When I look at you,
I can feel the Nile river gushing from
my arteries and separating into
the most delicate of tributaries.

When I look at you,
my bone marrow jolts my body forward
because you’re east and i’m west but
if we followed the lines of longitude
it’s impossible for us not to meet again.

When I look at you,
I smell bleach and roses
both burning the back of my throat,
one covering and the other cleaning.

When I look at you,
I feel warmth
but the real kind
not the the heat from a couple shots of absinthe.

When I look at you
my heart flys up and squeezes into
the delicate space between the two hemispheres of my brain
and suddenly you consume
me.

So when you left

I stopped looking at you,
looking for you,
looking for your hands on my ribs
or the hair of your leg brushing the back of my calf.

I tried to stop longing for the proclamations of love that you
whispered directly into my ear so
the wind couldn't ****** the seven letters before I got to hold them.

When I had looked at you
I did not want to admit that the red strings
that tied our calloused fingertips together
had begun to fray and snap.

When your presence became to fragile for my fingers to touch
and the ashes of burned rose petals
would fall into my palms.

I would swallow them
and try to remind myself of their-your
your once velvet beauty.

But charcoal is only used to extract poison from a bloodstream.

I refused to believe that you were the poison and I would open bottle
after bottle after bottle of red wine because
it was my-our-your favorite type of drink.
My red stained lips would get trapped on the neck of the bottle
until neither alcohol nor oxygen remained inside
and only shattered glass and ****** knuckles.

I tried to leave hickeys on the walls and pretend
it was your neck but my lungs were too empty from my screaming.

When they burned from your absence
I ate the charred alveoli
and hoped it would absorb a little bit of the pain.