Virginia Archer

I remember I let you replace the wounds on my tongue replace the words from my ribs with yours, with your hands covering the shake in mine with distraction, fingers seeking silence between my thighs, until tilted back my throat released every hurt I could not voice every hurt dampened by your mouth on mine because you knew I was broken but then, so were you.

My fingers are not the ballet of words that my mind envisions in the spaces between heartbeats, or this love letter would not be an awkward callus on palms longing to find the plains of your back, or an arthritic twist of bones that can no longer explore your collarbones with all the sentences stuttering from digits in a broken symphony written for you.

You taste like love and love is sweeter yet when sprinkled with the words of all the rain that patters here with summer's last refrain and sits upon the tongue without regret. You taste like love, as sun upon the leaves a warmth that dances naked, does not feign the laughter of the birds, just fair and plain unfettered by the murmur of the breeze. You taste like love, and I confess I'm full of all these syllables, I can't contain these words spill onto paper from my veins and I am powerless against their pull. You're tattooed into sinew and membrane, right to the core, my centre, to the grain.

The hardest days are the ones where I can't say your name out loud to anyone. Where you get stuck in the corner of my smile until my mouth feels like a battlefield of unuttered words and run-on sentences. And I know that everyone is tired of smelling the cologne of my regret, so I douse my skin in rain, standing with my arms wide embracing thunder, hoping to erase your touch from my collarbones. And sometimes I hold you in but you escape between exhales into conversations, and I get those looks like they know I'm crazy, but the most delusional thing is that the hardest days are the ones where I can't say your name out loud to you.

I've worn him like a livid scar, wrapped under smiles      and the lie of laughter but poetry is a bandaid ripped        from my mouth and my fingers dip into the fresh ooze of words raw      unfettered and you don't have to agree with my sentences    but they fit into my ribs like breaths and sometimes I think      I forget to breathe              without bleeding.

Your songs are only heard by a heart quiet enough to echo your beat.

"I hurt", she said "I know", he whispered, gathering fragments with fingers, as he rewrote last night's poetry into her wrists, remembering by touch where all the words fit. "I have enough glue".

I dipped my pen    into Thursday's sorrow and wrote your name five hundred times    along the length of my memory like a schoolroom penance. No matter how hard I scrub,    the ink stains on my ribs paint you.

Your storm surged into my mouth and I was engulfed these arms now uninhabitable, this belly engorged with so much sea the debris of us is piled along my tongue, and all I can do is beg for love but this shore is a ragged mess of sentences drowned out by the hurricane roar of all the words we failed to say.

We share stories and half eaten smiles stale now from too many months of dried up regret I swallow round the remnants of all the broken timber in my chest he touches my leg, softly, like bone china fragments of a cup he just discarded, and doesn't want to cut his fingers on he knows he made a mess but he also knows I will clean up all the sunrises between our breaking, clutching shards and sweeping them under my ribs where they will rattle at sunset, a serenade of endings and all those fireflies trying to get out of my mouth.

The smile    not quite reaching her eyes, fluttered with remnants of his last butterflies,        while his mouth wrote sentences tinged with regret; love looked like this today.

i I wonder if they see how my eyes follow your face. I catch myself searching the pockets of your cheeks for love notes that aren't there; for lipstick that isn't mine; for words we forgot how to say several yesterdays ago. And yet my gaze reacts like a reflex, a tide compelled by gravity. ii We were sighs along moonlit sheets. We billowed breaths in braille along collarbones, hoping to write intent against each others ribs. Somehow we misinterpreted each others sentences; you thought that love only belonged between my thighs; I thought that our poetry would be set in stone. It was. I left more flowers yesterday at the gravesite of every goodbye; they keep dying because we forgot the words, but I keep on writing them. iii I haven't felt your lips on mine for years. They cracked last night from thirst. I forgot to water them with other lips; with other kisses; with other hopes. Or maybe I was just afraid, I could only taste of you.

time slows between the curve of my ribs where you ricochet in the gravity of breaths, an astronaut in freefall

We hung love          from the scars of our tongues, dirty, for everyone to see      seams, ripped and flapping in the breeze of words, we applied sutures of kisses into our clothes        hoping the threads would hold, rough cross stitching bold along our ribs there were only so many rips our hearts could manage,      only so many cuts before the scars became ropes we swung from.

If we are a metaphor      then I smell like smoke and you're the flames that burnt through every defense    and left char marks on the floor    of my stomach the words are not enough to douse the depths of that brown stare        and I am weak wrapped in a carpet of cast off leaves      cast of sentences that end in your name in your breath        ghosting along my neck until I realise that it's only the downdraft            of the ceiling fan and that perpetual sound of your voice                  only an illusion of birdsong after a fire.