Atlas of the Unchosen

There are places that smell like burned time and wet wallpaper. Nothing ever happens but everything feels halfway done. Doors lead to attics full of sighs. The carpet remembers arguments. These poems are souvenirs from lives that almost happened. A kiss that flinched. A name someone almost said. It’s clutter. Leftovers from a future nobody picked. The lights buzz. The house breathes. No one moves but nothing sits still. This is where the unchosen pile up and hum.

The House Where the Sky Was Kept

I once loved someone

who didn’t know the names of my ghosts.

***

He came in polite,

like a letter opener

sharp, useful,

utterly unprepared for blood.

***

The moon lived in our bathtub.

I told him not to step in it,

but he laughed and said

how can it be full if it’s leaking?

***

We drank floorboards like wine.

We buried clocks in the garden.

We named the weeds after our worst days.

They grew quickly.

***

One night, I caught him

folding up the sunrise,

creased it neatly,

tucked it into his suitcase

beside his worn‑out metaphors

and a collection of unopened apologies.

***

He said I was too full of weather.

Said I hummed like a storm cloud

and slept like an unfinished sentence.

***

He kissed me on the third rib,

the cracked one,

and left a note made of feathers

that spelled someday.

***

I found him again,

on the other side of a dream

where everyone wore masks

and no one spoke English.

***

He was dancing with a woman

made of piano wire and prayer,

his hands on her hips

like he finally understood music.

***

I opened my mouth

and birds flew out.

I didn’t know I had them.

***

They screamed and screamed.

He smiled

and gave them names.

Love Letter to the End Before It Began

I fell in love with your absence first —

the silhouette you left in doorways,

the half-shadow stitched

by streetlamps onto sidewalks

where you never walked beside me.

***

I memorized the way your silence

filled cups like water,

sipped carefully to avoid drowning,

pretended thirst was something chosen,

like poetry or loneliness.

***

Time inverted itself for us.

Clocks unspooled their hours backward,

and I wore grief

like a favorite coat I borrowed

from a future I couldn’t stop seeing.

***

I learned the sound of your laughter

from the spaces it didn’t occupy,

notes missing from songs

I heard on distant radios,

echoes of a voice never directed my way.

***

We danced carefully,

holding each other at the margins —

fingers brushing just barely,

as if intimacy were parchment,

thin enough to see through,

fragile enough to tear.

***

You left poems folded

into algebra equations,

words I solved endlessly

without ever finding your name.

I responded in rainwater,

droplets gathering,

staining blank pages

until my ink became floods

of everything I couldn’t say.

***

The ceiling above us

turned quietly to lake water,

slowly filling the room.

We rose, breathless, graceful,

drowning upward into an ending

that had already happened

before it ever began.

***

When you finally departed,

it was as if you’d never come —

just the bruised scent of absence

on an empty pillowcase,

the cool indentation in bedsheets

shaped precisely like goodbye.

***

Now, I sit quietly

in the parentheses of our unlived life,

writing letters to the afterimage of you,

letters I bury in gardens that grow

only moonlight and regret.

***

I whisper your name,

not as prayer but elegy,

a poem held gently

in the mouth of ghosts,

a poem that ends precisely

where love should have begun.

Cartography of Collapse

The atlas cracked open

the exact moment you shut the door,

spilled continents like spilled tea

onto my childhood carpet.

Every country became a bruise

the color of words you never meant.

***

I traced roads shaped

like your promises,

each ending in empty fields

where your laughter once stood

like a house built to collapse.

***

Mountains wore your sweater,

the gray one frayed at the sleeves,

knitted from every sorry you kept

for someone softer.

They reached for me nightly,

whispering your name

with hands of frost and regret.

***

I found rivers shaped like your veins —

blue and gentle, full of everything

I could never touch again.

I knelt and drank, desperate,

but every drop tasted of distance.

***

Cities rearranged themselves

into apologies, polite

but unwilling to explain why

I was no longer welcome.

Streetlights blinked in Morse code,

saying almost, almost

until the bulbs burnt out.

***

I built shelters from memories

you forgot to keep,

patched roofs with photographs

of your eyes looking somewhere else.

The walls kept collapsing,

bending beneath the weight

of what I still wished we were.

***

Sometimes I think I see you

standing quietly at the horizon,

wearing the geography of my body

like a borrowed coat.

I run to you, breathless, hopeful,

but every step just folds you

farther into the distance.

***

Now the world is a room

full of maps with no names,

marked only by quiet earthquakes

of almost-love.

Borders blur beneath tears

I promised I’d never cry.

***

Cartography always lied —

it said there’d be ways

to find you again.

But grief has no compass,

and no map ever showed me

the country you went to

when you left me behind.

Flannel Ghost

I loved a man I never touched,

with hands like winter branches —

reaching, never grasping —

and eyes that probably saw right through

the thickness I pretend not to wear.

***

He moved like old furniture.

Wore scarves that smelled like apology and pine.

Armor knit by kind grandmothers

in a state too northeast for mercy.

They took family photos with axes.

I took screenshots of him smiling.

***

I called him Daddy once,

because jokes are easier than begging.

He laughed.

The room flickered.

That was the day I wanted to haunt him.

That was the day I disappeared.

***

Not out of cruelty.

I just folded.

Soft collapse.

Like time‑lapse footage

of a cake sinking in on itself.

Silence weighs less

when it’s time to leave.

***

He still wakes up saying Good morning

like it’s not a funeral.

I drink pine needle tea

and pretend I’m the kind of girl

who enjoys the woods.

***

The mirror forgets my name.

No one asks where I went.

The wind whispers through the vents

in a voice I’m trying not to recognize.

***

I hum the song his flannel left in my mouth.

It tastes like rain

that never touches ground.

Erosion

I didn’t cry.

Instead, my mouth filled with bees,

each whisper winged and furious —

sweetness born from venom

buzzing apologies I refused to swallow.

***

You wore your kindness inside out,

stitched with spidersilk and misplaced lullabies.

Your cardigan sleeves unraveled into rivers,

carrying tiny boats filled with unsent letters,

folded into origami cranes who forgot how to fly.

***

I never belonged in your photographs.

My edges too blurry, body slipping

in and out of color like an indecisive ghost.

My tattoos grew restless, changed their shapes nightly,

becoming constellations that rearranged

to spell all the names you never called me.

***

You were perfect —

or the hollow ache of perfection.

All that softness dripped onto the floorboards,

forming puddles of neatly buttoned grief

that I stepped around, barefoot and defiant.

***

Now my dreams are upholstered in cactus velvet.

I sleep in a basin filled with hummingbird feathers

and broken porcelain teeth I lost smiling too hard.

You live in a house woven from polite apologies,

glass walls holding lakes of silence upright.

***

Sometimes, your shadow knocks on my window,

wearing my reflection inside a broken pocket watch.

I hand it back, wrapped in maps I drew

with ink distilled from meteorites

that missed every wish I ever made.

***

We will not speak again.

Yet every Tuesday, my mailbox fills

with envelopes stamped by butterflies,

empty except for the scent of rain

and ashes of poems we burned separately.

***

I plant them in my throat

and wait for the garden

of impossibly blooming goodbyes.

***

Tomorrow, I’ll open my mouth

and offer you one impossible flower

grown entirely of starlight and spite.

***

It will wilt beautifully in your palm,

leaving pollen in the shape of a question

neither of us dares to answer.

Postscript for the Life I Didn’t Live

I saw the life we didn’t have

fold itself neatly, like laundry never worn.

***

All the Sundays we missed

stacked like untouched hymnals —

quiet, clean, full of unsung songs.

***

There were children we didn’t raise,

names I whispered into an empty sink.

***

A garden we never planted

that still bloomed behind my ribs,

because the body doesn’t know

how to forget a maybe.

***

You lived. You thrived.

You wore flannel without irony.

You spooned curry for nieces

who didn’t know my name

because it was never written into the recipe.

***

I wasn’t rejected.

Worse.

I was nearly.

Almost chosen.

Almost worthy.

Almost known.

***

You smiled at the ghost

of the girl I wasn’t.

And I smiled back,

because she was so much easier to love.

***

Now, even the silence

comes pre‑loaded with

your name in lowercase.

***

I lowercase you

because uppercase is for permanence.

And all I have left is

a browser history

and a heartbeat that apologizes

for still being here.

Geography of a Life Without Witness

Eventually, they stop sending maps.

No more invitations disguised as detours.

No more red strings tied to doorframes.

***

Just you,

in a country that doesn’t speak your name.

***

The land forgets how to echo.

Mountains shrug.

Rivers curve away

before they reach your mouth.

***

You wake each morning

in a bed that grows moss,

your heartbeat calibrated to rainfall

no one else measures.

***

The sheets whisper in dialects

only wind remembers.

***

You build a village out of verbs

no one conjugates anymore.

Chisel a church from regret,

just to hear your own prayer bounce.

***

There is no apocalypse.

Just quiet.

The kind that braids itself into your bones

and calls it company.

***

Your shadow grows fur in winter.

It sleeps beside you,

breath steaming like a dog

who won’t admit it’s feral.

***

You plant seeds that never bloom,

but still, you plant.

You name each root after a nearly.

***

You sing lullabies to rocks

because they stay.

***

Sometimes, the sky coughs up

a single feather,

or a memory shaped like a hand.

You hold it.

It dissolves.

***

You write letters to mythological creatures

you no longer believe in.

You imagine they write back.

***

When the stars fall,

you don’t make wishes.

You file them away

like old receipts

for a body you forgot to keep warm.