you'd sing along with the nasally voices shouting over acoustic guitar inside your 2001 Jeep Wrangler radio,
whiskey on your breath, dark jeans tight over your legs,
taking your hand off the shifter at stoplights to rub my thigh,
and your singing is terrifying,
your deadpan when I'm crying is terrifying,
and I loved it.

it was summer and your lips tasted like linen and
mint chapstick and sweat, and at dinner I could
feel your denim on my bare leg
as you told me that you're the most dangerous person in this room,
in most rooms,
and all I knew in that moment was that I wanted you,

your black rope bracelets and cowboy belt buckles and bulging knuckles and the
terrifying stretch mark scars spanning the inside length of your biceps,
the loss of your father and the heart she broke and the unbroken beautiful strings of words wound inside your throat and the veins underneath the skin of your hands,
and the threat in your voice when all of your weight is on top of me...

I know that's what you want -- to be a threat --
and you're in London, where you met her,
threatening to fall in love with someone else,
and I'm stuck with your nasally voices shouting over acoustic guitar and the sweat I had to wash out of my bedsheets,
eventually

the next morning I couldn't even smell his hair on my sheets
after he had gone--
they're in and out faster than the last, and

this one was bony and frightened
of me like a wild animal and I tell him,
when he has been edging his skeleton fingers
just underneath my bra all night,
you can touch me,
I want you to.

but he can't bear it, and instead he blushes and
wraps his arms around me in bed.
he's never watched **** and I
pepper his chest with bruises that neither of us want and I
ask if he has ever *** in a girl's mouth
and he fumbles over his words,
and readjusts my comforter to shield himself,
from me.

I realize it and I tell him, I'm sorry, I'm a monster.
yes I've been fingered on park benches in public,
forced into sitting on a man's face and then into comforting him
when he realized what he'd done,
tied to this bed with rope and been ****** blindfolded,

and I'm, polluted, maybe, for that,
disgusted with myself, maybe, for that, but I'm

a monster because I've
sat waiting all night for you
to come home.

I still find myself summoning you

even after I have been numbed and dulled and
painted greyscale,
the crawlspace between my bones and skin filled with spent ashes...

my stomach has learned to fold origami butterflies when she
feels like reminiscing,
missing when her floors weren't littered in corpses...

I still find myself summoning you

when I think that I have found a potent lighter fluid,
just to check that he still isn't enough,
and remember that I am still underwater...

I still find myself summoning you

playing your music, singing your songs in the voice that used to sing with you, and I am envious of it as it follows the melody from a memory I exhumed tonight because
it sounds like it remembers you better than I do,

but in the end I am glad I am forgetting you
even though it will never be my choice to let go
because perhaps one day I won't remember
what it was like to sing with you,
and I won't even notice I'm
underwater

through my apartment wall I can hear my neighbor writing on a chalkboard,
only a couple of scratches every night,
and I think he must be making tally marks:
another block of time passed stacked on all other passed time, segmented for ease of reference or glorification or
erasure...

there are cobwebs inside the gaps of my joints --
I am 21 and I have been kissed and I have
tripped and fallen and burned myself on hot metal and
drunk too much sobbing from the alcohol sloshing inside my organs and dissolving holes in my soft tissue and I have
tried Christian novels when I felt aimless and lonely and
been undressed by people I don't speak to anymore and
my body is a haphazard concoction of chemicals,
some ash and some poison accumulating already
into something irreversible...

my body and my mind is a sandbox I've been ******* with in pitch black, hoping a fistful that I throw one day will at least hit a light switch,
and I must have packed a pile of sand too high because now she misses you,
all her concavities ache for you... and
I'm not sure she knows who she misses, in particular,
just that she used to have a hand to hold in the dark,
and that she doesn't anymore.