I lay close to you,
Curled to the shape of your stonework body
Tracing the vines crawling on your arms
To the lavenders springing
From your cracked palms
And your back is the meadow I bury myself in
Half-picking foxgloves and goldenrods
Growing on your spine

Day after day, I watch you
Wondering about the dreams behind
Your eyelids covered in moss,
Softly kissing the dandelion dust
Collecting on your cheeks
While stringing a garland of daisies
To wear around your head

I sit here, longing to taste the dewdrops
Hanging at the corners of your mouth
But until your wake, I will await
The sweet honeysuckle
That is your tongue

We love like thunder
Like lightning splitting the sky
Like the earth knows this

We are savages;
Lion and lioness taming one another
And we kiss until the carnival comes

We put on a show,
And we do not moan to the whips beating us
All teeth, all sharpness,
We claw our way out of our cages
They lashed you 50 times,
I kiss you 51

We roar louder in the dark
We are wild in each other's mouths
And we kiss until the carnival comes

Nights like these
I feel soft, spineless
Lilies growing in my liver
Wingless, tethered to my bed post
Body one with the sheets,
One with the waxen moon
The lonesome crescent
That knows what it’s like to sleep alone,
That knows the phantom ache
Of being dissevered
From its gibbous lover

You found me in the underlit,
Said I was worth saving
So you stole the fire
Only to put it back inside of me

I licked the flames from your fingers
Like a fennel stalk
And in turn, your immortal mouth
Met my soft,
Devoured my flesh
And each time we kissed,
We burned
With only bones left

But the gods were not so pleased
With our offering
They picked on your insides, dissected you
For the parts of me
That made you whole
And left you aching, aching, aching
And empty

My brave titan,
I will never forget the warmth
Of your scorched hands,
The taste of salvation

In desperation
To fill this empty *****
I invented you

Here, the gods did not listen
When you cried
Here, disarmed
Here, fallen
Here, I laid you down
With kisses soft
Until you fell asleep forever

Here, the gods did not listen
When I cried
But I made sure the earth remembered
When you died
Here, in the pool of ichor
I planted my heart in disguise
And blood-red windflowers grew

Here, here and here –
I have loved you

We are not ruins, mother, not yet –
Let us live, let us love,
Let us make history
Let us kiss ourselves into marble statues,
Kiss until we are mounted onto museum walls
And we will be a spectacle
Not the way you look at us, mother

Call us a tragedy
So we dance and make it a beautiful one
So we wake again when the earth is asleep

Even Icarus knew this:
To kiss the sky was not enough
With lips like feathered wings
Smeared with wax
I will fly and fall
Over and over
Just to hover across
Your mouth like the sun

You leaned in close and said,
"There is no lull before the storm"
You warned me about the wrath of gods like you,
That you were born with lightning inside
And this is why when you cry,
A terrible flood sweeps across the land

I hold you near and the earth is shaking beneath our feet
You said, "You are the lull before the storm,"
And you kiss me like thunder, you kiss me hard
That I am a mountain leveled flat

And this is why your heart is not mine –
That when I leave,
I cannot take it with me
Like Mjolnir in Thor’s hand,
A heart is like a hammer

Your eyes were a familiar town,
A ghost town I call home

The first time we kissed,
We tasted soil in each other's mouths,
We both smelled fire
And felt burning when our fingertips touched

We had dreams of a natural disaster –
The rainfall of ash and pumice
People screaming, temples collapsing
And we woke up remembering
What buried us

We lay in bed
My bones on your bones,
My skin against your skin
My hands shook like an earthquake
I asked you, "Did we not die like this?"
You kissed me, unafraid,
"Were we not born from this?"