The suburb’s still a skeleton
but now I wear its bones.
I was backlit,
bored,
all drywall and divine punishment,
first names shouted through screen doors,
ceiling fans spinning
someone else’s damage.

I kept saying I'd leave.
I kept writing it down,
spending my stories on soft drinks and scar tissue,
but
there’s a difference between
nostalgia and necromancy.
Between naked and naive.
Between full of stars
and just
falling.

We said forever
like it wasn’t
a curse.
Like it wasn’t
already dissolving in the pollen.

I wrote hymns for mouths,
sloppy as mascara in rainlight,
that made meaning feel like a dare:
the emotional oversights
we let ruin us twice.

Flannel soul,
face like unfinished business.
He touched me with all the guilt
of a borrowed god.
Begging,
but never burning clean.

A slippery little eulogy
sprinting toward a dawn already
in someone else’s rearview.
He didn’t kiss me,
but he almost did.
And I’ve been sick about it
ever since.

An ode to night
that chews at the hem
of what we thought we were.

Being here now is
already retroactive.
Already haunted.
Intertwined
like seatbelt bruises.

A small canopied disaster,
still posing.
still pretending.

I was a rooftop girl,
and I meant it.
Which is worse, I think,
than being believed.

The sky never answered,
but I kept
sending poems.

The suburb’s still a skeleton.
I’m just better at burying
what I mistook for light.

The kitchen smells like a secret I forgot to bury.
A peach gone soft, skin splitting like a bad promise.
The fruit flies know something I don’t;
they’re the last priests of a dying faith,
and they’re waiting for me to leak.

I tell myself I’m healing,
but last night I dreamt I had to eat your heart to survive.
It tasted like burnt sugar and nail polish remover.
I woke up gasping,
your name soldered to the roof of my mouth
like a curse I didn’t mean to cast.

I call it the trick of wanting:
how I keep looking for your fingerprints in places you never touched,
how I flinch when someone says my name in the dark,
how I let the mirror watch me shatter
and pretend I’m a stained glass window.

Here’s the part I shouldn’t post:
I liked it when you lied to me.
I liked it when you said this isn’t about love
and I let you mean it’s about power.

The fruit flies keep coming.
I pretend they’re a sign from God.
I pretend they’re angels. Or demons.
Never both.
I pretend they’re a reminder that sweetness
is just another word for rot.
I pretend the buzzing is the sound of my name-
fermenting in your guts,
putrefying in your chest,
decomposing in your memory like abandoned fruit.

I know I shouldn’t write this.
But I do.
Because I want you to see it.
Because I want you to flinch.

Because I want you to know:
I am the girl who would eat your heart if I could.
I would peel it open with my teeth,
lick the blood off my lips,
smile like a god in a red dress,
and call it love.

And you’d believe me.

I saw you in the rearview of my mom’s Santa Fe,
your shirt half-buttoned, a half-burnt cigarette,
the sun catching the gold in your teeth.
I was fifteen, which meant I was fluent in making it worse,
and you were the kind of boy who could skin a rabbit
but never learned to say sorry without spitting.

I told you a lie once-
said I didn’t care if we kissed in the parking lot,
in front of God, or the devil, or the Home Depot sign.
That was the first time you looked at me like
I was glass and you were bored.

I was sixteen, which meant I was fluent in leaving,
and you were the kind of boy who could gut a fish
but couldn’t spell the word bruise if it was on your own skin.

You played me songs you didn’t finish writing,
the kind where the girl always runs,
and the boy always watches her taillights
until the guitar string snaps.
You told me I’d ruin your life if I stayed,
so I stayed.
That was the first time you looked at me like
I was glass you could see through
but wouldn’t bother breaking.

The night you didn’t say goodbye,
I wore the amber oil so heavy it felt like drowning,
stood in the mirror until I blurred into a girl
you might have wanted
if you weren’t so scared of the wanting.

I was seventeen, which meant I was fluent in staying.
I’m the girl who learned that wanting
is just another way of setting yourself on fire
and hoping someone else smells the smoke.

I bought stamps for a letter I’d never mail you,
I saved your voicemails on a phone
I kept at the bottom of my drawer,
next to the earrings I stole from my neighbor’s sister,
the ones that looked like a promise you never made.

You’ll tell your friends it wasn’t that serious.
I’ll tell mine you never learned the chords.
But we’ll both think about it:
when the air smells like wet asphalt,
and the radio plays that one song
we never sang together.

We both know the words.
We just never sang them at the same time.

She only smokes when she’s spiraling or performing.
Usually both.
Says she loves a dramatic flourish—
exhales like a closing line,
laughs like a scratched record.

You’ll meet her at a party that’s already ending.
She'll kiss you like she’s trying to delete her own mouth,
like you’re just the eraser.
She'll leave before sunrise
because she hates how the light arrives slowly,
and can’t stand watching the world wake up
and not call her back.

If you ask what she’s looking for,
she’ll point at the exit sign and say,
“Something with the same glow.”
You’ll think she’s flirting,
but she’s actually just listening hard
for the next excuse to leave.

If you ask for her number,
she’ll give you a poem,
one with no punctuation
and a key taped to the back.
Not to her place.
To your undoing.

She tells stories like she’s double-daring
the past to contradict her.
Someone once told her
she seems like the kind of girl
who disappears mid-sentence.
She said,
“Only when the sentence forgets I started it.”

She collects promises like matchbooks:
already scorched,
still reeking of places
that almost got her to stay.

At dinner parties,
she compliments your cutlery
then slices the conversation open.
Asks what you hate most about your mother
before the bread hits the table.

You’ll want to know her real name.
She’ll say something like,
“It’s carved into a tree somewhere,”
before you realize
you’ve already said it in your sleep.

And when you find the poem she gave you
weeks later,
crumpled in your coat pocket,
you’ll swear you hear her laugh
when you read the last line out loud:
“Don’t follow. I haunt better when I’m alone.”

She’s the reason
someone, somewhere,
is learning the difference
between being worshipped
and being watched.

And when she finally leaves—
because she always does—
you’ll swear you still smell
ozone, orange blossom,
and the beginning of a very pretty ruin.

She leaves you rearranged—
not broken,
just fluent in a dead dialect
that only speaks in warning signs.

You’ll start writing things
you don’t remember feeling
and calling it healing.
But it’s just possession.
The poem wasn’t for you.
It was the door.

She doesn’t burn bridges.
She just convinces them to jump.

She never really leaves.
She just sets the room on fire
and watches who runs toward the smoke.

(And if she ever comes back—
and she will—
don’t blink.
She’s made of edits,
and she notices cuts.)

Leave when the sky is loud but the sidewalk is quiet.
When the door clicks shut like it’s keeping a secret,
don’t flinch.
Let your hands hang heavy,
the silence has its own grip.

Take only what fits in your chest,
you’ll be shocked what doesn’t.
Use only what won’t puncture your lungs.
(Even breath can betray you.)

Don’t check the mirror.
It lies loudest when you’re quiet.

If you must cry, do it in motion.
Stillness makes grief cocky,
then it hands you a mirror labeled “proof”
and waits.

Let the memory bruise.
Don’t label it.
Names are spells.

Closure’s a mirage
that waves from the distance
and never once turns around.

When the day feels unbearable,
bear it.
Not because you’re strong—
because you’re stubborn
and still here.

By month three,
his name will taste like static.
By month six,
you’ll forget the exact color of his laugh.
And by month twelve—
you’ll mistake the whole thing for a metaphor.

You’ll almost be right.
But even metaphors
break skin.
Memory crusts,
but it never closes.

Don’t knock.
Just rattle the door like the wind did
that night I sat in the bathtub
eating ice with a steak knife.
Bring your worst self—I’ll know what to do.

I’ve buried better men under worse moons.
Named stars after bruises and made constellations
out of what never touched me.
Still called it love.
Still called it mine.

I painted my ribcage lavender
to trick the vultures.
Grew silk in my throat
just to scream prettier.

There is no map.
Only muscle memory and perfume
that smells like the lie you almost told.
The one you rehearsed
but lost the spine
to say aloud.

I practiced not loving you
like it was piano.
Every night, slower.
Quieter.
Wrong keys, on purpose.

So if you must come,
come wrong.
Come ruinous and unready.
Come like someone who forgot the story
but wants to hear it again.

I won’t read it to you.
But I left the pen uncapped.
Go ahead. Ruin the rest.

I didn’t text you.
I just stared at the message box
until the words pooled like ***** rainwater.
Left it open all night.
That’s not the same thing as wanting you.

I didn’t reach out.
Just opened your last text
like a window in winter
and stood in the draft,
hoping the cold might say something
you wouldn’t.

I didn’t dream of you.
Just lay awake with my hands crossed on my chest
like I was practicing
being the kind of dead you’d miss.

Tonight, I’m romanticizing survival:
eating cold tortellini with a fork I found in my car,
wearing a dress that smells like gin
and someone else’s cologne.

The moon’s out
like it wants to get punched.
The stars are just freckles on a drunk god’s face.
They’re blinking like they’ve seen this before.
The night air slips in where I didn’t shut the door.

I’m not waiting.
But if you called right now,
I’d answer from
the cold part of my bed
and pretend it was a coincidence.

And if you asked what I’ve been up to,
I’d lie with my whole face.
Say, “You?”
like I didn’t write this
with the window still open.