xLeylunax

Morning sun creeps through the blinds, a snake encroaching & this warmth is nearly nauseating, my body trying to purge the thought of you branded into me, these bricks a foundation I pull apart & shatter, crumble, but summer is the worst of seasons when we wrote our names in the wet cement of our old town, watched the stars & every first since then has been a last, a poignant ooze like the blood from our cuts starts dripping again & I think, this year, the snake will swallow me whole.

This half spring, days run hot run cold like the water we run over burns on our hands, they blister, ooze the nectar we sipped like honeysuckle from the bush outside your window  but it has not blossomed, bare branches  in this winter spring, the cherry blossoms  came early, died early, a blanket of blossoms coating the ground like snow. 

Some mornings I hear cicada cry, a faint echo of that summer nine years ago we traded sleep for firefly stars and chlorine water I can still taste on my lips, dry, a hand in mine, we forgot how fairytales end and Ariel became the seafoam on our toes, the wistful air against my hoodie. I still find sand in that old thing, a piece of jersey, a piece of you of me of us and some nights now the air still tastes familiar but my steps go untouched, those footprints we left washed clean and I won’t go back there anymore to the place where you’re most real to me, a shallow cry, I wait for them to sleep, 13 years but they’ll be bac

Those scars on your wrist are like tiger stripes they say, I say–well–try to say, & I’ve been looking in the mirror at my body, those gray hairs & stretch marks on my thighs, I run my fingers over them like wind lines in sand. He left his footprints on me & so I’ll carve them out, smooth them over, I’ve noticed–your right eye is slightly slanted, the corner of your lip, sunken. This face has aged, with time or grief or both, like wilted lilies I stare back at me & this body is unfamiliar now, my eyes an ocean but this imprint won’t fade, convoluted I chopped my hair off when he touched me but these w

& those arms still feel like home to me, a house on fire we’ll burn in, content with the ash we breathe, the skin we peel, but you smoke dandelion heads & I remember what they smelled like, milky residue I smother on my skin.

December brought rain, your hands fold newspaper boats, waterlogged, they sink.

There is a polaroid photo somewhere in my house, my face a smooth, round child. Back then the gap between my teeth was as wide as the gap between my father and I, from Florida to Jersey, and you were the closest thing I ever had to a father. I stood, that innocent little girl who is now unfamiliar to me, on the steps of my family’s new restaurant as you, with sturdy hands and admiration, snapped the photograph I no longer need to see to remember. That was 15 years ago and I forgot to visit your grave this year, to cut the weeds and run my fingers over the writing. I didn’t know back then you had fought in the war. There is a

Your girlfriend left you around the same time my boyfriend cheated on me. I can’t help but wonder if you remember those summer nights we spent together in high school nine years ago, an engagement ring sitting on my shelf collecting dust. How ironic that I now sit in the same spot you had six years ago when I left you for another man. Karma finds us in funny ways but right now I imagine the heartache is just the same.

The orchid on my mother’s windowsill has bloomed again this year, each petal a dark purple like the day you gave it to her. Of the two stems the other wilts, a weeping willow of orchid I can’t help but find endearing the same way I find my graying roots, a shadow of age in an otherwise youthful body. The flowers blossom all the same though, a vibrant spring against adversity and mother tends the plant in a way you never tended me. I can’t help but laugh at this, her animosity toward you set aside yet still I drown in it: Hers, or mine?

I wrote poems about Mondays, about breakfast in bed & coffee, black, the way like it, the bitter taste now lingers on my tongue in faded afterglow.