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.