you don’t know me anymore
and truthfully you never really did.

you knew the parts i painted with my wrists but never the ones i created with my wretched heart that you repeatedly squeezed too tight and had me clean up the mess.

and if i’m being honest, i never really knew you either.

we both had a fantasized version of each other and what we desired each other to be, only to have reality sink in years later.

i was always five steps ahead while you were taking the fast lane to get further, never fully meeting our destination and mark.

the last time we talked, you apologized for the way you were and that you’ve changed

but if i learned anything from you,
it’s to never trust a wolf with no teeth

because they never know when to stop.

my hands clung to any happiness i could achieve so when you came in swinging, i felt the rush of adrenaline in each and every part of my watery veins—they pumped with yearning and that’s all you ever made of me. a ghost wailing for its own vessel but to only be left hollow in a grave throughout the afterlife brim.

i always screamed too loud at night and i know you learned that you’re the reason why i can’t sleep on my left side for too long. but if it makes one of us feel any better, i cannot drink my coffee with four sugars without remembering how you always did things the same amount of times. never more, never less.

and if it helps you sleep better at night, just know, that i can’t.

my insomnia has been coughing up blood more and more as the days go by. the bedroom gets more suffocating and the comforters have gotten more tight. your name is still the same on my phone but you told me to lose that ages ago. (news flash, wide eyed watercolors never looked good on me.)

we both know the truth of what happened that night but you cannot risk your reputation to save my life.

because after all, only one of us have a soul
and everyone knows it isn’t you.

it was june or july or august
everything i could never say carved itself my esophagus, the words that would never escape – you made sure of that. one hand wound around my throat and the other cradling her blushing cheeks.

she slips away but your grip only tightens.
fingers scraping – my flesh beneath your nails as i learn a new kind of silence. just a little longer, i’m almost gone. trapped like a bug encased in amber but when those wilted wildflower eyes meet mine, you know i’ll always forgive you.

my lips flicker like a flame as i wonder if i’ll slip away too.
of course not & you like that. push on the middle of my windpipe, crack it like a glowstick and watch my lucid acid purge from my throat in neon technicolor – you do it in a way where i’m both alive but running through the afterlife in white gowns & red stained feet

you recite those wendigo apologies while they look in your wildflower eyes, you purge those auto repeat explanations and how it will never happen again – but we both know it will. your testaments are all folklore, but i always keep reading it.

you lick the blood filled sorrows into my skin and i forgive you.
and i always will because daddy always showed that when a man loves a woman, he hits her.

i. he tells me that the iron in his bittersweet blood pumps just for me but the corybantic taste of gun metal on his plump heliotrope lips bears the names of other young lemon balm girls

ii. he runs his tongue over my bloodied lip and bitten flesh as a sugar-coated pristine apology leaves his own because love is only a blood sport for this arcane and the only way he knows how to love is to ****.

iii. he mixes vintage cyanide and coconut water inside of a wine glass while in the driver’s seat of his ‘69 fastback and leaves the blood orange sun rays to seep into my warm undertone skin that is slowly decaying in the passenger’s seat, waiting for his essence to bleach my bloodstream with his carboned deception.

iv. he sews bruised begonias and sullied belledonnas between the crevices of my teeth and leaves me with phantoms that will rip out every cuspid in my mouth; i will rot with the wailing of the weeping woman. he tells me that i am his favorite cryptic artwork throughout the history of sacred retellings.

v. he burns out his corojo cigars onto my ashtray glass skin and watches how it pops, crackles, and melts into my safety pin bones and grow tumor cells within the cracks of my peach mimosa ribcage until i wither to smoke and dust

vi. he sharpens his teeth with a razor blade and licks up the flames of my soul with his serpentine tongue. he will swallow me whole like an acid tab and offer the same one to the next girl with a sharper spine.

vii. my body is his confession booth, wrapped in all of his sins like barbwire. he is absinthe mixed with satiating sunday sins who kisses gospel into my thighs and i fall to my bare knees for a devil with the framework of a god.

he plays a sweet symphony—
touches as soft as silk
cherry stained kisses like
remedies to my mouth

he reads my skin like poetry
and whispers about dissolving into our skin—
je t'aimais,
je t'aime,
je t'aimerai.