The stitches holding my wound break, one by one,

For the memory of you is a blade upon my flesh.

I gave you my heart as the river gives to the sea,

And you returned it, torn, yet heavy with your shadow.

Now I carry both the pain and the wisdom it has sown.

The sky folds itself into a bruise,
spilling red streaks like arteries unzipped.
A comet breaks,
its ribs dragging fire through the dark,
and she swallows her wish,
a coin sinking in the throat of a well.

Her hands—
sharp vowels of bone,
cracked knuckles learning
the grammar of pain—
pounded earth
like it owed her a name.
She made fists out of her loneliness
because no one ever taught her
to bloom.

Mistakes:
the geometry of hurt,
a language she spoke fluently.
Once, she carved shame
from a girl smaller than herself.
But wasn’t that just a mirror,
a lesson she couldn’t unlearn?

**** forgiveness,
**** the easy absolutions.
Her body was a script no one read.
Her name was a slur
the world muttered in passing.
She carried choices
like glass splinters in her lungs,
each one cutting
when she tried to breathe.

Whiskey breath,
a kiss smeared on the lip of a bottle—
she called it love.
They called it sin.
Disposable girls
folded like paper swans
in the flood of a system
too tired to save them.

When they found her,
her body curled into itself,
a fist unmade—
the river murmured her elegy,
pulled its fingers through her hair
as if apologizing for the weight
it couldn’t carry.

She wore a butterfly, gold and trembling,
perched at the hollow of her throat,
where Amazing Grace drifted faintly,
like smoke from a dying candle.
Her nails, chipped with the color of regret,
clutched years she could never restore,
bloated on squandered time,
her body an elegy of famine and fire.

He stood in the shadow of her unraveling,
his gaze mapping the sharp terrain
of bony shoulders, brittle wrists—
a cartographer of her ruin.
His fingers whispered along her flesh,
as if tracing verses in invisible ink,
his words dissolving
in the cotton of her discarded dress.

How do you leave a woman
who is already half gone?
The butterfly quivers, the song falters,
and the keys fall silent in his hand.
Goodbye, he thinks, is not a word
but a weight
that neither of them can carry.

a smoldering haze,
the shadows coil,
speaking secrets untold.
she moves like a whisper
through the maze,
her hair wild,
the storm made flesh.

he waits, caught in the
stillness of longing,
reaching for her but
clutching the void.
every step forward
collapses into d i s t a n c e,
every gaze is a wound
that never heals.

time folds in on itself,
love becomes
a mirror that cracks
endlessly,
an ache without e n d,
a truth too r a w to hold.