chicago’s first chill of november left your hands empty and frozen blue, trembling as you walked laps around the same city block over and over, hoping that the falling leaves would take pity on you and pile up six feet over your head. you’d always thought of snow as rain that loves you, but now you wished rain had loved you all along, instead of trying to wash you away into the freezing current of the river nearby.

he breaks the endless loop of the city block. he has a halo of cinnamon and his apartment has a furnace. his hot chocolate warms your fingers and eases the tightness in your chest. he gives you a bowl of blueberries drizzled with honey to eat. his sweatshirt is fresh from the dryer and his blanket of feathers wraps around your shoulders. he lets all of the rain fall, and makes sure to be there when you decide to get back up again.

there’s blueberry jam and honey on your toast the next morning, too, and there is more hot chocolate every evening. there is cinnamon sugar in the hot chocolate. there is the scent of cinnamon keeping you away from the river.

“hang in there” said the voice on the phone, echoes rattling around my skull like a marble maze. “hang in there,” as if mere words could do anything to dull the persistent, perpetual pain of bruised bones. “hang in there,” says the tape holding my hand together. “hang in there,”the words like a stick of gum in my mouth, chewy and slimy all the same, but they just don’t stick. “hang in there,” as if there was anything to hold on to, but my ribs are monkey bars and my stomach still stays empty after i’ve counted all my coins. “hang in there,” how could you say such a thing to me, sitting on your high horse? “hang in there?” i’d rather hang from the rope.“hang in there,” to the handles in the taxi cab to your part of town.

i don’t believe in god,

but i believe in the angel

that exists in you,

the cacophony of wings

and eyes arranged like

a constellation of sadness,

you appear to me as the beauty

of a melancholy melody,

concentrated teardrops and stardust

tracing your outline onto

a backdrop of bloody bed sheets

and syrupy short stacks.

i could eat you alive,

i want to swallow those tears

and feel to the fullest.

i want to sing again,

so lend me your sadness

and promise on pink sunsets

you’re like deja vu—

to the one he lied to—

without even saying my name.

i’m tired of calling him

the boy in blue

because bittersweet blisters remain.

right place, wrong person

psychotic signs worsen

plus crossed fingers tossed down the drain.

i wish you could hear me

when i say your name

in the promise i’d like to repeat.

because i swear, i swear

i know your soul

from a timeline where we’d found defeat

lost through dimensions

of my own invention

hoping that somehow we’ll meet

a promise, my promise,

through repeats and loops,

isn’t it strange,

the way i know things like the truth,

yet it evades me like a pest?

i’ve discovered beauty in mousetraps and glue traps,

methods to catch something so disgusting as to be true.

and yet, months later, my traps are full of dust,

my hands are empty,

and the pesky truth runs loose, out of sight