1.
Your love was words written in snow, and they melted into me, not a trace left in the morning as our bodies turned to fire beneath a thin sheet.
The waning heat as night fell returned with a palm to my cheek
And bruises on my throat
Colors that reminisced about sunset cigarettes
And fallen petals from roses cut off at the neck.
I wanted you to sever me in the same way.

2.
Head buried in the sand, I hoped my skin would absorb its hue.
Remember when we made dresses of leaves for cigarette **** dolls?
Those ******* were my friends.
You said that's why you didn't finish the last inch of your beers so I washed them back and watched you take miles and miles
Bottles breaking in quivering hands.

3.
I never minded the taste of blood, so I licked our wounds clean.
I'm beginning to question what "self-inflicted" actually means.

You should have brought me to the hospital that night
Instead you took me and I took another bottle of pills to try to better know that ever elusive quiet.
But quiet is a **** tease and you're meaningless to me.

4.
Silence and quiet are twins
Infantile in their ways
Two drunks stumbling through mounds of glitter from some winter parade.
Streetlights reflecting in their pale eyes
Frostbitten fingers itching at half-turned locks
Their sighs slip through doorjambs whispering of kisses and comfort
Weaving images of abandoned bathtubs into dreams of a lone child sleeping upstairs.
One who longs to be known, yet forgotten.

Neck bent a little far to the right
Impressions of sheets in skin wrapped too tightly around willing wrists
Makeshift bandages for cuts that have closed but still bleed.
You must be out for coffee
Or on a call that couldn't wait
But Sunday's are for rain and dreams you can't quite remember
And secrets tucked in a leg bent at the knee.
I can't tell the difference between lust and love making anymore though I'd like to still believe in the latter.
You return and I lose myself in the corner of your eye and I hang myself there on those lines
Allowing myself to kiss you there just once for fear of becoming too entangled
A sweet suicide that'd be
Gasping for air
Lost in your laughter

“Dearest Degas,” she scrawled
script tipped and tainted by blood,
a reward only the most skilled of movement makers receive,
one she gives away all too freely.
“It’s times like these that make me think
I used to be a lot closer to God
and to you,
but the lines are blurring now
between you two
and I am burning now with memories
of the arch of your back echoed by brows
crested by beads of sweet sweat
raised higher still with finger-lickin’ lies
and lowered by our goodbyes.
They say my knees got lazy,
but I pray en pointe daily
at that battered barre,
my altar
closer to God than they’ve ever been.
And it’s His name I speak,
spoke
over us as we rolled in our sin.
‘Turn to God!’ they screamed
but you were always a better comforter than He.
And without you to give me form,
I will dance no more.”

I don’t know why she was so easily frustrated
or why she spent hours on end,
at the end,
on the floor compulsively cutting
butterflies out of book pages.
I don’t know why she grew to hate her birthday so much
or why she seemed to become increasingly more and more indecisive.
I don’t know why she began to write those letters,
that jumbled, nonsensical prose
that tumbled, then rose again
only to fall again,
end and begin again.
What begins only just ends again.
And again.

I don’t know why I write in third person
or why I write these letters
or why I can’t make decisions
or why I hate my birthday so much
or why I’m burning these butterflies,
watching the flames feast on their wings.
And I don’t know why I think these things,
the things they say not to think.
But I think that the thoughts I think can’t just be unthought,
that thinking these things can’t be untaught,
like I can’t be untaught to love you.
And that’s where things get really confusing
because you’re not the you that I knew
anymore.
And I suppose I’m not the you that you knew anymore either,
but in my heart and somewhere in the attics of my brain
we’re together, alive again.

All I want is to be like the flowers
To be picked for my beauty,
Kept for my fragrance,
Cherished for my meaning,
And light enough to blow away in the wind.

There is too much

dust in my joints
ice in my bones
wind in my ears
and flesh between my fingers.
I want nothing more than to shatter
into the millions of stars you once said fill my pores.