We lie awake in the shadow
We’ve molded into the bed.
I wrap your hair around my finger,
You smell like the sleep and sweat of a summer night.
You start to talk about death, again.
You tell me that when people get cremated,
They pop.

I remember the black balloons from my grandma’s funeral.
I watched them pop when I had expected them to float
Til the black faded into the blue.
They reached the atmosphere, but not heaven.

I tell you my grandma was cremated.
You don’t hear me.
You say you want back into the ground,
To nourish the earth with your body.
I say I want to be burned back to the earth.
I say “ashes to ashes” and “dust to dust”.
You don’t get it.

You say that sounds nice, actually.
You tell me to take your ashes and spread them over
The river we
Spent our first summer days together
Drowning in the sun,
And each other’s company

I try to picture you as ashes.
I’d rather be your black balloon.

I should have kissed you before you ****** on your smoke,
Before the fluorescent elevator lights illuminated the flaws
That danced and drifted along your skin.
The thick smoke mingled with your shadow,
A shadow of a man; no face, only a cigarette.
You breathed in smoke, but your lips were positioned for a kiss.

I don’t look like the other girls, the ones you used to kiss.
I can still picture your eyes, reddened by smoke,
And your lips as ashy as your cigarette.
And I hoped you, too, could forgive my flaws.
Like how my body casts too wide of a shadow,
And the sallowness of my ordinary skin.

Things that really shouldn’t remind me of your skin,
like old leather books with burnt paper that I bet taste like your kiss.
Such books I read in the shadow,
And hide, like the way you hid behind your smoke.
Because, like the way I love a bad book and its flaws,
I could love you and your cigarette.

I’ve held your hand, the one that holds your cigarette,
And I felt the sandpaper of your skin.
I smelt the airy cologne you use to cover the flaws.
It smelled light; you used just a kiss.
Now, I smell only smoke,
And the memory of your touch is a shadow.

In the hospital you were no longer a shadow,
But a body, surrounded by walls as white as your cigarettes.
Your voice cracked from the smoke,
While needles pulsed life into your skin.
Your lips were cracked with only blood to kiss.  
I saw you naked, and I saw your flaws.

Your favorite vice was your fatal flaw,
And the black fire of death became your shadow.
It followed you around, and it saw our first kiss,
Which was our last, because you chose your cigarette.
So a charcoaled monster brooded beneath your skin,
And your flesh succumbed to the white ghosts of smoke.

You died in smoke, from your flaws.
Your skin’s now dust, roaming with the shadows.
So I’ll smoke a cigarette, ‘cause it tastes just like your kiss.

Your name was the one I etched into the frosted glass of my dad’s F150
The day after the first Christmas you didn’t come home.

Your blood was the hot coffee I poured into my cup at 3 am
While I wrote essays about how you wrote Anna Karenina
In your previous life.

Your voice was the ghost that haunted my room as a little girl
Nine years before I met you.

You were every one of the five people I’ve slept with besides you.
You were the pink champagne I spilt on my white dress
The first time I got drunk alone.

You are my 11 p.m. dreams
And my morning showers,
And the blue-eyed strangers I make eye contact with in between.

You are the garden I’ll die in,
Or the car I’ll crash in,
Or the ghost I’ll follow into Eden.

The last time you slept in your own bed,
I was the blanket beside you
And the pillow that tasted your last breath.

When l reach for you on the left side of my bed,
you aren’t there.

You are the yellow roses I leave on your grave.
You are not dead. You live inside me.