She uses her skin as a trap
To catch men and drug them
With their own lust until they
Surrender to their hallucinations
And fly away on a trip
To her body
As she touches them softly until
Maybe
Their bones get filled with dopamine
And their mouths get to taste
Her beating heart under her *******.




- LynnAA

He stares out the smudged window
nose nearly kissing the glass
gaze committed to the tawny rabbit
who sits idly by the shed

He whimpers
fur rising on his back
turns his pleading eyes to me
as if to say

*Mama, I want to play
who cares that it’s raining?

She sits on the bed and reads me
Old poetry
About ******, sadness, and loss
All synonyms
For the same affliction really
Dysfunction and despair
Captured in yellowed archival snapshots
Of a girl
With a penchant for surviving pain

Mortality leaps
From the prose as she reviews her life
In hellish imagery
A transmutation of spirit occurs
Within her
As she drifts through the years
On each page
Melancholy awareness for us both realizing
That it's all real

No one can take away the scars that
Every word cuts
No one can deny the inviolable fortitude
Required to document
The war embedded and entrenched on the front lines
Just old poetry
To me they resonate like a distant bell
Her sudden silence
Whispers that the dead still scream her name

we taught each other
to enjoy
a lingering kiss
   soft touches
     loving glances
the built-up tension unreleased
    but in secret solitude
       at night
a yearning for fulfilment
   never to be granted
as we moved out of school
and into different lives

I saw her last
only a few years after
  alarmed by news from mutual friends
two days before her death

she did not recognize me
   any more
as I stood terrified
beside her bed
in a secluded section
of the cancer ward

I had arrived too late

my loving stutter
   already out of reach
her blindly searching gaze
passed on through me

it hurt
like nothing else before

I cried my grief out
in long sobbing nights
yet still not long enough
to heal the pain
nestling since then
   quietly
in thinly calloused
wrinkles of my heart

            * *