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you speak her name differently, like a sharp edge on sea glass, like the morning your mother stopped making your lunches, like how blueberries taste at their ripest. your eyes catch on her like a snagged sweater, you unravel yourself on her.

she laughs and the room fills up with the sound of it, and you explode into it. her fingers between yours are little anchors, little reminders of fragile and whole. she sings the world at the top of her lungs, she drives herself into rainstorms.

but you’re soft, poison ivy, small weed body. you cannot crawl into her cracks and make her into garden, not when she is already a forest all on her own. she holds shadows between her hipbones and folds herself razor notes she tucks into the cavities inside her soul, ripped aching holes that hands like yours don’t know how to sew.

you want to make her a necklace out of kisses just so she can’t hang a noose where love bruises would. you want to be the person she calls at four in the morning when the sweat breaks out down her spine and her grave starts calling. you want to give her your secrets as an unopened box, give her your body as the key. you want to tell her: we were born from the same demons, became iron in fire, swallowed the same bitter sea.

but you are nothing, and she is lovely, and in the morning, someone else will be her ocean, in the way you’ll never be.

Labels: poetry