attrition
seventeen lacerations on your tongue
and the bruise on your achille’s heel.
it bubbles in the corner of your mouth, parasitical, invincible,
the bullet through sedgwick’s head,
the knife kissing caesar’s thigh.
the ceasefire immediate, justice honored, and iron painted on the back of your teeth.
a word for each hash mark:
they hang your best friend in the street and when his tongue falls out,
it is clean.
they say you are brave when you do not cry but they do not hear the prayer you forsake, taste the blood adorning your chin.
they do not find the revolt in itself.
seventeen lacerations like a homemade tattoo and they do not believe the weakness
is where your hands linger,
where skin meets skin meets bone.
your baby teeth fall out and grow back metal and people listen where sanctity is breached.
you have words, a script, and a mouthful of blood. that is enough to rouse the minutemen, to build a wall and hide behind it.
sacrifice
i placed your body out of harm’s way
and prayed for rain—
instead, i received a bottled whisper
of the future we could not share:
long lives silhouetted in the drooping sun, deep breaths, the privilege of being slow, the ability to love without the ghost of suffocation. we cannot both have what we always dreamt of: one must be selfless and the other cruel.
i could push your body to the right,
let the flames swallow what is left
—flesh and marrow without a frame to hold it—
but you are the frame that binds my bones, aligns my vertebrae and laces my gown. if i am to live in a dream, you will be in it, so i will die, dreams unfulfilled
but ever-present, hopeful, possible.
i think the rain was part of our dream.
i think my silhouette will live forever,
racing down the window, under your eyes, into the cracks inside your chest.
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