He longs to be close to me,
like a moth to a matchstick.
But god,
he's drawn to any pretty light.
Blinded, hungry, dizzy.

Fluttering erratically, just to feel something.
Life is too short.
One day, all the lights go out.
It's all he can think about.

I had been her kind.
Neurotic and breathless like a dead girl.
The night no longer made me brave.

I tried to resurrect myself. I retraced my steps. I chanted forgotten rituals.
Anything to feel the warmth of Promethesus’ fire.
My voice was not my own.
Gravel embedded in wobbly knees,
I paid penance to a merciful god to bring her back to me.
Yet the sky remained silent.

I stood, screaming at the shore.
Yet His shrine still crumbled.

I climbed through ruins, and chased the sun.
Lungs burning for a glimpse of that old world.
I read Plath and bled out onto parchment.
Offering up every last valuable bit of myself.

Then on the third night,
the lantern glow spilled out from
a mouse hole carved into sandstone.
A sailor turned bricklayer
stood over the remains of my scaly skin.
He looked into my stormy eyes and
Begged for me.

Adoration without sacrifice.
How many had begged
to take away the fire that now licked at my chest?

The tide goes out,
And finally I can see the flotsam at my feet.
How sweet their gaze and sweeter yet,
the stutter of their pleas.

I blew through that little coast town so fast I never realized you didn't love me.

I wasn't the other girl for once, not that I knew of at least. I was just a blip in your timeline, somewhere lantern-lit and overripe. Wooden stairs and open ceilings and terracotta tile and *** and coke; I was Eden beneath banana leaves.

I am so angry at the aftertaste of his devotion. He lit a candle with the intention of us, the flame will go out in a week.

Others have knelt. Looked at me with those big tearful eyes.
Gazing.

He trembles like them. He murmurs like them.

Yet he does not worship at my altar.

But how can I expect him to? A man who has so fervently forsaken any god?

Smoke wafts up from the lounge
among young bamboo.
I am standing on the balcony
backlit from a desk lamp,
cutting the ends of her hair.

The soundtrack of laughter
drowns out the news story
about the Japanese man
who ate a woman in France.
The French didn’t want
to deal with him and
neither did the Japanese.

He lives somewhere here
and has published too many books
for a murderer.

I wish the boy upstairs could see
us from his balcony in this beehive.

He never looks for me.

I have not loved anyone since the spring.
I'm beginning to have my doubts that I will ever find that perfect matchstick moment again.
But I'm throwing myself into everything,
trying to scare myself into love again.
What we had wasn't love but god
in the movies that's everything that love was made of.
I don't mind being a bad memory.
I don't mind being that Katy girl.
Because I ******* know we had something special
and I could have loved you forever.
Let me be that complicated girl.

I'm sure she's beautiful, Hubble.

It's been a year now, I have not changed. A sweet sailor told me once that poems were the only art form that allowed, demanded this much melancholy and I am none the less tragic. You would have laughed in my face had you seen him and I. Soft, silly boy opening up into bloodied lips. Pressing flowers into his hair, contritely convincing myself I was not the monster you wrote me out to be.

I won't tell you that he couldn't love me, that I could never keep him.

I'm sure you already know. That's how the story goes.