someone took a pair of scissors to the sky today,
the way the light burst through a sliced-open seam in the storm clouds,
the city across the lake still in a fog and the water
in a tantrum

you are all chocolate curls and puppy dog eyes,
family fireplace warmth,
lips magnetized to my skin and transparent smiles,
and she's quiet in silver revelatory haze--

in this quantum-split universe I've been
living in the wrong halves, in the storms, and even I
would have rather been left for dead
again

but your palms make me angry that I ever
trained myself to swallow rain,
convinced I could make dresses out of fog--
I am angry that I wanted anything besides you,

and I love you,
the way you glow with fervent comfort,
dripping in sunlight

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.