WLW It’s Hot When She...

i. Burn vanilla candles and ignore the scent of her perfume on your sheets.

ii. Listen I know she splits open your ribcage when she laughs and leaves you hollow. I know every part of you feels halved and chasms gape between the chambers in your heart and if you could just trace the crescent-moon curve of her lips you’d be whole again, but fill what is empty with chocolate covered strawberries and moonlight and scented candles. I know it’s not the same as her. I know.

iii. You make a thousand metaphors about her with things that can never really compare with her but search them out anyway. If she is every single star then buy a telescope and watch the universe burn miles away. If she is dark and heaves with all the heart of the sea go taste ocean water and feel the salt on your tongue. I know it seems like the world took all of the most beautiful parts of itself to make her, veins like rivers and laugh like birdsong and passion like the white desert sun but you can find these things, you can swim in deep rivers and sit and watch birds and feel sunlight on your skin. They won’t hold you like she could but they are beautiful.

iv. She makes you feel like shattered porcelain, doesn’t she? Like breaking over and over again, a thousand times and a thousand pieces. And you tell yourself that for her you could break endlessly, like waves that break themselves against the shore with yearning. For her, you tell yourself, anything. But pick up the pieces, maybe; you deserve to be whole.

honey jars full of sunlight, vines that wrap the walls. summer days, half-naked, plastered to hardwood floors.

willow trees and giant oaks. strawberries and peaches. freckles and whiskey eyes, kissed by noon sun.

iced tea with lemon, novels in the garden. sun-bright smiles, as wind disturbed pages.

bright golden hours, sunrise through the window. a china cup of tea, held by sun-soft hands.

maybe I am sinning

with my tongue between her

thighs like this

hands on hips

quoting scripture into the afternoon

praying for God to come

to come

but she is an angel

and my hair is tied back for her

some kind of heaven on my lips

on my fingertips

bathed in her

praying for God to come.

I have seen her straight out of bed.

Bed hair, bed eyes and bed smile.

Lying on her favourite pillow, with her favourite cover

Drawn up her body like the most fragile ferocious shield

Waking up after a night that seems to go on forever;

Relentless, tiresome ticking away of seconds that gushed in with anxiety and misery.

I have seen her calling it a night when the sun is about to shine and waking up feeling perplexed with no recollection of how she survived the darkness.

I have seen her straight out of bed and she has looked like the most exotic and lonely thing to walk Earth.