It is not a taste,
Not precisely,
My tongue running over my lips…
It is not a taste you have left,
For I taste only myself again,
But I taste now also
The absence of your lips.

It is not a sound you have left,
But the silence remembers your laugh,
And the floor recalls your feet,
Marking itself not with footprints
But with an absence of footprints:
The cold of my side remembering
Your warmth against it.

When I die
my grave will be
surrounded by cherry red wine stains.
That grass,
once green,
will be red, red red.
Have the weight of Cabernet
The dark mystery of Merlot.
I’ll say goodbye
and that wine will drip drop
Through soil
Under rocks
To six feet under
where I will taste it once again.

It surrounds us all
Binding us to our mother
Holding us all near

"Not like that!
Like this."

She turned over her shoulder to face me, snatched her hair, soft and strawberry blonde out of my hands and giggled as she tried to show me the French braid.

She saw my blank expression and buried her face in my neck and giggled some more.
"This isn't going to work."

She gave up on the braid and kissed me anyways,
She tasted like sweet tea,
mixed with somethin' southern and strong.

She said "thanks love".

Her porch was lit up like it was the hearth of her home
and we had stopped slapping at the mosquitoes hours ago.

with my head in her lap, I was getting the grass burs out of her skirt when my fingers crept up her thigh and picked at something polyester, it smelt like lavender.

She put her hand on top of mine and kissed me again. I watched the dimples form on her cheeks as she whispered "daddy'll be up soon."

Laying by the river, when everything is silver, and silent, just for a moment before
the sun rises, we held our breathes

and then the love birds wept
and rattled their cages.

My memory fades as she got up to go but she said something like

you're still dizzy from that southern sting
or
you're still dizzy from that southern swing

and that she was hungry
and that we were hollow.

and I just laughed anyways; I could never get her father's truck to start but my heart was always in the right place, she knew it.

*She had a way with words,
she had a way with wasted...

she had heaven on her ankles with her jeans rolled up, and I just wanted to linger there.
My first prayer, my first gray hair.

I was lying in bed with him
after we had both come.
In the pitch black, I had to
use my hands to see his face,
trace his
eyes, lips, cheeks, the shape of his head.
We were silent but for our breathing.
His rumbled ever slower
and I knew I had to act
before sleep captured him.

The words were so potent
I could feel them in my mouth,
A heavy weight pressing on my tongue.
I opened my mouth to
spit them out, but
my brain was too powerful
and kept them locked in,
snapped my jaw back into place.
I swallowed as
I felt his breathing deepen.

I held it in as long as I could.
But the force from my pounding heart
won the battle against my brain
and before the defeated could rise to try again,
My mouth burst open on its own
and I heard the words tumble out of my mouth
as clear as the sun.

"I think that maybe I love you."

Moments like kindling led to these
shimmering sparks, weightless like
breath set deep into hands

And ease pouring through two
bodies, the sense of which
cannot be silenced so
long as the other exists in
the world.

i don’t want to love you
anymore
i’d rather love books
and words
and the sea
when it rages
i’d rather love
adventure and
late nights
filled with smiles

i don’t want to hide
anymore
i’d rather fly
to a far away mountain
and scream
at the top of
a blue peak
i’d rather explode
with virtue
like a light—
a star
who has met
it’s end

i don’t want to love you
anymore
i don’t want
the sun to fall
i don’t want
my coffee to go cold
or my cigarettes
to wage war
on my lungs
but there’s little to do
when the universe
twists
in it’s inevitable ways