In twilight’s hush, where shadows pray,
For sweet Elinore, lost to day,
The weeping willows bend and sigh,
As silver stars blink in the sky.

The whispering wind calls out her name,
A fleeting touch, a ghostly flame.
Oh, where has dawn’s bright darling fled?
To silent halls, where none have tread?

The roses weep in crimson dew,
Their petals soft—their sorrows true.
The brook, once laughing, hushes near,
As if it waits for her to appear.

Yet still the nightbird sings her song,
A mournful tune, both deep and long.
“Return, return,” the echoes plead,
But twilight holds her—lost, indeed.

So shadows kneel, and prayers rise,
To guide her soul through star-strewn skies.
Oh, sweet Elinore, sleep so bright,
Cradled in the arms of night.

A pair of glasses, shattered,
On the floor of a room that remembers nothing.
They weren’t mine, but I miss them anyway.
No one ever claimed what they left behind.

There was no sound,
Just the cold shape in the corner.
A chair pulled slightly back,
As if someone thought twice, then disappeared.

Dust settled like it had been listening.
I traced something into the glass with my finger.
A name? A date?
It didn’t stay long.

There are things I meant to say.
And one thing I never should have.
A hand I almost reached for, I shot in the dark.
A book for all, a book for none.

Shattered illusions.
Shattered hopes.
Shattered dreams.

A house with no structure
built from the remains of ruin.

A powerful soul
in a trembling body.

A house meant to fall.
A house that realized
it’s not a house at all -
just the memory of shelter
pretending to hold.

It asks,
"Then what am I?"

But no one answers.

And so,
what’s left
sinks into the soil,
quietly turning
back into earth.

The suburb’s still a skeleton
but now I wear its bones.
I was backlit,
bored,
all drywall and divine punishment,
first names shouted through screen doors,
ceiling fans spinning
someone else’s damage.

I kept saying I'd leave.
I kept writing it down,
spending my stories on soft drinks and scar tissue,
but
there’s a difference between
nostalgia and necromancy.
Between naked and naive.
Between full of stars
and just
falling.

We said forever
like it wasn’t
a curse.
Like it wasn’t
already dissolving in the pollen.

I wrote hymns for mouths,
sloppy as mascara in rainlight,
that made meaning feel like a dare:
the emotional oversights
we let ruin us twice.

Flannel soul,
face like unfinished business.
He touched me with all the guilt
of a borrowed god.
Begging,
but never burning clean.

A slippery little eulogy
sprinting toward a dawn already
in someone else’s rearview.
He didn’t kiss me,
but he almost did.
And I’ve been sick about it
ever since.

An ode to night
that chews at the hem
of what we thought we were.

Being here now is
already retroactive.
Already haunted.
Intertwined
like seatbelt bruises.

A small canopied disaster,
still posing.
still pretending.

I was a rooftop girl,
and I meant it.
Which is worse, I think,
than being believed.

The sky never answered,
but I kept
sending poems.

The suburb’s still a skeleton.
I’m just better at burying
what I mistook for light.