Grey dress, moonlighting
You’re perched again on the rocks, balanced on the seam between the sidewalk and the street
You always burnt softly in the daylight
Your face is lit up like a distant star
Like years ago
Like humming breaths, sober and deep, that I fought to keep in
Like bodies pressed into rock
Like stories escaping your lips
We begged, but the endings never came

They thought you were the veins in the granite
The current in the lake
The light in the trees
All the things you’d curse when drunk
I knew you as the Goddess of Twilight
A profound emptiness at your disposal
To me, you were an eternity in longing
Lost in dark rooms and vacant houses
Sometimes you were an exercise in blindness
Other times, a chant
Thin and narrow
Just blood on the concrete
But most often you were the living one
The beating heart
We would count your lives on our fingers
You’d had fourteen and a half
In thirteen short years

Tonight you’re silent
Somewhere else
The day’s distant, far-off
Promising to drown you
Fiery asphalt informs you
That it should feel all too familiar
Yes, but this time you’re not here
Lingering halfway between going and gone
You’ve written your name on your cheek
For fear of forgetting
Heard a ten-year-old reciting fragments of stories the other day
Stories of a girl lost in dark rooms and vacant houses
A Goddess of Twilight
Blood on concrete
Stories of a girl with fourteen and a half lives
Stories with no ending

Oh, heaven always comes right when you’re leaving.
Sometimes you wonder why you bother to stay at all.