Fingers don’t slide into juicy ***** lips
the way they do in books.
No violins.
No silk sheets.
Just the awkward shuffle of skin and wanting—
and the silence afterward.
That’s real.

All the cellars of this town?
Yeah—
they hold the moans
we’ve been suppressing
like secrets with teeth.
Generations of women
biting back sound
so the floorboards don’t creak with it.

Love.
Can you hear me?

The storm’s dancing at my fingertips.
It clings to the corners of my chest,
tugs at the meat of me.
I want to feel something other than metaphor.
I want to feel the war—
stop.

They said it’s over.
Is it?

There’s this movement on the island.
It breathes me back to life
then wrings the breath out
in the same second.

I don’t know what to do with that.

And her cry?
That muffled cry?
It delivers a thousand unfathomable silhouettes.
That’s what she sounds like
when she loves too much
to scream it loud.
When her daughter’s future
feels like it’s taped to a fragile door
and everyone’s knocking.

Love doesn’t feed ya.
It doesn’t feed us.

But we still set the table.