Eyes. Heartbreak is her sunlit memory barely held by a wooden clothespin. It hangs and glares before your eyes, mocking as it fades into an empty filmstrip. Heartbreak is a lost soul left to perish in her ghost-town, and warmer sunsets are lifetimes away. A wonderwall left standing, pinned polaroids, desperate scratches. You had fought hard and long, for this, but homes are made for breaking and crumbling and leaving, especially in the losing side.

Mouth. Heartbreak is a paper-tag of a goodbye caught in her lips. It is a metaphor that melts at the soft space under your tongue, a certain bittersweet taste made for drowning with a cold lager, a stranger’s whispers, and the perils of his unfiltered cigarette kiss. Heartbreak is taming a manic scream into a delicate, defeated sigh, out of sync with the way she breathed. But then sighing still hurts, and breathing still hurts because you’re alive – you’re so ******* alive for this unbuffered pain.

Chest. Heartbreak is begging your chest not to break amid a listzomaniac rush. Heartbreak is a prosaic throbbing, a treacherous ***** stuck in your ribs, begging to be held like it doesn’t hurt. Heartbreak is a site of buried lavender lithiums, asking for a eulogy; but silence is equally as oppressive. It is your body betraying you, like a city undone by its smokes. It is a quiet word – not a poem, because poems are beautiful despite the pain, and this isn’t. This isn’t.

Hands. Heartbreak is your shaky hand flipping through the last three pages of a tragedy — a heroine dies, a stray star falls, a maiden leaves on a horse-drawn carriage. There is no changing of the ending. Heartbreak is reaching for the empty space in bed, leaving your fingers in technicolored bruises. How can emptiness break one’s bones? Heartbreak is scrubbing your skin dry, raw, and untouchable where she once laid her kisses. Heartbreak is your nails digging through her letters in utter despair — for invisible ink, a promise in the postscript, an estranged lover in familiar flesh, only to find torn sheets, spilled wine, and finality.

Legs. Heartbreak is coming home to ***** laundry all over these cold, wistful floors. Heartbreak is walking in hushed tiptoes only to trip and fall down a memory lane – a kaleidoscope of all the wounds that can possibly hurt. It is catching an empty train to somewhere unloving her is possible – doable. Heartbreak is teaching your legs to run away from the chaos of her naked skin, and not to fall at her feet. But still, you fall and you fall and you break what’s left of your bones chasing after something that’s already gone – long before it has said goodbye. So turn your back and hold your heart — it breaks harder, louder, and worse before it settles down and sits as quiet aching: a forgotten filmstrip, a soundless breath, a calm poem, a serene night.

I'll always be the uncertainty
in a liminal space known only to your feet —
the one you'll always cross
only to step on fragile ground.
I am the kiss mark buried deep
in the hollow of your throat, darling,
the intoxicating Scorpio Venus hands
that aim to unravel, to claim,
the chase slipping off your fingers,
as you still in bewilderment
all the same time.

Skin me dearly, breathe me in
before I go,
in earnest longing;
I have a bad habit of leaving —
yet lingering like the scent
of your brother's cigarettes.

Yet you always come back
knocking at my door at midnight —
and I always have waited for you, darling —
I always have waited for you
in strange, barely escapable hours.

This, an unveiled obscurity — an epiphany, darling.
Our enigma and clarity that perhaps —
perhaps you've always been mine to love.

— "and I, yours"

I'll always feel in my chest broken Septembers. I am languishing with the days, head first to a point of no return. I am the ghost of an abducted goddess, the one who bled all over saffrons and still holds on to her sorrows. I bid farewell to the sunglow on wildflowers. I bid farewell to daylit copper fields. I bid farewell to golden hours, as down I descend to the sweetest madness, and up it goes to consume me.

this cold sunrise will choke on all the dark, sunless ways that i am in love you. sweet one, let's watch the light as it falls apart and crawl, like ether on our golden skin. this is us sitting in the last of september's lights — this is us in the finitude of poetry, and i have never seen anything as beautiful.

the butterflies and their dusted wings — they're sore under my tongue. i inherited the sting of my mother's wounds — her sunday madness and propensity for hurting. but not quite her bravery. not quite her capacity to carry such wounding weights. i am a washed-out silhouette. i cower, with lips blood-red from a tourmaline graze. i shake, i buckle, i drown, and sink. how then, do i say my words without turning them into a gospel made for wasteaways? how do i become half a woman she ever was? how do i live with myself?

long are these cold, clear nights of sobriety and awareness. long are these cold, oppressive seconds. i pull this dilapidated skin — wrap it all over me, resembling an unclaimed body in a morgue. solace exists, but solely outside these walls.

oh, what would i not give for you to gut open the poems — gut them out of me. what softness would i not stain? which bones would i not break? i look at my outstretched limbs — look for the parts i wouldn't hurt, but their silence has always been ominous. foreboding. anticipating. like wary, unmoving leaves. like quiet crows. like haunted dusks.

i spin among formless silhouettes. what would i taint?

what would i not?