I feed my appetite with your voice. Your fricatives pirouette on my tongue. Each sibilant hangs on my teeth, then slides off and leaves its wax to pile up in my throat. I cough it up and collect it in a jar. It sits on the shelf in my basement and becomes familiar with the musty cloak of yesterday’s wet laundry. On the shelf, there are jars of swollen strawberries and gritty half-skulls of pears, blackberries like bundles of balloons. But in your jar, suspended in their own sugary liquid, are ripened vowels that arabesque when I give the jar a shake. I wipe the damp film off the metal lid with my thumb. Now I’m sitting in bed at 2:00 a.m., scooping your words from their glass house with a sticky index finger, speckled with seeds, semicolons, ellipses. Each dig gets me closer to your older, sweeter language–closer to what I’ve been craving. The last drops cling to the jar’s lip until I tilt it to mine, and I’m full-bellied, staring at an empty jar. In the bathroom, I slide a finger in my mouth until it reaches my throat and the words come up and fill the toilet and overflow onto the floor, puddle around my crooked toes and stain the linoleum.

In sleep, the lungs balloon.
Air fills their walls and sacs where it can,
like saltwater waves cresting in inhales
and exhales.

They release and crash
as ribs slide tides of breath
shallow within the core,
where we cannot hear the volumes
of the waves that drift us about our nocturnal coma.
of the waves that drift us about our nocturnal coma.that we never feel how far from the shore
we have been taken, up and down.

Our chests, we have moved them
but elsewhere.
The ribs crack like driftwood
in the choppy current, and float
from the diaphragm of the Atlantic into
our chest cavities.

Like a snake unhinges its jaw—pink cheek exposed—

to something warm and whole, I unhinge you over and over and over again in my mind when I need to shed away every time I told you I would visit,

when I need to shed away that night we drank a cheap six pack in my tangle of blankets,

when I need to shed away the songs you wrote about blue eyes,

when I need to leave only the raw, scaly bits of you—the bits I scraped away at and made real, not the girl four hours away with the name I always mispronounce,
not the pieces she only barely notices when you leave her side, or the pieces you left for me to find, scattered on my windowsill.

I unhinge the moment your forked tongue first formed the words “I love you,"

the day I took pictures of you playing my guitar with the missing string—you said you didn’t need it anyway.

I think about the wrongs we righted when I slept in your car with your hand on my head, and I know I can’t come close to chewing our problems over, so I swallow them whole.

For months after,

        I tasted you in the flowered mug we took shots of Jim Beam out of—it went down like hot velvet.

        I saw you in every sliver of my Grape Hyacinth eyes and constellations of freckles.

I’ve halved you into here and there—into miles of unwelcome blooms.

She has thin lips that rarely touch—painted Merlot

and sheltering teeth—those perfectly aligned, white-spined novellas.

And when she speaks, her satin tongue presses out sweet breath

that hangs on your head like a daisy halo.

I remember when I surveyed your bare shoulder blades

and the directions they tilted

as you raised your arms to light and
puff and flick,

puff and flick,

and how I measured the distance between

right and left bones that peak and plateau separately,

but are linked by my favorite unapproachable spine.