The cartoon hearts are hospitalized. She pulls her parachute & fractures gently into darkness. The girl I loved is a graveyard. Nobody laughed when I got out the gun. Nobody paid me any mind. Even then, my baby was running out of me like yolk. It puddled, a prostituted mess of hemorrhage. I cradled the viscous child in my hands to the clinic & dumped it in the trash: lifeless at last. Cops don’t look at me. I am a cockroach made for squishing. Let time change her face; make her mine. Without God, angels are criminals of the medical kind. Glory holes for eyes, lazy idolatry featuring a parasite at your party: two pixel-slick girls ease into blackout. Burnt breakfast, black thread of child death, I shot heroin to locate the part of me that didn’t want to kill. As it turns out, heartmeat cannot be auctioned off & bought by suits. The meat is whole, yes, & full of maggots. Chronically a killer. I leave the filthy fucks & the filth follows me out, powdering my teeth pink. I walk into a room full of men — I think, How many rape women, hate women, would love to make an example outta me— No. Was made to be ruined, to be bored & bent by boys in a blue firefly glass. Girl love is dark with god. Girl love eats my ovaries dry & wide, a tongue mutilated with want. We were glamorous, then: naked, early morning’s plastic, church breath left at the edge of my cruel & nasty fits, the ones where I debased my body to become hollow & anger, tender opiate, immolated us both in her forsythia-caked crypt. Desiccated,- smoking cowboy killers, though not a killer yet (like I was), you locked me in your lash while I shot up in the kitchen, away from you. We were victims of self- repulsion. The lengths we went to to be dead — the choices you left me with, when you thought a kiss was a contract. What we are now is foul: paralyzed by pairs of pantyhose, takeout cartons stacked, head to head, like when she haloed over my disgust- ing body, breasts smashed, creeps & their wildflowers. Our love was left to rot. Now I am a maladaptive morgue, strange holes in the ceiling for centipedes to settle down. The last night you dreamt of me was in May. It rained as it does in Paris — fickle, cubed ices. Finally, buried, our sex swathed with crystal mdma & endless, endless questions — face-fucking could not redeem me. Neglect, cold milk in your cords, shaped my suicide: no longer a hand but a mouth. Easier to understand. You deserve a man — after all, loving me will not land you in heaven. & I so bad, so gutting, purged of fat — having had none of the sad, holy warts to scream & stomp about — need you there, even if I’m still shooting heroin in a cool, cream womb. Even if I become some late-night news criminal, a violet corpse to coat your television. Even if all I’ve ever been (not dogheart, not parasitic possession, not a angel, no, that you ever prayed would visit) If all I’ve ever been to you is a carcass with which to cut your love, brick some dark sugar that I mainline & make a mother of, I need you to be in heaven. Even if I’m not there to see you off. Especially then.

I remember when God was some killer. Now God’s gotten soft.