Concert

We locked eyes

And mouthed “I love you”

With the excuse of a song

Playing in the arena around us.

You were wearing jeans and heavy boots;

I remember because they thudded loudly

On my carpet later that night

When the right people made the wrong decisions.

We touched noses and I held you there,

The gentle slopes of our faces

Crashing down with waves of dopamine

That lit the world with a feigned fire of forged emotion.

The butterfly kisses were my favorite;

My wings were too short and yours tickled.

Sometimes we’d make them fly to each other,

And our lips would barely brush but that was enough.

“You’re a strange, strange girl,” you said,

and I breathed in deep to save every last molecule of you.

It was the only way you knew how to say “I love you”

When the music stopped and there was nothing to fill the silence.

Sunnyside

Her bare breasts spread flat onto her chest like two forgotten puddles of spilt ink, rising and falling with the steady tempo of her lazy heart. Gentle orange from the streetlights below soiled her face with the warmth she did not want to feel. Couldn’t feel. The accidental boy with the blue eyes and sneaky smile who stayed two nights too many circled the palm of her hand with an unsuspecting finger. Even in the sea of sheets against his fiery chest she felt herself shiver. Round and round he went, tracing the same spiral she tripped down last summer when Frankie fell off a cliff somewhere in the forests of Washington state, and then again in the fall when Angela was diagnosed with cancer. Fucking cancer. He nuzzled his stubbled chin into the neck he just met, dribbling with sweat and perfume, now covered with love bruises and the kinds he will never be able to see: the bruises that formed the mornings after the screams clawed their way out of her narrow throat, making their desperate escape into the black night. He painted pictures with dirty words of empty rooms where they could be alone, and half-whispered promises of eggs in the morning. She turned on her side and felt the depleting universe inside of her pool in the socket of her right shoulder. He weaved his fingers into the spaces between hers and she let him, her calloused hands unmoving. Little did he know that she did not need strangers’ beds to be alone, and that it’s been a long time since she’s felt the sunny side of anything.