Last night a priest from a past life
came to me in the orchard of my sleep.
He wore the face of someone I used to trust,
his robes stitched from the letters I never sent.
A door drifted down from the ethers.
when the wind was lonely enough to try.
to this door that opens into nothing.
My knees know the exact geography
of that threshold, my palms
how she held me like a spare key
to a house she hadn't built yet.
next to her symbol of the divine,
waiting for a lock that would recognise
She held me with precision.
She kissed my eyelids while I slept.
She remembered the name of my childhood dog.
windows with light peeking
and warm bread and the particular
timbre of her laugh at dusk.
But our house was haunted
by a phantom architecture,
a shape I learned to eat around
like a tumour on the tongue of every evening.
a contortionist of the heart.
I folded myself into smaller and smaller
origami versions of a vague personhood
until I could fit in the drawer
Every morning in her shower
I had to share with ghosts.
Some nights I felt her hand on my cheek
Some nights she said my name
and I heard two other syllables
hiding inside it like larvae
in the belly of a fallen pear.
I left because I was tired
was a feast I was starving at,
I watched her serve to someone else
in the secret kitchen of her mind.
I left because I could feel
my bones beginning to curdle.
that sets in when you love
My blood learned the word maybe
no mouth can be wide enough
I could smell myself spoiling.
I could see the fruit flies
gathering at the corners of my mouth.
from the doorframe. I spat out
the splinters I'd been calling home.
I walked into the graveyard
I had been digging the whole time
because it is made entirely
of the hours you forgot I existed.
You built a cathedral to my leaving.
You light candles to the ghost
of my absence. You tell everyone
The wound was not my leaving.
The wound was staying so long
I forgot what unbruised skin
But you watched as I took the pliers
to my own mouth. You watched
my hand become a surgeon,
who still believes in tenderness.
and I pulled. God, I pulled.
being torn from the earth of me.
It was a lifetime of making room
being extracted through my jaw.
I had been trying to pronounce
When it came out, the tooth,
It was heavier than it should have been.
It was your face. Their face.
I never saw but always felt
sleeping between us in the bed
that connects to no room.
My tears are the amniotic fluid
of a future we miscarried
three heartbeats, mangled.
I press my ear to the wood
of that dumb persistent muscle
still knocking, still asking:
or is love just the arithmetic
with a cruel sense of proportion.
where the living still have to sleep.
snowghoul
jbbartram-illu
theartofmadeline
2087
dededos
germansingergirl
kianamaiart
titsay