, I do not know how to give in to it, so enslaved  to the conversations in my head.  They are only whispers amongst the chaos, and so when a voice tells me to breathe, I almost do not hear it.  My exhale hurts more than my inhale, with lungs so crowded of things  I will never need again but hold onto anyways.  It is letting go that proves to be  almost impossible.  The longing to be loved eats at me, a moth to silk, for I am unpracticed in its art. Miserable ignorance.  If I am only capable of controlling the size of the hole in clothes that used to fit, the ache in my soul,  then let me learn, teach me the way. I offer my surrender, I admit that I am lost.

When we broke up, I fell apart. I heard when that happens, you should let the pieces fall away and leave them on the floor for a little while, until you can be sure of which ones you can pick back up and which ones can stay. But I didn’t want to break up and I didn’t want to feel broken so I asked you to stay. I could pick my pieces up off the ground and move my heart back in with you. You were tired of the way I took up space but at least I asked. I can say now that I have no regrets about how we ended. Except for the length of time I let you treat me the way you treat yourself. All of the times I let you lie to me, all of the times I let you justify every way you ever hurt me, all of the times I let you tell me I was the burden. I don’t blame you but I hate you a little. I think you deserve that. I think that if you ever tried coming back, I would hate you more. I still think about it anyway so I can be prepared just in case. I would ask you: how could you do this to me? but I don’t ...

i am tired of writing poems about a feeling that does not go away a feeling that feels temporarily  satisfied when i know he is there to kiss me and love me since i  can not do those things myself or at least, not well enough to  cure me of restless anxiety that is uncomfortable to live in i beg a higher power to save me and when i hear the silence i desire i run to him  instead He will save me. and i will be happy giving up this fight with myself, maybe even eventually get married and have his children who will grow up to be just like their father and nothing like me -entirely too selfish  and naive or maybe just plain stupid to still believe i could ever outrun a feeling that does not go away

I have always found comfort in the world, within myself. But now you are gone and I torture myself by remembering all the things I memorized: The texture of your skin against my thumb, the solidness of your arms around my waist, the joy of our shared laughter in the dim light of your room. The familiarity of your memory taunts me because you are no longer mine and I do not think I have the right to pretend you still could be. You became my home. Or close enough to it that in your absence I feel restless in my skin. Not even in your things does my heart lie, empty promises of a life I destroyed. I am so close to drowning. Sinking without an anchor, taking myself to the bottom. It is easier this way and my heavy heart does all the work anyway.  The heaviness has settled in now and I fear it will make a home out of me  the same way I made one out of you. But while this feeling exists in me, I must accept I can not exist with you.