it is 3 p.m. when hope visits me. his t-shirt is light, jeans ripped and frayed at the cuffs, feet bare against the scattered leaves on the ground. the sun hangs halfway in the sky, the breeze carrying the taste of cooler air— it is the kind of weather you fall in love in. when he sits beside me, i shiver. it’s been a while, i say, slipping off my shoes, toes digging into the dirt. thought you’d forgotten about me. his smile is beautiful in its sincerity, eyes blue in their wistfulness. he tells me he’s sorry he’s been gone so long, tells me how much he missed me, tells me— i didn’t realize how much you needed me til now. i trace the veins along his hand, absurdly envious of the blood that flows inside of him, of the fact that we will never be that close. he cups my chin, tilts his head as he reads my face— smirks when he understands my desire. if i could dream, he says, every dream would be about you. when he kisses me, his tongue tastes like summer. he is cotton-candy stained
as he speaks, he stands in front of me, the vibrations of his voice burrowing themselves into my bones. he is powerful in his stance and tragic in his beauty— furrowed brows and deep-set eyes, a long, patrician nose leading to dry, cracked lips. he talks without inflection, as if his passion has seeped out and is pooling at his feet— i run my thumb along my bottom lip, wishing to kneel and drink in every part of him. his gaze meets mine, eyebrow raised— when i smile, his lips rise in the ghost of an answer. his pain is a hidden reflection of my own, buried deeply in his being while i wear mine on my skin. every night we tear each other apart, and not one morning have we helped put ourselves back together. we are strong, and we are weak— colliding and destroying and never rebuilding— inside of each other, we are alive.
grief visits me today.
he watches as i write about you,
putting his hand on my arm
to stop the words
from shaking.
the river of veins is a blue glare
beneath his waxen skin, the valleys
under his eyes dark with our shared
misery.
i don’t ask where he’s been, or why
he’s suddenly back. i don’t want to know
who else he’d been with
when he was gone.
“you look better,” he says, pulling my hand
from the notebook. he
kisses it, holds it to his cheek.
the weaker parts of my spirit surge at his cold
familiarity.
i trace the arch of his lips to avoid
his eyes, ask him if he’d forgotten
about m
i cracked myself open for all those other men,
but that wasn't enough to make them stay
so i took a hammer to my kneecaps
and a pistol to my heart and i
bled and crumbled and let every-
thing spill out so that maybe
you'd see something that would
make you brave enough
to stick around.
god knows i've tried to move on,
tried to glue the confidence
back onto my shoulder blades,
tried to tuck the insecurity
and distrust into the softness
of my stomach
but that's not possible anymore
because i've shown you every-
thing, i've given you every-
thing, and i thought this time
it'd be enough but then you tell me
it's too much, you're
too much,
i
knees are bleeding and shins are
bruised—victims of new razors
and struggling
to shove you off.
laying down is vulgar tonight—
more exposed with cotton sheets
than lacy thongs;
thighs blue from something other
than that goddamn open sign—
breaking and entering,
but you call it love
he ties a rope around his wrists
and watches as i work
to loosen it-
skin flaking off in bits,
fingerprints lost amongst the friction casualties.
he says his dna is spherical,
says this makes him special because
it looks like the moon, kristen, it looks like the fucking moon
and i can't tell him that his eyes
hold destroyed planets and scattered galaxies,
that the moon has pieces of it missing,
craters it can't fill with anything but nostalgia-
i can't tell him that that the moon
is only special because it's a victim of gravity;
it doesn't want to be here any more
than he does.
i can only look toward our hands,
tangled in a bloody mess of
the mountains ask me why i’m broken,
their voices thrumming through my tripping
heart and burrowing in
my bones.
i tell them i can’t explain why my fingers
can’t grasp their promises-
why we’re both too frozen to offer any warmth
as consolation.
they arch their spines in rigid acceptance,
palms braced against the sky
in prayer-
resignation is all they’ve ever known.
i carve myself into the earth,
breathe birth and bark and blood
and burrow into their sides-
they hide their tears in trembling lips
and sightless eyes.
it seems even the strongest of us
sometimes
have
to crack.
i have a bird in my chest and
she's pecking at my ribs and trying to squeeze
between the fluted bones,
frantic heartbeat tripping over mine-
i feel her feathers
scra-
pe
my lungs,
talons shredding threaded valves
and acid rising when she vomits
and
emaciated organs slic
ing and
sewing themselves back together
because
i'm the bird in my chest and
i want to pry myself open and rip myself
out-
but i don't want to let this part of me
go.
he likes to shove glass straight down
my esophagus, tells me it's better
this way. says,
this'll make you puke
all the shit you just ate. don't
wanna lose your pretty figure,
right?
so while he watches
i vomit bloody shards and retch
as acidic insecurities sear
the back of my throat and crawl
down my trachea-
gasp and fight to breathe
against the fragments wedged
in between my ribs.
it's been an eternity of broken clocks
and desiccated organs shriveling
back to perfection-
bones filed down with sandpaper,
rusting marrow cavities
ignored.
(don't fix what's not broken.)
when i rinse my mouth, he smiles-
catches my hands, pulls me close,