Her eyes resemble
a fading filmstrip
left in the bottom drawer of our wardrobe
next to a lilac dress I’ve outgrown
and the rest of unrecognizable memories.

Her bones poke
like a yellow flower barrette on my scalp,
a sharp pencil on a tender wound,
a hand of a neglected child burying
anguish on the skin of another.

Her mouth has grown
poems too soft for my hands to hold;
i try to lie with them, a blister beneath her tongue
where your name now resides
and washes away
the sweet perils of a love like ours,

her chest, now its graveyard
that she no longer visits.
It has turned into a museum
of the things she’s built with you.

Limbs, hands, fingers —
All delicate things I wish I had — was
instead repel finality
in ways ugly,
in ways desperate,
in ways this poem can never soften.
But some things are made for ending,
Some bodies, for leaving,
Some hearts, for breaking
Some grief, for feeling in all the other places
and in all the other parts
where she once laid her kisses:
now just quiet, empty skin
aching, under the colder half
of October’s distant breath.


10/01
My anatomy still learns to forget
about the love it swore to remember.