em-arginated

 i. rustling clinks and    worn-out keys,    spines that echo    and snap. ii. twenty-six letters,    five hundred twelve letters,    two stamps. iii. the phone receiver rests    on a film canister,    teeth grinning. iv. he took it apart    for me, already convinced    that the black coffee    and peanut brittle had pervaded    too deep. v. the slick hiss of paper feed    and the groan of agony    at the end of each line    were worth more    than a slipshod twenty-five cent    yard sale. vi. the last thing it wrote for me    was its own obituary.

there were christmas lights entwined in the trees, celestial dewdrops over the stillness of the lake. there was worry painted all over your face. my hands fluttered like hummingbirds, desperate for a place to land, unable to free thoughts of the day that i handed you six paperbacks to hold and when i said thank you, i meant i love you. questions met silence and the wind curled across our skin and left traces of early-morning kisses and the fountain's residue. "do you want to know what i'm thinking?" caught between the slick humidity of swim meets and the january cold that seeped into our souls and warmed us from the ou

slivers of limelight slip through driftwood blinds and peaks crescendo to a snow-dusted finish. the glow of early morning dusts the immaculate planes of your back with sunshine, and the sheets echo the slow burn of daylight. moments slink through my fingers like ethereal fragments, perpendicular to reality and lurching into a future i cannot reach.

i spent my july fifteenth eating your picnic lunch of whole milk and trix cereal (you hated the way they don't make the original anymore) and trying to make you understand why killing things is wrong, and why sometimes keeping them alive is just as savage.

what i wouldn't give to have my body sink down into yours, cocooned in the tumultuous quicksand of human flesh. i have never been so moved as by your touch, the slinking seeping brush. the universe dispels and in the absence of everything, i am less alone than i have ever been.

i am the mouse that never stops running for the cheese, paws bound to wrought-iron wheel blinded by desire. to be poisoned by a whiff on the wind, to forget feeling, to run legs steady as the pulse of sea against sand, the static thump of coming and coming and coming – to want for something bigger than myself but to be too consumed to remember what it is, what i have become, what have i become, but to know with the same certainty that the pulse of waves and song-struck blood come and come and come, the first pinprick of victory to reach my heart will never.

         i.      his eyes are the effervescent green of soul-struck youth and his touch is deafening. he holds my hand and the ocean floods my lungs, sea salt stings of guilt and gasping for more. ___________________________________          ii.     skin painted with the binary code i never learned how to read, he was my favorite companion for games of tag in elementary school and sometimes he is there for me most. ___________________________________          iii.    to love a boy who kills things is to love no one at all. ___________________________________          iv.    i know your body like my own, i call the planes of your back

the fridge shudders with animalistic growls, its mechanical malfunctions settling back into their homes for the night. it scares him with its suddenness, but I assure him that it's simply saying hello. he never forgets to say hello back to my fridge ever again, and asks when the dishwasher grumbles if it's saying hello too.