Your thick, long hair
Your sun-streaked lion's mane
Falling on my cheeks.

Your drowning pool eyes
And their shattering shade
Of blue
Erasing my good sense.

Your Cupid's bow lips,
Soft and pliable
(I know because I've studied them every time they've formed my name),
Tasting my mouth and my yearning skin.

Your hands.
Doing what they do.

And your body
Against mine.

Oh.

If only.

you deserve a novel,
but these words suffice:
you thief.

I'm on my back
The darkness so heavy before my face I could be looking into the depths of a well
The eternity of a starless universe
The pupil in the eye of a monstrous monster
And never even know.

Never know,
Never care (what's the difference, really?),
because I'm thinking of you.
Of your breath on my neck
Your arms on my ribs
Your name on my lips.

Staring into the deepest part of the deepest ocean
The black abyss of a cave unexplored
The yawning jaws of a mile-wide rift in the earth
And I couldn't give less of a ****

Because I'm busy thinking
About you.

She was small.
The top of her head only just
came to my chin -
the bow in her back had robbed her of inches.
Her eyes were deep,
entrenched in the spiderweb patterns
of soft, folded wrinkles that covered her cheeks, eyelids, forehead, lips.
But in her eyes was something that danced.
She reached out
And with gentle fingers took hold of my hand.
And I felt the silky velvet that the footsteps of her years had walked into her palms.
And she smiled like someone who has earned the right to do so, and she wished me a
Merry Christmas.
And then I woke.
Blinked at the tears running into my hair.
Closed my eyes and held onto the feeling
of her missing velvet in my hands.

An arm hung across the rubble,
draped like a broken swan neck,
decorated by intricate patterns of blood and dust.

I couldn't have known who the arm belonged to, but in that moment
I was sick
to my stomach
with devastating surety.

Those were the fingers that had twined through mine in gestures of
love and
desperation,
painted my arms
in strokes of comfort, and of loneliness.

The palm that had confidently gripped a weapon,
and had carried groceries
into the house.
Palms that had pressed hopelessly against rain-washed glass and
gently
against tearstained cheeks.
Those palms that willingly cradled my uneasy heart.

And the arm.
The arms that stretched into
the sparkling star-strewn sky,
the grey and
pouring rain,
the sun-baked air rippling in waves across that embrace.  
Arms that had wrapped around a struggling body
with grim purpose and
aching heart,
softly beneath a wiggling puppy and its
pink kisses,
easily against the warmth of my breakable ribs.

I saw the broken swan and I felt something heavy,
maybe my heart,
slip from limp fingers and
break
into glittering shards
decorated by intricate patterns of blood and dust.

The tiny starfish hands pressed on both my cheeks. Her heart trembling in her sea-washed, sky-gray eyes. Little delicate lips pressed in an adult line of barely-controlled emotion. The *****, dully-shining tear streaks that drew paths through her freckles. Butterfly kisses, I would tease her as I swept her into the salty air.

I have to focus. I steel myself, dragging memories from the back of my clouded mind and setting them before my fogging eyes. I refuse to let them slip away again. I could never live with myself if I did.
I had said something to her. Ignore the fact that I can’t remember what it was. She smiled through the tears, her laugh a reminder that she wasn’t the adult she was trying desperately to be - that I was forcing her to be. I had wrapped her in my arms for the last time, lifted her toddler body easily from the sand. She held onto me tighter than I thought she could - another underestimation, I suppose. My neck started running with her tears. I hummed her song through a choked throat.

“Momma loves you.”

Fairly standard, as far as last words go. But sufficient. I am satisfied. Flashes of that day, the departure, boarding the ship, lacking the strength to watch my daughter fade into nothing behind me, spin past my eyes with increasing speed. Funny, everything else has slowed. The water makes my limbs sluggish, the ropes twining like lazy snakes around them. The footsteps of my heartbeat have slowed their pace, leaving longer and longer pauses of silence in their wake. Even the glittering light, what there is of it, is lethargic in its reaches to my nearly-blind eyes.
With all the salt-water clouding my vision, dimming my memories, I could swear the sea knows of my loss. It must: it is weeping with me.

my eyes
ask you silently.

i dont want the answer
the way i want you
but i can't
help myself.

can't help but
imagine that
this is the last time
you
will grace
me.

i can't remember
a life
without you and the
heady suffocation
of your
gut-curling, heart-pounding
presence.
you've clean-slated me
the way
broken glass can
purge human vision,

your intoxicating soul wrapping me up
in its heated hollowness,

in that warmth
which keeps me up at night
and makes me
wish i could
drown
in the heavy circle
of your body.

and i can't imagine why
i fear
your vanishing
when more often than not

you,
your soul,
and your broken glass

are
the stuff of my
haunting dreams.