Two girls sit side-by-side eating a can of peaches, one licks her fingertips as the other tips back the can and drinks the syrup. A single stray streak drips down her chin and circles her collar bone to find its way down between her *******. They look at each other; she laughs.

Cormac is looking at the dead roadside trees.
                  It’s going to be ok, he tells me.

It’s going to be ok.

I’ve spent my Saturday sleeping, my Sunday too.

But now, I stand
listening to the birds, a cacophony of sound bounces
between cattail and off the
water

It isn’t quiet out here
like you might like to think.
Flurries of feathers violent flit between the stems.
I sit on a bench beside the pond—
the drying leaves of the late world carried on the cold and temporal winds. The chill fiddles it’s way between the buttons of my coat and I’m shivering, staring
out
into the open-wide.

This air smells of smoke and arboreal decay—or, maybe it doesn’t.
Everything has smelled of smoke lately.
I need to wash my clothes.

between sand and soot
sits a little yellow shell
hollowed out; quiet

Yellow taxi cab tango
strings between teeth
teeth between tongues
underneath--

You pick the paint from under
your fingernails, but I want a man
I want a woman
Who leaves it be

Our love was
embalmed
in lace.

Subtle knives snuck under dish towels and pins
dropped into morning tea.
You were my sometimes moon,
covered in rust from head to toe.

With the unveilment of night, you were invisible in my room.
I traced the map of my floor many times traveled and found you.
Darkness, it tied together our hands-
with a warmth of smoky shadows blown out brownstone windows.

I always hated sharing a bed at night, cramped feet kicking out,
but with lips locked together and greedy fingers grasping,
I felt myself falling prey to the devil called love.

Dead skin and dirt under crescent shaped keratin claws
I'll take a shower- fix the problem, but
Sin isn’t grime, and pain isn’t filth
and the lines on my arms
aren’t a map
directing you anywhere
but you’ll trace them from my wrists to my eyes and you’ll
wonder

Pink eyed words whisper slow.

Lazy layers of smoke curl around her expositions--
marbled collarbones protruding from the recluse
of a crippled child called

Hot ash sprinkled across her duvet,
she feels too heavy
under the dark velvet of the night sky.

Fingertips trace stories across wrists,
catching the rivets of her imperfections with
bitten down nails.

Her eyes reminded me of Sunday afternoons,
Licked fingers turned to ash--
compelled to a numb and bleeding madness where
the presence of any tangible future was smoothed into
a small pebble held in the palm of her hand.

The way you walk reminds me
of how I lost my front teeth,
on that playground, under those monkeybars,
where I “had my first kiss"
but didn’t
and said I did, because
I was six and I was afraid of
being alone

Innocent saucer eyes open wide,
Sweet budding lavender laughter.
We’ll all go down-
One by one.
Silence aggravates the wreckage
Of what I used to be.
Into an abyss of false love
I’m falling.
A love that is mistaken,
Shown in the form of tender kisses
In detested secret places-
On a moldy couch
Covered in cat hair.
The crippling angst of your fingertips
Against my cold youthful cheeks-
Tracing the outline of my fatty jaw.
Slow circles of smoke escape your chapped crusting lips,
As chunks of flesh turn to rotting hostility
Against ones own body-
The bitterness of the cold turns to sweet comfort
As a lovely numbness becomes my regularity,
And emotions and physicality become one
Persisting to disintegrate-
my soul has become
a boiling bubble of spoiled milk
With the putrid stench of pillaged skin-
The devastating devouring desecration
of a ravaged--

I forgot how to hope
When I was four years old
On the cold cracked concrete floor
Of her basement kitchen down the block
Where we used to sit and laugh
About absolutely nothing
Then nothing turned into something
And laughter turned into an exertion of fear
A fear that lasted- that still prevails
And even through the good
It seems entirely possible
*That life on earth itself is hostile