Tear in my side...I feel it all.

hope is a train wreck

dew eyed and prone to hysterical sobbing as you lean your head into a sofa cushion, as the long day fizzles into a dying horizon, as hope dangles sweet relief from its smooth mouth, the glint off of hot tracks as promise becomes a streaked mirror, a bumblebee drowned in rain water pooled in a leaking birdbath.

june elegy

an ephemera of snapshots burned into gray matter, the crease and crack of the mind's recall, a ring of condensation worn into the cheap wood of an end table covered in dying succulents and a box with your dog's ashes. the blur of days into fragments of wants gathered against the lip of a steep driveway. the violet moon in your ribcage, a dim nightlight, your blue iris fade.

recovery

the parted and stitched skin raised like a bristled rope, your waveless sea behind a window, crossed fingers and toes for relief from a flesh prison. it keeps you as a curtain in an afternoon breeze— the memory of your foot drag, our sorrowed parting into an abyss of unrealized affections. june gathers your honeyed voice like unreachable treasure, the echo of goodbye ringing in the ears.

i fear the coming summer

there is no way to soften the blackened stone that sits crooked in the ribcage. the sun's tight fist will squeeze the brittle surface, leave behind a pile of soot. winter has insulated me, has kept me sheltered like a young deer in unspoiled forest. i fear the wake of a thaw's heavy hand.

catch up

a hand extended then dropped, draped over a railing in the swelter of almost summer— ¿quién va a bailar contigo? chalk left on a sidewalk, lessons are left for me in between the pages of your fan fiction, my dirt hive of slivered lust, desperate in this deepening want— what is there to discover in reciprocation's cruel indifference? a zipper seals a confessional.

the softest violence

fall leaves on fire in a pile of backyard death, memoria as a blanket, yearning as the split wood of an empty birdhouse, deep dive into a murky summer, excavated texts to coax skyline blaze— something feral that lies in wait, that travels a hip's curve, the violence of remaining fallow, a fallen tree that leaves me stranded, tethered to the ocean's arms.

guilt trip

my tangled legs, your sinkhole shove, to bottom out as a dimension shatters. one thousand knives pointed at the chest— finish me, finish me. sealed into walls of unhappiness, to fulfill the promise of failure, this final bow. never able to stay afloat, sepsis ravenous as cracked shutters close. a chapped hand over the mouth, the plummet into a dry well, a last blink, this emptied shell on a muddied shore.

terrible tenderness

stored since birth under layers of skin, sickness that cannot be bleached from fibers— never a raised hand, this blood curse, this vine of swaying blooms in late spring's swelter and storms, sanctuary from the whip of lashing wind, woven into the fabric of this tongue bitten presence, carried like a newborn, this lunar lullaby in stillness.

mentioned in passing

a disappearing girl, the last road her feet trailed down. a tin filled with bitters, with the muffled howl of the dead— swan sketches and the gurgle of fountain water. dark ringlets in blanched afternoon, an aria for the dead, surgical, as the hour hand stalls. a shared disease, unraveled thread, frayed and in piles in a bathroom sink. cascading notes of repentance, of a museum of realities never inhabited.