lalune-tropbleme

once, i held your hands up to the light to see what kind of shadow it would cast across my face. your wax-paper skin flaked in the heat, let the sun cast rays warm into my eyes. i blinked, and in a moment you had melted entirely, existed merely as droplets of wax flowing quickly to my feet. you molded yourself around the soles of my shoes. i recalled a day when you and i stood leaning against the stone gray wall of the church. we watched the bees fly from petal to petal, waited for the sky to ignite into its pinks and yellows that could perhaps cast us there forever. into my ear, i hear you breathe: i am vertical, but i woul

It took three hours and fifty-two minutes for you to die. Not that I was counting -- I had more important things to attend to. The eight Hershey's kisses that scattered along the floorboard of the old Corolla when my mother slammed on the brakes, the three children's magazines fanned out on the table of the waiting room, the four grown adults huddling around your bed, sobbing. I didn't even have time to learn that it's cliché to say that nature reflects experience when it started to snow outside. It all started going downhill around six pm: there's some chest pain, you said, and I think that the doctor would like to see me

when i left You for Them, i had to learn how to cross my legs again. i walk in straight lines down the hallway, my feet barely leaving the ground, no bend in my knees like you would have had it. the blisters on backs of my hands have subsided a bit; i have learned not to speak out of turn at the dinner table. the dirt on my heels leaves tracks on the floor in front of the bed, and when i wake, it is to find that they have gone. in the dust, i search for fingerprints, some semblance of where you used to be, but each surface turns up clean. if i am to be washed away, i only hope it is in the direction of your feet.

one summer you skipped the gap and slipped right into thirteen-- it fit you like an old pair of jeans. i hold in my mind the hot nights of july, you and i laying under my open window, counting grasshopper chirps and the freckles poised on the bridge of your nose. you explained everything 10-year-old me could ever need to know, like what it means to bleed between your hips and the feeling of lips on lips why should you ever want to marry. my arms grew to match yours, and i wished each day that my body would follow suit. i did not want to be older, i just wanted to be you. once you showed me the scar on your leg and you said, "

You make me wish I were the earth and you you were the grass sprouting up out of me with your roots embedded in the dirt underneath my fingernails. You make me have to discipline the butterflies in my stomach from reaching too far up because all I feel when I see you smile is a tug at my navel and I want to fall over-- You make me want to fall over on top of you because when I want you it is with every inch of my body and I can't ever decide where I want to touch you first. Our dry lips and our sweaty palms must have the right idea when they stick to each other. You make me want to fall asleep next to you and

      She sat at her window staring at what seemed to be nothing but the green misty mountains in the distance. The only sound that filled the cold, dark, stone chamber was the whisper of the wind as it rushed through her raven curls. A tear, clear only to the unknowing eye, slid down a porcelain cheek.  The world contained in that tear, a world from the still painful past that only she and I could sense, shattered as it fell onto the rough window ledge.      If only I was still there to catch those beautiful tears, but no, I will never be there to hold her soft face in my hands again. Never again will I stare into those eyes and lose mysel