boxes best left closed

[[hahahaha this isn't a thing i do at all whoops. let's see how long this lasts.]]

I.

Sometimes
I wake up in the middle of the night and find
that your ghost is keeping me company again.
The ghost of your mouth
and the ghost of cigarettes dying in an ash tray.
And in that place where dreams are born I can’t help but think
that maybe I made a mistake
And things weren't so bad after all.
But the ghost of your smile tells me
that wishful thinking was never my strong suit,
even if it was my favorite hobby.

II.

We tried to make blackout poetry—
I took your Bible and struck
sharpie through everything
That wasn’t the Song of Solomon.
And you took my dictionary
and struck sharpie through everything
That wasn’t “atrophy” and “phobia” and “inferno”.
In the end we both made mistakes
Because I shouldn’t have blacked out Revelations
And you shouldn’t have blacked out “resuscitate”.

Chiko that second one is GOLD. O: I love it a lot.

iii.

you put me in dark places--
a state of being
and a place of mind.
where up is out
and down is where we used to be
when we thought this was how it worked.

iv.

You’ll file this under:
things you wish you’d known before.
The pattern of hands clasped around your wrists
Fingernails on your waist and
Tongues on your thighs.
It’s the tragedy of your landscapes that make it beautiful,
Because there’s nothing like a night sky that breathes when you breathe, even
When you’ve forgotten the map of yourself and
Can’t ignore the fact that you are made of
One way streets.

v.

I dreamed about your skin last night.
You laid your cards on the table and asked me
To choose the outcome of things that are already dead.
When I woke up I realized choices are dictators in silk stockings
With a corpse’s hands and a devil’s tongue.
They’ll mark the road to perdition like it’s the highway to rapture
And we’ll drive fast like there’s nowhere to be,
yesterday’s exit number tattooed on our spines.
And we’ll only be halfway gone
When we realize home is just a place
In our rearview mirror
And hell is just a place to refill the tank.

vi.

Speak to me, lover—
Tell me what secrets you learned
when I rolled over last night and whispered
into your neck
and searched for your soul
In the last place I found it.

vii.

This is how gods are born,
Between the juncture of our thighs.
Your body is a constellation,
And I am a black hole
with wandering hands.

viii.

You were divinity-blessed
With a cold mouth
And a colder heart.
But you opened up to me
And let me pour fire over your throat.
‘This is what it means to be alive’, You said,
as steam rose from your pores
and your body warmed like passion.
‘this is what it means to be owned’, you said,
While you cradled my curves in your heat-stained hands
And looked for what made me breathe.

ix.

I am a heathen
who still finds comfort in the name of God
whispered in the night
when I think I’m asleep.
I can taste the blasphemy on my fingers
Even if it’s been hours since I touched your skin.
hell is tattooed between my thighs
In the spaces where you whispered mea culpa
before showing me heaven’s back door
and teaching me that sin is a pretty word
for everything I’ve been trying to say.

x.

I want you to touch me
The way you hold your cigarettes—
Tender and cupped
Behind your palms.
You showed me how to be a threat to myself
Even though you had your eyes closed
When I finally took off my skin,
learned how to swallow feathers
And taught myself to fly.
Because nothing is more dangerous
Than a comet without a parachute.

xi.

i finally got your attention
when they found me eating
fingernails for dinner
with streaks of blood for dessert
because the kitchen was out of starlight and gasoline.

xii.

We made the headlines of next week’s paper
because somewhere in the back roads
we took a wrong fork
chosen from a cutlery drawer
in the basement of someone else’s house,
where none of us knew which cabinet held the mugs
or which medicine cabinet
hid the opiates for the lonely
(it isn’t religion,
It isn’t sex.
it’s being able to lie awake at night
and listen to yourself breathe
and not want to drown your lungs
in arsenic and lullabies).

xiii.

In church we are taught
That this is where the holy breathe
And we learn to catalogue our sins
In the order of which they came.
It was where I learned
That there are bricks where my heart should be
And cobwebs hiding in my lungs and
a hymn book is not an instruction manual.