The day
your train left
we caught the stomach flu
to purge our bodies of everything
but me and you.

you put something (someone)
inside of me

and it left.

does that mean
that you are leaving me too?

I have not ****** in my stomach for over a year,
but I have reverted to
wanting to be a tear on your face again
that evaporates so slowly, it looks like an angel’s
halo for a little while. We never
have good nights anymore, me opening my mouth is equal to
desperately taking off my clothes like I
used to
when you had not been inside of me in weeks. I am an
infant begging for attention,
crying, my need for love is incessant and miserable
and you hate me for it now. There is a filter
in your voice,
if it had an appearance, it would be the bottom of a mug
of tea or static on a television screen –
you don’t sound far away or distant, just full of something I
cannot touch. A wall, immunity
to my advances, this sort of mistress made of brick.
All I want to do is
keep your sadness company, but you
cannot recognize my body in the dark. You have me pinching
blood vessels beneath my skin
so pain will not
keep me alone in my room like you do,
it is getting bad again.      (I am getting worse again.

My own body is abandoning me,
the flesh and blood falling out like clumps of hair.
I never wanted a second heartbeat –
already have one too many

but it came with
a full moon; my cycle in its final stage,
to purge and be young again

purge and be hollow.
He or she has whispered, vital things can leave
too, stain your thighs
red like footprints down a path. He or she found the
door easily. I whisper back, you were

a light
too bright for my house
so you set the whole thing on fire.

Ashes, singed skin
float from my crevices like a cloud –

I did not know that
some things can take up too much air before they
even need it
or that I can mourn what
I would have wanted dead anyway. It is

like everything I could
never love
just wants to remain a pink bloom on my *******
until I wish they would have stayed.

I want to ask if you know how wet our noise is
because my tongue
against your
jaw, against your earlobe, has the same
melody as rain.

The air is never dry with us
water is our blood, we breathe lightning storms
into each other and call it a pulse (

where there is silence
where there is
no weather
there is no way for anything to grow as we do).

He needs the rain hitting car windows and
air being ****** through them
without motion sickness, the waves of the ocean falling from
night stars. It is being safe
and keeping safe, being inside his mother’s womb
when he closes
his eyes
the lull can almost fool him into
believing he is the boat, safe in her sea again.

He has a mouth like morning
and picked me up
from the ground by the ten second rule,
the time it takes for one hundred thirty million
babies to open their mothers,
four hundred times he could have been
on the train to come back.

He says I say I’m sorry in circles
but Earth does it,
her new cycle every day,
why can’t I.

He should say
he is sorry in circles: there have
been nearly three hundred sixty five trains
since
we knew how to **** each others’
sadness through a straw
and not puke, he would try to swallow it all.

He must see me as
moss now, frizzy-haired, meant to be
laid to rest
on the floor for everyone to
trip over
because I am the reason that leap years exist -
the skipping stone, spread water
on the ones I love
so they’ll be heavy and sink with me.

He must taste recycled beauty on me,
the way new light
turns the beds of his lips pink.

(I could not be her)
he needs to say sorry until our hearts are
the same shade of blue
from suffocating below everyone,
the bottom of
the ocean waiting to resurface as a wave.