Key

I tilt my head, focus, and he's looking straight at me. His half-open eyes strike the flint behind my ribs, send a shot of straight aggression to my pulsing midsection. Feral, I ignite. It isn’t fire, but it’s close. This is when I wish he had long hair, so I could pull it harder.

Demonstrations. Things he could do. But he doesn't, and even if he did, we’re moving too fast for the hurt to count. Click click click and it's gone, thrusting weeks into the rear view mirror. It isn’t flying, but it’s close. Time devours pain, processes it, transforms it neatly into nostalgia with alarming efficiency. In a few days, these hours will be beautiful. This is now and now and now and now is nothing.

"Say my name," I growl, and it isn't for the power, it really isn't, of watching all of these smirking sets of lips spread wide and oblige. It's to ground grind ground this into Me, because even though I start out lost and end the same way, in the middle I am endless. In the middle, I am strong, or I can make-believe to be, and that fairy tale is key. Because this is how you fuck when you've got a soul like a half-empty trash can and a heart gone missing. It isn’t dying, but it’s close, god, it’s so close.

Cipher

Loneliness is a knitting needle on my chest, pointing straight down. It couldn't hurt me on its own, but it waits, it waits for assistance, the thrust of his palm. It never needs to linger long.

I love holding things that could kill me, because as long as I'm touching them I am untouchable. As long as I have arms to hold them.

It's probably true that every person is an algorithm or a mixed bag of equations. But I can't handle that. Inevitably, I will see all those numbers rushing together, blackening the air, choking me every time I try to inhale.

I stared at the sun and saw nothing for days. The apocalypse was worth my blindness.

People run from things that spin webs, even if we've got no venom left, even if that's all we know how to do. Sanctimonious, they call us black widows and enact senseless slaughter under the guise of self-preservation.

Despite being desperate for singularity, I am forever a part of the plural. He does not notice me.

She told me that water flows faster when you decrease the pressure. I must be living backwards.

Defiance

And I laugh, I laugh

when you look away.

Where is your power now?

Your only tool

grown obsolete

because

I've learned to love the mania

that you impose

so joyfully.

Vouloir

There's this breath waiting in his throat. I want to steal it. To put my lips over his and suck out the sweet air and get dizzy. All mine is gone, anyway. I want his bruises.

So strange. Small, gnawing animals populating my chest, settling in, building nests. Every second of his silence feeds them. Every time I see him, all my reasons dissolve.

I want his boiling insides; I want to swallow it all, and it will burn good, it will burn like anger.

This is the skeleton; you have picked away the meat.

I want his expressions, every shift, every furrow, or maybe I want what's pulsing behind them. Because whatever it is, it is screaming, it is pushing at his cheeks, and I can nearly hear, I am nearly there. Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's only a heartbeat. Maybe he's only alive, like me.

Him under my fingernails and eyelashes all over the pillow. I want I want I want like a child. And I could almost hate him, if I tried.