My palms sweat on the bottle of Bacardi,
But it’s claustrophobia of my phone,
Not the temperature of the room
That my fingers cry for
and from.
No celebratory sips will be had at home,
Because I spent last night in too many beds
Nothing became of my pillow-wallowing,
The honeyed-eyed dream-hopping,
But that’s the
fucking problem.
My chest caves in at the checkout.
An emerald rectangle incoming,
Vicious in its flatness, its caution.
The same lukewarm rejection text,
But this time from a girl, someone
Who knows my mania intimately—
Not just because we share private parts
Shaved into something soft and sortable,
Diagnoses overwriting school history,
But even the same lovers we scorched
With aloofness, then a petulant, biting need,
Swapping exes’ exes, a couple of “ironic Tic-Tac-hoes”
Lowercase in all but loneliness, insomni-addic crushing.
I busted it, faltered at the fault lines,
Underlined my cheeks and care in red,
Slipped it under my tongue like the runny gel tabs,
Sunshine side-up with slush stashed up my nose,
Pretending I’m prepared for the strange weather.
Ha-ha-haing my advances, you wore a halo
But it warbled under the steam of your brow.
I wanted in on your heatwave, a cap for the storm
But when we baby-stepped into the midnight shower,
Fingers lily-locked, you were waving me away with a smile.
I wandered down a gravel road, feeling every pinch of the earth,
Each breathy gust of Mother Nature slamming into my breastbone.
It’s bare-tooth anger that carried me along, that self-same shame,
The velocity of my inaction, my miscalculation of a girl’s affection
That only ached to ensnare and ingest the contents of my purse.
La-La-Lipstick, melting chocolates, Oriental coins, and smelling salts—
They all hold more promise than a same-sex, revenge-bound relapse.
I knew that in the moment, but
fixated upon the car
Carrying a curlicue cheater into
your driveway
I’d cut his break
lines before I begrudged
you
Instead, I admired the smoothness of your budding horns,
The silverthorne-sharp sparkle in your creeping simper.
Forever, I’ll recall the blinding pale pink of your hips,
Crossed legs tapered into a V, nothing short of a Venus
de Urbino in denim cut-offs and the throes of an Ativan
Diet since the car accident no one died but a rutting wolf.
These things happen,
So said the paramedic
The blood splatters on your bathroom tiles
Looked more art-novena than ominous,
A Rorschach test for star-crossed lovers
It can’t be helped,
So says my psychiatrist
What I remember most is the roughness of your blankets,
How closely we swaddled ourselves
Apart, two Calla petals,
Lethal only to those with claws
My vines tickling the back of your neck
The dewy tenderness of your brush-off
Then the black of the dirt.
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