la maison picassiette

My father tells me one million times a day that he is proud of me and each time is a piece of

blue glass which builds a blue house around my fury

He builds another house around my blue love

Covers it in graveyard tiles

There are days where bombs still ring in my ears

HEAVY HEAVY HEAVY there are days for mourning

Little lives lost inside borders I haven’t crossed

There are days for holding hands

– crooked , velvet

There are days for forgetting and not feeling guilty about it

There are days for matching your socks to your sweater and buying yourself birthday cake

two days early

There are days we eat paper thin silence and sit in front of the mirror until we choke

I write on my wrist:

Bad Things belong to all of us

Good Things belong to me alone

There are days for painting cardboard and calling your parents and balcony cigarettes

There are matching amulets around our throats –

BLUE BLUE BLUE

I am more loved than I care to admit

My mother shows love by getting things done – emails: sent; paperwork: filed.

My father shows love by sending thousand page books in the mail that I will never find time to read and which honestly might be heavy enough to break my blue bookshelf in two

SNAP! Love is Heavy

heavy heavy heavy and full.

There are mornings the fog is so thick that you are tethered to the nearest rooftop – imagine it’s an airplane and you’re going home

There are mornings for watching the sunrise with your one roommate who wakes up earlier than you and sipping slow coffee and trying on six pairs of pants and braiding your tinsel hair

There are mornings for giving yourself time to find it

There are mornings it’s buried in an article you can’t bring yourself to slice through

There are days for coasting on your blue bike and stopping in the middle of the street to take a picture of the moon and talking to strangers and falling in love with every pair of brown eyes you meet

– I wonder if my first love is still breathing –

There are nights I wake up from dreams of locked gates and guns half as strong as my fist

There are things we want and things we need like our split ends are SCREAMING for it

I am losing track of the number of people who love me

I am losing track of the number of times my dad has picked up the phone when I didn’t even need him to

I am finding my center.

There are times when you’re walking alone and you just smile you just smile you just smile A cat purrs in your heart only

There are strangers who tell me I’m beautiful – tastes like candied rose petals

There was one stranger — the words DRIPped  out  of  his  mouth – I’m Sorry Miss, I Don’t Mean To Bother You But —

I have not forgotten

There are days I want to stop fighting until I remember that everybody wants to stop and that is why we keep breaking plates keep reading poetry keep burning candles

DRIPDRIPDRIP

All my favorite people drink black drip coffee in shady cafes where the blue door is always open and the radio is always on (humming; ready)

All my favorite people are                                  jitterbugs

I am losing track of the number of different ways to pronounce “Do You Love Me?”

There are paint chips spread across the table there are decisions to be made

(I am no longer afraid of the way things change)

There are choices that don’t belong to us and dresses that we stitch blue patterns into and movies we bought but never watched because we wanted to watch them together

There always have been and always will be days for going home

There are days where home is too far away so you settle for music that rings like trees,

blue sweatshirts covered in blue paint

drip drip drip

I am learning to tell time again

I am building an altar for eating breakfast and a kitchen for praying and a crypt for sleeping and

a bed for dying in

A house built so long it grows its own wings

I am covering my life with mosaic promises –

heavy.

heavy.

heavy.

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Samia Saliba is a 19-year-old Lebanese-American college student based out of Washington state. She is studying history but has a strong interest in creative forms of expression, particularly poetry, drawing, and painting. You can find her visual art on Instagram.