there’s a vacancy in me, a moon crater, a cesspool, a grasshopper on its hind legs pleading to gods that don’t exist yet. i’ve always spelled love with bullet holes in between, his hands rummaging through my snow-caked lungs for heartstrings that vanish at the touch, my own emptiness an animal that gnaws me, a biteful here and a prickling crack in my being there. something wrong, something gnarly. a prayer with bent teeth and beer breath. a glimpse of a memory that might’ve been a dream or another world you existed in when your hands were smaller and the universe was an infinite beast, rattled by stars and ancient fires, matchlit mountains and roiling seas. have you ever felt like a graveyard in the blooming? all these tombstones littered across your body, each grave marked by your name, owls hooting behind the ribcage gates. in me there is a vacancy like this: the earth stemming from purified veins, droplets of blood capering up my skin like caterpillars, something half-eaten, half-felt, something that was perhaps, never whole. waterlogged limbs that only carry you as far as your next disaster. cheeks mottled with rain that does not burn. someone asking “hi, how are you?” and your answer is fine, always fine, do you know what it’s like to never feel anything other than fine? to hold hands with the dead and sing their souls to blissful sleep. maybe i would be a clichè, something out of a movie you’ve seen a hundred times before, a ghost with nothing to haunt, a girl who gets bitten by a monster only to become a monster, suicide in the city.