#foldedcranes

a dove-delivered letter:

Forgive me, it says, for having loved and then deserted———

o paramour of stars, white willows were your dowry: and i have kept them all, kept them tucked / in the vaulted dip of my clavicle. they await you still, await your fingers / dusk-stained and hungry, greedy / for the bleeding love characteristic of unmaking ———they await your lips, your red fleshflowers.

a three-piece suit the color of a riparian scene shot through copper.

i want to remember. you want to remember? i want to remember.

jagged teeth, broken eyes the color of old attic lightbulbs. the battered leather of a wristwatch hanging off piranha-gnawed bone. the hand frozen offers you milk of the mnemosyne.

drink, then. drink and remember.

lethe unwinds, murmuring secrets long lost to the gods, to a man that only goes by the name of time.

algea cries and cries and too late you realize that the water forgets and forgives the names of the drowned.

aphorism number two: don't deal with the river.

the jewel of the stars, distorted by nights spent too long bottled up, weeps, pours red from eye sockets empty of everything but teeth and a red spiked tongue that licks its lids like a cat that got into the cream.

there is someone dancing with notes in the chapel, rising chords that spire higher and higher, like someone has stabbed the piano and left it to bleed out in the street.

everything perfectly timed within this daydream waltz and when the clock strikes three, I will awaken and find red to be the anger that coats me up to the sleeves.

the night sinks its teeth into summer— fruits—birds—rivers all drown in the torrent of broken contracts and lost dreams that course through the land of the forgotten.

symphony of darkness, ballet of blades, a wolf's tongue rasping against the clean-licked bone of your hyoid.

all this and everything more, the shine of the champagne glass against your rose lips, the spilled viognier, the blue-skinned veins held against pearled canines.

merle— have you ever stopped to consider perhaps you are spending your nights in the arms of the wrong person?

tears served upon golden plates sprinkled over the spine torn from the boy who cried and cried and found respite from the cherry-slicked smoke of the heavens in nothing but his own wings.

now that the sun's heat daze has passed us by, you are ever bolder with your words. ever bolder with your insistence for all things precious.

now that the sun's heat haze has passed us by, I am ever bolder with my desires; tracing the soft curve of warmth against moonlight.

summer's wrath consults the angels who threaten to rip divinity from our form and finds it all too easy still to forgive our murders.