Rich, red raspberries in your palm,
rolled there from a damp paper towel as you sit
crosslegged on hardwood floor,
perfect posture,
head leaned against the lowest of the barres in the studio.
Your shoulder blades shift and
your collarbones gleam with perspiration.
Down the wall, another girl savors every drop of an orange.
Through the wall we hear an instructor yelling
and slipping into strings of Spanish curses.
You lean your head on to my shoulder wearing a new shade of lip stain: raspberry romance.
I bite into my bell pepper like an apple and
try not to breathe too loud.

shoulderBlades meekly scrunched, hard, together shoulder blades.
Before me shoulderBlades and spine curved up to head, raven coiffed,
hair pulled, lipbiting, shoulder blades: you've got monsters inside you

     've

got pain, cuts, and bruises inside you

                 've

got pretty eyes and dimples and you like to wear flats, tanktops, and skirts.
But i like how your monsters taste like molasses and sulfur, they taste like
fingernails(turquoise)rending. And your cuts feel like lace and razors they
feel like your waist in hands thick with me deeply in you: shoulderblades.

i remember
gettin' kinkykinky in the backseat
while your friend drives
illumined shoulderblades in the dimmers
your step daddy doesn't have much
say in us running away since you're 18

your mommy never loved me
and how i don't normally fit in things

told me you'd be going to school
in Kirtland, but i'm missing out
on how thick you're getting
for the waving tiers of succulence
belting in your stomach
profusion of feelings confusing your tongue

Darlin’, they say you’ve got knives swimming through your heart beats.
That the blood flowing from your pin pricked fingertips to your mumbled fear lips
is dressed up angry, in bayonet holding coats of arms.
That your tiger tooth saber shaped blood is dragging its hands down your veins
slowly scratching in dates down walls of young membrane tombstones
shooting firing squad lines of pain as your body tears itself apart.
They’re saying that its only going to get worse from here.
With your pinstriped POW nerves vibrating like skyscrapers
as each pulse bleeds through you like a ten on the richter.

Darlin’  I’m dying to see you smile, but the washington rain is drowning you
and you're losing time for existing.
Shivering in that hospital bed as icicle cells freeze you to the bone.
You used to light up a room with all your bright sunflower laughter
but now your hands are cold like sad glaciers
pushing your shoulderblades under icy water
and all that seems to come out of your lips
are hospital bed nightmares and fluorescent smoke wishes.
Every morning your black coffee eyes brew up tears
they rain for hours.
but crying isn't dowsing this wildfire.
You’re trying to stay on your feet, but your ankle deep in gasoline.
Your breath is like a pendulum time keeper.
The white blood cell count like a stop watch for the grim reaper.
And you watch, eyes stinging, as you burn up from the inside out.
Temperature climbing mountains. Breaking ozones.
But they say you're on the decline.

Darlin’ I know they say you have bad blood.
They say that your heart won't gone on beating for a long time
and at night you cough up blood on your pillow creating a universe of helio constellations
but they don't know how hard you try.
I know right now london feels like its falling
Everything does.
Its ashes and ashes.
But like a pilot light supernova things can change.
Lets grab up fistfulls and fistfulls of ash in our shaking hands
and put them together
and let the weight of the world turn them to diamonds
and we can push them inside our nimble rib cages
and live a little bit longer

Darlin'

Can you hear me?















They asked me to speak at your funeral.
I talked about our weekend in the mountains
and how your laugh would bounce off the canyons in such beautiful frequencies.
I talked about how I met you
how my heart wouldn't stop feeling like avalanche symphonies.
And how you turned scarlet when I asked you your name.
I talked about your family, our friends,
how we would look at the stars for hours without letting our eyes breathe
because you thought the world of space.
I talked about your yellow rain boots and how you would always track the wilderness inside with you.
I talked about your fear of trains and thunderclaps and how in rainstorms you would curl up next to me and shake like an earthquake but you knew your were safe.

I talked about how much I loved you.
It started raining, I started breaking down.
And I talked about how hard you tried.

Darlin' they said you had bad blood.
That if we would have caught it sooner we could have saved you.

Darlin' I wish we had had more time.
I could have written you so many love letters.
Darlin' I wish we had had more time.





Death stole you away.

And signed your fate with a sickle cell pen of red ink.

I write too many poems about my body.

but it’s the only house my spirit knows

and the only movement is my own

I could write you a love poem

or one about the way the kids in my hometown

used to walk the traintracks like they led somewhere

but i’m completely obsessed with this idea of entrapment

that i could be more than skin and bones that i could be made of

ink blotch shoulderblades

ribbon ribcages

clothespin wrists

and ruby lips

that i could abandon myself and get out of this cage

that’s too big or too small or whatever the **** they tell me this week.

the laddering of my ribs creak
like water-stained cherrywood stairs;
tread lightly, lest you
stir the dust and the ghosts
that dwell underfoot,
‘neath the cracked floorboards
of my skin.

i have but a simple request:
               rid yourself of your lungs
               and fill up the empty spaces
               with used coffee filters,
               crinkled wrapping paper, and
               forlorn hope. do
cast aside
               the shroud of indecision?, for
               that winding sheet will only
               hold you down between
               your shoulderblades, like
               framed butterflies pinned on paper
               with needles of stone and salt.

stay with me tonight.
we will be taxidermy birds
on marionette strings
with crumbled concrete
between our talons,
the afterimages
of neon diner signs
stamped into our inner eyelids
oscillating, phantasmic.

we'll sing elegies in spring
rock sugar on our tongues—
               there are staves of music
               written in the lining of your mouth
               and in the webbing of your hands
––as Sappho might say:
girls, sweetvoiced.

oh! but to think
that the starfire in your eyes
could be extinguished
by the tears you shed;
i’ll return my heart to the constellations
for you

safety is a forehead
pressed between sleeping
shoulderblades,
butterfly kisses on spines
and entangled fingers

At one point he realized that if he hugged me hard enough our hugs don’t last as long

It reminds me of the way some people take pills
if you take enough all at one time
perhaps the dosage will be strong enough
to run through your blood like runners in a race
to blissfully declare that it’s all for nothing and nothing for all
that the feeling of my shoulderblades cracking under pressure
is better than overdosing on pills

It reminds me of the way some people gorge on food
because if you eat it all as fast as you can
it takes a few minutes before your stomach feels that its too much
and if you wait to puke it all up in the bathroom of your school after lunch
maybe the feel of ***** and the burn in your throat
is worth the taste of all that food
that you ate too fast to enjoy it

It reminds me of the way some people use their orajel
because if you sit there are you numb one spot
all the other aches are suddenly so appearant
because all of you hurts, doesn’t it?
Not just one tooth, but all the others
and if you numb the one distracting you
suddenly your whole mouth is in disarray
and you hurt everywhere

It reminds me of life support
because a machine pumping what you were born with into your body
reminds me of the way I cling like a child to their mother’s skirts
to you as if you were my only living teddybear
because I know that if you were to walk away one day
I could go on living
and that fact alone makes it that much likely
that you’ll stay even longer

because I don’t think I need you
but I want you around anyway

forever and always.
a very long time.
Flying along with the feeling of freedom. elation. sprouting wings, they shoot out from shoulderblades. Time to sour. Unrestrained, liberty and life in the breath of the clouds. Whole and Complete. Joy unending.
these things can't be written, only felt and forgiven. Unbidden, so, welcome still. Freedom of the soul can't be lost of sold. the way the music plays, crescendos and dances. Notes the most beautiful melody of joyous abandon.
Release. Fly.
Freedom in the waves, wings glide along glistening waters.
Sparkles.
Millions of diamonds dancing atop waters, delighting in the laughter of joy and, innocence. Wings unfurl, plummet through sky. no stopping no turning no end to this flight. Can't open or close, define or control. this freedom brings so, much, more. Words can't describe, minds can't imagine. Poets left wordless, musicians without notes.
Purity, not a definable thing. This love, that they sing. it isn't a definable thing.
release, be free. That's the song to be sung, nothing can come, near. Sweeping and swirling, with no worries simply twirling. unimaginable. uncontainable. the beauty of this freedom song. A dance, sweet flight, all things beautiful. Release and relinquish and be free inside. arms open wide, wings spread so free. on top of a cliff, overlooking the sea. Breaking. Free.
Forever and always, the love of which we sing. freedom comes at a price, I'm growing new wings. break. free. New and completed, ever appreciated. Perfection in imperfection, every bit accepted and, unabbreviated. No need to say no, to change or to bend. Just spread those wings and sour through the breath of the wind. Undivided and unqualified, yet utterly complete. Perfected in the sight of love consummate.
Flawless, fearless, freely flying, forever and always. such a very long time.
Perfectly broken and unintentionally flawed. Beautiful in the chaos of a world still in snow. Beautifully broken, all the battles have been won. sweet wings open wide, feathers glisten and gleam.
fly. fly.
fly free.

The Supreme Reacher
was a watcher of dreams.

The Supreme Reacher
was an inclination.

The Supreme Reacher
was the instantaneous
and the forgettable.

The Supreme Reacher
could recede into the shadows of a thought,
only to emerge from its triangles
clean as a remembrance.

The Supreme Reacher
had veins for hands
and could reach across the mind
like lightning.

The Supreme Reacher is not
a person,
place,
thing,
or God.

The Supreme Reacher
had thighs black with feathers
and shoulderblades
hairy with time.

The Supreme Reacher
could talk and talk for days.

Lazing on dreamt-up
park benches,
green in their concrete holes
with algae,
and become green
as well.

The Supreme Reacher
could lay her heart on your
heart
and
place her lungs
in your palms.

The Supreme Reacher
could never be reached,
but only dreamt of and felt
like heavy fog on a tongue.

If ever there was a time for the Supreme Reacher,
to be Supreme,
this was the time,
the time of limes
and wicker minds,
of transposition
and aberration,
the time of larks
and loons
and goons,
of thugs in power suits
and kings in jumpers
and dreads,
of revolutions gone stale
in their infancy,
crunchy and pale
even to their cores.

The Supreme Reacher,
could not be reached,
but it could reach out itself
with lightning hands
firing up the whole earth of minds.

i am trying not
to write poems about ***.
but it’s not easy.
everywhere our souls and our bodies are being
torn apart by genocide and violence
but all i can think of
is the sound you make
when i kiss the soft sweet-smelling hollow
carved into the place
where your neck meets your shoulderblades.
i’ve never ****** someone
without wanting to write poems about them.
you see, it’s a new language
i’m learning, this calligraphy
of the flesh,
how touch and sensation can transmit messages
unknown by hastily scratched letters.
they say when you learn a new language
the most important thing you can do
is practice it.
i am discovering now
the art of translation
how skin and hair and warmth and movement
can be described in these
empty syllables we pour from our mouths
these words we caress each other with
the only other thing our tongues are really good for.
i am a pious monk
dutifully copying the holy verses written on your body
to a cold thin page
hoping only that in doing so
i can preserve the memory of your touch
long after death has taken us both.
and i am trying not to write poems about ***
but i want to honor what you have taught me
about these strange forms we were given
this is merely a manifestation
of our animal incarnation
this is all i can do
to give voice to desire
the thing calling
wanting only to be heard.

Honey
May i give you
A reverse hug?

He stands still
Opens up his arms
For her
To embrace him
From behind

As she lay her head
Between his shoulderblades
Listening to the murmur
Of his heart.

Melody is the soul that binds us
wavering throughout space and time
the void
echoing with singularity
by closing your eyes
a state of full relaxation
mantras of intellectual *******
course through your pores
lightly touching the soul in every part a whole
rain with sound down your shoulderblades
as meditational medicine envelopes your physicality
sing together as one

Tired eyes
shame envelops her body, like gauze
shoulderblades dripping with chagrin, a tattered pair of wings.
Freckles dot her nose, a miniature map,
sanguine lips on milky skin.
Stale, intangible disgrace.

Her eyes are drawn to the sunken sky,
and puffs of breath dance around her lips.
Acid boils within her
rippling throughout her body, threatening to tear her in two.
Fingers pressed to lips; drag,
a tiny ember. Ash away the agony.

A script, perfectly mastered:
a whimper, a moan, a buck of her hips.
Expectant with dread:
a low grunt, heavy panting, and slick, salty sweat
and at last it comes to a close.

And then: a fistful of bills.
Stiff, unyeilding, she will swallow hard.
And tell herself it was all worthwhile.

There is a hole in her heart,
dimly lit by a frenzy of pale, crushed stars
the smell of their flames: chalky, thick charcoal
whisper a faint reassurance.

Penance stains her cheeks in lacy contours
ageless, crooked bruises lace her body and blister to the surface of her skin
unable to rinse herself of sin,
she will choke on the sun.

I once met a boy with shoulders that could hold up the world and a few stars across his shoulderblades. He stood high, swear he belonged to trees, with a stare that made every nerve correspond to make me a personal lightning storm (to get a better idea, I used to jump off branches to feel wings I didn't have and his eyes were the leaves I'd see before I crashed to reality). What was reality without the birds beating against my chest when the expanse of my hand covered the thrumming of his heart. If there was a God? If there was a Plan? He would've made him ready to hold my hand, and he was (I'd like to include that he fit me like tides on shorelines).  
He was entirely made of stardust and sea glass, jaggedly beautiful, someone shattered him along time ago to throw him to my shore, thank god she did, you were too alluring for me not to admire.
I've never been to the ocean, but the way your hands felt on my back felt like the entire world. (To elaborate, he's earthquakes, forests and the way the moon loves the sea).
Somebody asked me to explain the scientific explanation for infinite and I just whispered his name. He was engulfed in my forever, surrounded by words I whispered about futures we were scared of, with plans we'd propose now and promise to mars they'd work.
You see, I'm not artistic, not in the least, I like the elaborate equations of the brain and how your bones never actually fully mend. But I wrote books of words for this man, every color in my paint set couldn't compare to the way his eyes looked under street lamps or when he first wakes up.
That's what scared me, everything in the world can be drawn, written, solved, but someone forgot to finish the riddle for a boy with shaken leaves for eyes, forgive me, for I have been caught in the labyrinth of this boy.
The only way out, is to stay until stars crash around our ankles.
*Tu sei un mondo tutto da solo.

one of these days
i will stop falling in love
with angel-headed boys
residing entire oceans
and plateaus away from me

the ways that their honeysuckle words
drip from their lips like honey
only to cover me
consume me
drown me

i'll cease thinking about how golden hair
would feel between the tips of my fingers
how their voice would sing
and reverberate within the hollow prison
of my rib cage
reciting rimbaud
rilke
camus

i will stop being tripped
up by the unyielding curve of pale
cupid-bow lips and lithe
long fingertips
tracing collars
shoulderblades
eyelids

continuously rendering me
hopeful
hoping
helpless

You were born bone
I became tattoo
flesh tethered your scaffolding
Under my beautiful scars

Thin paint, Stinging red
Constellations of wings
Left them with fingernails
Your soft shoulderblades
snug under pale skin

A bit lip tease soft blonde hairs one by one
Down tips underneath
the divet in your neck.
I admire the canvas of your spine back to me, all red wing stinging.
Ready to fly off
Moving thigh and held
Shifting maroon blankets.
My mouth smirks
Attempts to hide how desperate
To taste it is.

Sweet bird. Sweet angel.
Awake all night
With a tattoo of an arrow
And her hand
Pressed to her forehead.

A glass of water.
Towel held like a childs blanket.
Still white.
Even used, it is still fresh linen smell.
We are still fresh linen smell.
Your hipbones agree.
My thumbs asked them.

I kiss your feathers gentle and let them burn softly as I trail down.

Your whimpers send me skyward.
Lighter headed now
Tight cheeked.

More rustled blanket
Your thigh dances over hipbones.
I feel the tethers between bone and canvas
Scar and silk.
Warm in these wings
Stars in this constellation.

I wish that when you moved your head
you were turning over to tell me
something beautiful and that when
you adjusted your legs it would
be as subtly purposeful
as when I moved mine
because when I breathed
it felt like our bodies
were flowing together sinusoidally
from head to foot. And our hands
snarled, hardly together, close to
thick barbed wire our fingernails
scratching each other’s palms. Despite
mental unrest for two hours
I did not feel uncomfort, my chest
warming your soft shoulderblades.

I am open for you—
like cemetery gates at sunrise.
Both deities above and below
warn of dire consequences.
Still I am open for you.

Love, and love, and love.
You must admit there was love
in the speckled blue you left on my neck,
and the tight grip on my hip
beneath flannel sheets and morning eyes.

Not love like caged doves and thrown rice.
Not love like three-bedroom house in the suburbs.
Love like no space in your queen-sized bed.
Love like you showing me how to inhale smoke at 3am.
Love like teeth and tongues and thumbs and thighs.

I am open, fully.
Gaping, expanding, overwhelming.
I am racing heart.
I am goosebumps on your forearm.
I am fingertips gripping shoulderblades.
I am love, I am love, I am love.

Laying in the middle of the field
Dead grass pricking my shoulderblades
I'm up against the sky
Drowning in ocean of clouds
Tree's stretching their achy limbs
After long hibernation
Sunshine gold kisses my flower petal lips
Crimson as my love

One More, My Love
One More, Cigarette
To quench the stress in your shoulderblades
One More, Sweet Note
From the belly of the dying Piano
One More, Last Kiss
Before you learn to hate me for the rest of your life
One More, Burried Treasure
In the park by the tree where we met
And One More, Excuse
As to why I let you wander into oncoming traffic when I knew you were drunk and I should have been watching you.

One More, My Love
One More, Cigarette
To quench the stress in your shoulderblades
One More, Sweet Note
From the belly of the dying Piano
One More, Last Kiss
Before you learn to hate me for the rest of your life
One More, Burried Treasure
In the park by the tree where we met
And One More, Excuse
As to why I let you wander into oncoming traffic when I knew you were drunk and I should have been watching you.

Eyes: Stars. I can’t help but wish on them, holding my breath, standing on tiptoe, hoping. They promise so much.
Arms: Branches and vines. Reaching, wrapping, holding. You break what you let go of; you choke what you keep.
Legs: Thunder thighs and tree trunk calves. You frown like it’s a bad thing, but you’re strong; you’re steady, sure, solid. You are a forest and a storm.
Laugh: A flash of lightning. An instant of blinding, dazzling music in the midst of my storm.
Shoulderblades: Bookshelves. My head is a journal, thoughts spilling over. You are strong enough to bear even the heaviest of my words.
Tongue: A forest fire. I still have a second-degree burn from the first time you told me you loved me.
Hips: Hills. You are mountains and valleys, and I want to take a walk and get lost in you.
Feet: Anchors. They team up with gravity to keep you here. And so you stay.
Chest: A strongbox overflowing with treasure. Your heartbeat is the song your whole body sings, kept in time to your pulse, flowing through your veins.
Ribs: Boards on a ship. Weatherproof, waterproof. This means my tears (saltwater, too) will not ruin you when they fall onto you.
Hands: Morning glories with green-veined leaves. Opening, closing; beautiful every time.
Mind: A maze. You’re a puzzle I can’t solve and a line I cannot rhyme. You are never going to make sense, and I love that.

when i was a little girl,
during that span of time
when years weren't the yardstick
but rather the speed with which
my popsicle would melt
or the days awaited
when wands of pine
would cover me from
sun-burned scalp to scraped-up toe
with sweet sap,
i would run about the tall grasses
and name every wildflower
that brushed my ankles
oh-so-tenderly.

i would keep a journal,
all in cornflower blue crayola,
about my findings,
my voyages through seas of green
and the whispers heard
in rustlings through the waves,
all turning to fae fairytales between my ears.

everything was named beautiful,
and everything was soft as a cloud
as i laid with my shoulderblades in the earth,
sticky fingers outstretched towards
projected memories far above me.

and now
i often find myself in a similar position,
ribs heaving heavily
as the floral essence
fills my lungs so amazingly--
the leaden comfort in my limbs
making it almost as if i had never left.

it's as if those fae fairytales have finally come true,
the ponderings finally rippling anew,
and the poppies lulling me to sleep
for hundred of years,
millenia stained with
the purity of august's finest daisies.

their perfume roused me one morning,
the sky still bruised and fluttering,
head sticky with a misplaced exhaustion and the woes of age;

the circumstance to which i awoke was this:

the buds,
              the lilacs and hyacinths,
                                                       the baby's breath and dandelion
                                                                                 fluff
i had made delicate wishes upon since my earliest days
had found themselves a home wrapped around my spine,
fragrant petals gracing my stomach with their presence.

as if influenced by draught,
the ache did not place itself
but rather my fascination
with each tickling floral
forming fissures in my abdomen--

i took mental note
of their names
and characteristics,
as many as i could fit in that sap-lined cavity of my mind,
just as lovely as ever.

the soil was as soft as a cloud,
childish glee filling my heart to overflowing.
some things never change.

sometimes, the beauty of flowers
remains
the beauty of flowers,
whether it is plush under foot
or pushing through
bone and sinew.

the nape of her neck
smells of soda and leather  

she rubs her eyes.

my hands are raspy hanging around your breastbone as if it were
a
trashcan
from which i seek vantage, looking out across the grass for a
familiar     face.

bangs tumble over her brow like rain on a
tin roof-
a soldering joint that comes undone after years of dissatisfaction, a broken arm.i am left humming an asymmetrical tune.  no longer familiar with the haptic feedback of my palm against your jawline-

i
find you the way i find the tone of a bell shaking  in my belly.
inside there, you are
a chorus of drips from the faucet
                                      a room away.     
filling the basin.

around the circumference of her wrists are thin red indentations where elastic bands have been
removed.

i can trace like-marks around her waist.
there are pink shadows between her shoulderblades that
              show me
              where
to apply pressure.

i do so and crack our spines downwards


the hairs on the back of my forearm are taken between her lips and tongue
       so as to
     moisten them at the breach of her mouth

we modernize
and carcrash into eachother

we are there dangling on the ground

Like severed limbs
as
Uru as
Uuuuuu

There are butterflies in your stomach?
They flutter when you see him;
a furious blush paints your face,
raw brush strokes and
unadulterated emotion
leaving behind a rich pigment
known as cluelessness.
Mix in a bit of pallor,
and it's embarrassment.
They beat their mosaic-printed wings
with a stumble of your feet
or a failed exam,
a 68 in Applied Physics
when you should have pulled a crisp 69.
They find Eden-tier gardens with excitement
on par with that of a pajama-clad kid on Christmas morning,
and I bet you relish in the feeling.
But little did you know,
Miss Little Innocent sitting there
with her head weighed down  
with her heavy thoughts and knock-off Docs
pigeon-toed in a less than symbol
(don't you know that, sixty-eight?),
had elephants,
                          prides of lions,
                                                    *******,
                                                                ­­         the whole savanna
housed inside her ribcage,
bones rattling from deafening roars;
a cognizant mind stumbling from the seismic waves
of leviathan footsteps,
shaking the ground she walks on.
The pain in her chest,
the god awful attempts to provide
for her own microcosmic ecosystem
wracked her frail frame without mercy.
She continued to bounce her knees
and answer your questions
with breathy, exhausting syllables,
but you put yourself out of commission.
You write and write about your butterflies,
but think about how
it must feel to have to accept
lionesses gnawing on your shoulderblades.
Would you ask for your beautiful ******* back?

You want to make something beautiful.
You try on your many hats-
Can you make art that stirs hearts to syncopated fluid intake?
Can you sing songs that lift the diaphragm?
Can you move in a dance that will bring your audience’s tear ducts to full production?
But you are not good at those things.
And you are not patient- here’s where it gets difficult.
You are not patient, so you move on.
You pull more hats from the closet.
You want to make something beautiful, so you save lives
In safety features for automated factories,
In the stitch of a needle through shredded flesh,
In the measure of a brace in a new office building
But you are too good at those things.
You want to feel like you’ve made something beautiful
Not just looking back, but as you make it
The stroke of a brush forming the curve of a lover’s cheek
The curl of the final bracket in a series of nested loops
The flex of your shoulderblades and press into the pillows
Everyone wants to make something beautiful,
In blood, in sweat, in paint
In lyric and code, in ink and tears
They want to have made something extraordinary by the time they die
So they can say they did, so it wasn’t a waste, so it just
So it was, and is, and could be forever.

foggy street-lamp lit streets
concrete dark with damp and dusk

adrenaline, my constant companion
that thrill of fear curled 'round my spine
snaking between me shoulderblades
white-knuckle clutched switchblade
hidden beneath a cloaking fold
ready to pounce and draw in red

think me a pretty petty foolish maiden?
i'd like to see you try to touch me
to quench your ravenous thirst
and feel my sting through skin
to quench my own lust

foggy street-lamp lit streets
the concrete dark with damp and dusk and
doomed men's blood

h.f.m.

God is an urban legend
More dangerous than a creepy pasta in the news

And youth is less corruptible than nations.
And the stories
The normies
tell each other are comfort and exclusion of fault and responsibility .
Sensation spreading
I play with my ribs
Thumb side pressed below shoulderblades
and skipping in and
Out
Of grooves

I move
Towards you
And in for the
****


If
******* can hurt it
Then do it.

Barcode sticker on the shower wall wet and dripping ink like one handle hairy bandaid from a leg

my name is an expletive on your lips tonight
as your nails dig their way into the grooves of my shoulderblades

you scratch them apart
and i feel like you’re freeing wings out of my back
wings that had long been stapled inside
by crucifix nails that were bent and meant to crush
the natural curve of my body against yours

i am aching to touch you
with a certainty of faith that could move mountains
so tonight i will tuck your name under my tongue
and recite a litany of whispers

that i love you
i love you
i love
you

your name is the only prayer i need to say tonight