You in the store, eyeing red tomatoes so neatly cling-wrapped in their plastic coverings, thinking of me + how I eat them every morning for breakfast. You, sleep-deprived from wanting, that terrible need stealing away my time. What I so easily give. In my room, in my bed, under the covers. His hair still finds my thighs but no longer are his delicate fingers there to pluck them all off of me. One by one like he used to. His sensitivities always undoing the worst in me, softening my jaw, those violent instincts, all that self-restraint you say you don't need. How you claim your knees don't buckle at all that I am when I am all that I am + I'm doing it right in front of you. Instead you call me a poisonous plant. An addiction to nightshade. Razing me to the ground in a flash of fire. Until you ruin yourself on my tongue. Until we argue, until we fuck. Sticking a flag into my back. Naming yourself. The greedy king colonizing the fertile country of my skin. + you hate it. How I put my twisted vein of a heart inside your hands to hold. You suddenly terrified by your own power, the responsibility, how you might slip while carrying it, crush what you love into a pulp, like tomato juice, like blood running from my mouth when I bite my tongue so insane on you + how in your eyes I'm made perfect + new. Again + again. Baptized by your gaze + recreated through your witness. How I'm tough enough to take it. How my hands refuse to burn.
