two summers ago we sat in dark hallways and you shined a flashlight through my palm and traced the veins that threaded my fingers. we kissed like children, with closed mouths and open eyes and searched for answers in the bottom of an orange bottle of pills. you wept the first time you tried to touch me and i flinched away because in the world i grew up, a hand laid on my skin became punishment. you faded away at the end of a rope after too many years of a heart that bled with the pain of someone much older, a sacrifice for the uncreated child you longed for and i was alone in the same hallways in which we used to brush hands

he fell in love slowly for once
after one month he realized
he had fallen in love with her small brown hands
and another two passed
before he saw
how much her loved her breathing in the middle of the night
and it took five missed calls and too many broken silences before he realized he could love her parts
but never the sum

your bones were breaking and you called it love. the life leaked out of your wide grey eyes and your hands trembled and you said it was safe. her foot held you underwater and your lips formed poems of devotion.

i saw the bruises.

i saw the signs.

every time i saw you i read the screams for help between your silences but nothing could keep you away from her. like moth to flame, your wings were singed as you flew into the one thing that could **** you, the one thing you found so impossible to leave.

your mouth was full of sobs but you couldn’t spit them out.

three months and too many scars later you tore out of her hands, leaving blood and skin behind in her claws. you had to leave behind chunks of yourself but you were free. the flame was extinguished and nothing tethered you to the broken-hearted love you had grown to crave

your soft
brown
eyes
used to keep me up all night
with one palm on your cheek and my lips grazing yours
but those same eyes
are now avoiding mine
and when ours meet they’re full of shame

when she speaks, her voice grates my skin, leaving the pale expanse of my back and shoulders raw and weeping. she’s five foot two and although she’s made of paper, she’s built of titanium and her fingers draw portraits in blood across my neck.

that night we lit up on her roof and watched the smoke dance in the vibrant black sky. her eyes are blending into the pure absence of light and i’m hopelessly lost. there’s an ash resting on her pale hair and i keep thinking i want to blow it away but i can’t move or she might disappear. her small calloused hands are waving a flame too close to my face but i can’t leave those two spots of endless, endlessly infinite, swirling darkness and i feel my cheeks singe. my skin is bubbling and melting and she’s catching the drops in the curve of her left palm. my muscles have still forgotten how to stretch. my limbs are carved from ice but my face, my face is burning and the tongue of her lighter is lapping at my eyelashes. my forgotten cigarette is burned to the filter and i let the glowing tip fall to my thigh. i’ve torn my eyes away but they bleed because in those moments we had fused together. i’m fixed on her mouth now, and it’s the face of my sister, no, it’s the lips of my kindergarten teacher on the day she whispered that her cancer was consuming her and never she never came back, but no, her features are sliding and it’s her again. it was always her. it was her face all along but i’ve flinched and she’s a stain on the ground.