I have known girls who can only be held quietly –
that if you speak, it destroys their bodies
so instead you step around her thoughts and
touch until she understands how to exhale again
only by word of action, our language of fingertips.

Sometimes I failed. The decibel meter
climaxes far too high, she does not breathe again.
She gets so plum-faced I know she wants to die
and those girls, sometimes they do anyway
even if you pet their ribs all through the night.

Or they become just a gap where words once
rose. Her name rolls off the tongue but
there are unnecessary spaces inside, melting like
snowflakes when rain isn’t quite cold enough –
to become nonexistent, a piece of evaporated dust.

She can kiss, can hug, but no longer can she love –
an embrace is nothing if it is quiet and girls’
are in silence. I have known these girls who do
not feel, but sometimes I wonder if they were
real and simply vaporized flake by flake like snow.