“the first time we kissed a tornado blew its way through Kansas and a small town in Arizona fell to its knees at the sight of a forest fire we told ourselves not to mourn that maybe we were the creation borne from the destruction we’d learnt that there’s no such thing as beauty in the breakdown but we fell into each other like a jetplane with a loose wing I held onto you so desperately that five months later the nail marks on your forearms still spelt my name it looked like someone had pressed cigarette butts to your skin but it was only me and it was only you and somehow we ruined everything but each other if we were ever sorry for any of it I don’t remember our bodies marked like graves with each other’s mouths it was all so beautiful even when it went up in flames see, because even when I hated you I still wanted to touch you and when we touched, baby somewhere across the city a truck flipped off the road and the electric went down just for half a second, the time it took for your hands to touch my hips and turn my entire body into a lit match for a solid month, we were nothing but hungry teeth nothing but red marks and swollen lips we were the reason for every natural disaster and every car accident this is the love our mothers never warned us about the kind that tasted like lighter fluid and lingered like gun powder under our nails the kind that tried to split the earth right down the middle just so it could breathe this was the kind of love that the bible wouldn’t talk about because it looked too much like being buried alive too much like a landscape made of bruises too much like having a heart where the mouth should be this was the kind of love Eve tumbled out of Eden for I will never apologize for the way we were or the things we did we could not help the volcano inside of our bodies or how we burned like the treetops in Arizona because this was the kind of love our mother’s didn’t warn us about the kind we couldn’t even say out loud without making the entire city shudder”
— “The love our mothers didn’t warn us about” || Azra & Caitlyn
