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Hall 1d
i ask him
what’s wrong

i tell him i’m here
that i will always support him
and the silence stretches
like fabric
thinned by too many washes,
too many wears

i say
i want to be there
but maybe the door is locked
or maybe it’s not a door at all
just a wall
painted to look like one

sometimes
i feel like a ghost in his world
hovering,
wishing he’d see me
noticing how often i check
if he saw
if he’s there
if i still matter

funny
how love turns your ribs into cages
and makes you ask questions
you hate yourself for asking

like
does he think of someone else
does he laugh harder
with someone else
does he hold
someone else closer
even when no one is touching him
does someone else make him
the happiest boy

he once said
i was too much
too close
too everything

and i try to be less
to shrink,
to vanish at the right times
but it still hurts
when he disappears before i do

there are gaps in our messages
and i read them
like tea leaves,
like grief,
like maybe he’s just tired
or maybe he’s tired of me

but still
i would sit in silence forever
if it meant he didn’t have to hurt alone
if it made him
the happiest boy

and i would leave his life
you know,
i would go in a breath
if it made him
the happiest boy

if it meant
he wouldn’t feel the way he does now
whatever way that is
whatever ache he won’t name

but i wish he’d let me stay
and i wish he’d tell me
and i wish i knew
whether i’m still
someone he’d wish to stay too

because even through all this
he is still the one
i would choose to care for
over and over again
even if it leaves me
nowhere at all
I wrote this one quite a while ago. I don't think(?) it's objectively "good" but it's always been a favourite of mine.
Hold me like a weapon,
bite me like a sin,
and watch me burn—
because I’m yours,
wild and wanting,
and I want it—
every savage, filthy second.
Slow—devout—
as though your hands are holy
and I’m the altar you’ve prayed for.

I feel your hunger,
how it trembles in your breath,
how your eyes have already carved me open.
I am not afraid.

Let me be your sacrament.
Your forbidden fruit,
your crimson communion,
still warm in your mouth.

Bite gently, or don’t.
Tear what you need.
There’s no sin in this—
I give myself willingly.
I want to live inside you.

You—
you will know the real taste of divinity.

And when I am gone,
you will be full.
And I will be yours.
Entirely. Eternally. Internally.
In every aching, holy bite.
Your name—my final psalm—
pressed between teeth, bled into prayer.
A devotion that digs past skin.

What temple could hold you better
than the hollowed chapel of my ribs?

I swallowed you in whispers.
Slow, reverent.
As if the closer I took you in,
the more of you I’d never lose.

Now you echo in my marrow,
a relic too sacred to rot.
They call it desecration.
I call it closeness.

Let them pray in fear.
I’ve already tasted heaven.
Robert Ronnow Oct 2022
I spoke with two people at the party Saturday.
A young police officer, short-haired, fit,
chiseled face who had two young children.
He felt constrained by the law, without discretion
to question mopes (perps) aggressively
or to let go those who were obviously no threat.
Even at a family function he seemed straight-backed, correct,
devoted to his role as our protector (and his children’s)
yet I thought perhaps too deeply in debt, indentured
to the rules and laws of legislators and destined
to be disappointed (or worse). I thought his courage
and devotion (to whom or what?) would surely
be poorly repaid and that this lesson
was necessary to ready him with wisdom
for death or further living. I worried like a brother
about the unpredictable dangers, even terrors,
he must daily face, and the pleasure he takes in facing them.
How will he return to the fragility of family,
of the soul alone, after wielding the force
of the state, the blind, combined will of us all?

Next a business exec, retired from a well known
global investment firm. At first we talked about
the lush beauty of the northeast compared to the arid west
(although he loves every inch of the west, too).
Then somehow we got beyond light conversation
when he complained about the perceived decline in values
for instance how the Ten Commandments can’t be publicly
displayed. He said we can all agree on God
but I said I have a mechanistic view of the universe
(although the unknowable always sits just out of reach
of the known). I told him my dad’s theory of reincarnation,
a good man and a corporate seeker of God also, whose shoes
I could never fill unless I swore belief in a supreme being.
No hard feelings. Then he told me the story
of his dying friend, an atheist, not even a deist
like the founding fathers, who opened his eyes for the last time
to correct the exec’s misperception that now he’d meet his maker.
Having exceeded the bounds of acceptable conversation
I went looking for my children. Nothing more to question.
I Should Have Followed You  

"Can I still call you Dorothea?"—even though the black and white lines in the paper reduce you to the habit you wore, arrange you into silence, a name and surname surrendered to the cloistering of lilies. Somewhere beyond this obituary, the grown children you once taught trace grief into their office desks, their minds recalling your half-remembered lessons. The others—those who once marched beside you—remember the compadre who chose devotion over struggle, who vanished into the ghost dust of old revolutionary dreams.  

Once, you were a believer who marched along Che and Fidel, a woman with a true north compass. You were never reckless, never a ghost in Havana’s dusk. You spent your nights writing, sealing letters to revolutionaries. You drank in hope like sugarcane.  

Then, the cause hardened. The slogans lost their breath. When Fidel called the people gusanos (worms) in a moment of drunkenness, you knew you must leave the revolution and Cuba behind. It was a certainty.  

You rooted yourself among the Miami exiles. We met on campus, arguing over a political opinion piece you wrote for the college newspaper. I argued that the Bay of Pigs operation was necessary. You wrote that it was a stupid exercise in democratic colonialism and was doomed to failure. And it was.  

Our love was a bickering affair. My adolescent jokes, mocking what I thought were your misplaced beliefs, chipped our foundation. I believed I was never lost. But I was orbiting a center I refused to name. After the revolution betrayed your faith, you retreated into a steady, quieter certainty—Jesus. He told you to press your palms into the smallest child’s hands. "Teach them lessons in your authentic voice," the command.  

I should have followed you. I could have stepped over the doubt that swelled between us, made a church of our mornings, sheltered in your certainty—if only you laughed more. If only I’d prayed less in jest.  

Now, my fig grows stubborn at my window, its roots strong, its love silent, and I, too, am nearing the end. I would light a candle, Dorothea—but what god still takes offerings from men like me? I will leave a hundred dollars in the box instead, fold your name into my palm, and call this devotion.
Because I loved you
I fancied myself kind
To bow at your fingertips

Because I loved you
I felt myself strong
Enough to break

Your care,
Ever changing,
Floods me inside out

The dam bursts just
from the pinprick of a fracture

And I shatter

Because I loved you
I used to think bleeding made me worthy.
That if I burned slow enough,
someone might finally call it love….
But it’s not love.

It’s a quiet execution.

I give, and give,
and they call it devotion,
but no one ever asks why I never stop.

I twist myself into prayers,
crawl into their peace like a grave,
and call it my purpose.
But I’m tired of being a vessel for someone else’s softness.
Tired of being holy only when I am hollow.

They sleep soundly while I splinter,
and I tell myself it means I matter.
But I don’t feel holy.
I feel used.
It's a clockwork — like the dances of phantoms in the hallways, in the glow of lights through the window at night. I stared like a burglar from afar, It's the fear and anger, that's keeping me restless — a reminder that I should sleep with one eye open, meager, furiously shame.

I understand how stubborn they are rewriting the history, as I try to recollect, catching trails like they were footsteps. Love is all they worship from the beginning of time, thus it crumbles them to dust.

Are they second - hand embarrassed? If I couldn't see the ghosts and shadows lingering everywhere, yet here I am nestled to all that fairy tale, for a momentary, and still plotting the sweetest lullaby. Did they haunt you too? as if it were a chunk to the armour or it counterfeits them?
You hurt me with hands that once healed,
and still, I kiss the wounds you leave behind.

You are my poison and my prayer.
A god I can’t stop kneeling for,
even as the altar crumbles under me.

We are saints of suffering,
bound not by grace,
but by the echo of every scream we swallowed,
just to stay.


The silence.
The sweetness that comes too late
and still tastes like heaven.
I know the cage,
and I decorate it in your name.
Call it temple.
Call it home.

You say you love me
in the same breath that cuts me.
And I believe you.
Not because it’s true,
but because it has to be.
Because if it isn’t,
then what am I left with
but ruin?
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