I hid the bodies
underneath my ***** laundry.
The clothes I wear are always stained.
It's good. Gives me no reason to stay out of the mud.

A stranger put the skeletons in my closet.
A stranger broke up the bones
to put them in a box on a shelf.
It was simple.

Time would allow her to forget.
To cut her hair,
to visit some doctors
so they could change her cheekbones.
To dress in clean yellow dresses
that smelled like springtime.

In time, in time.
Those dresses would end up in the pile of ***** clothes,
and springtime would retire into a
never-looked-at corner
behind wooden doors,
where light enters through a thin crack, but is dissappointed,
when it has nowhere to shine.

Boney strangers stare at each other
through a panel of reflective glass:
their movements, opposite of each other.
Their hands plunge into deep pockets
and emerge with brass keys
to a wooden door,
with a crack
from a hatchet.
So unfamiliarly familiar.

Ready to flood that room with light,
ready to iron out the wrinkles in the clothes,
ready for the light's beams to reach all the corners
so that maybe something will grow.

And,
one day,
ready
to open the box
that sits alone on the dusty shelf,
and hold the dry, cold hands
of the skeletons in my closet.