our breath is conjoined
at birth
when we are folded into the dark, my wastrel queen, your eyes sink into salt for doctor appointments, for the cracks in doors admitting light, for the thought of leaving.
you are inside of me when i walk, head down, listening to the sidewalk sing the dawn out through the slatted gills of spring. you push that same salt out from beneath my eyelids like some irresistible vine. sometimes black hearts, at large in the afterlife, rise from chalk outlines -- restored.
(this is how):
in teacups, in the persistent foliage of a red nasal blossom, in every telephone shriek that births my hummingbird heart, you swim, like a banded streak of color, like oil infiltrating water.
you are beside me when i walk, where the dregs of day fall around us like rotten dropping fruit, and the arctic light of the moon crowns
you,
my wasted queen.
and, every time the rain slices through our clothes, every time we trade spears, i want to show you how your scent, how the squeeze of your hand in mine, collides with the jagged maw of memory,
how it collides with the way Lake Michigan’s mist walks, with the lost chatter of a plastic bag, perched in a locust tree, or, with the taste of a goodbye exhaust, of crematory ash, of a red thread, passing through the eye of a needle gently -- and what i mean to show you is that gentleness, because
gently is how you put your hand behind my heart, as if cupping a broken dove, or the melon head of a child, and, slowly, pumped it back to life with a squeeze of your hand.
Jonas Lucafont We don’t know too much about Jonas. We don’t know where he lives, what he does, or when he is doing it. He sent us this incredibly short bio and we haven't changed one word of it: “Jonas is eighteen; a fresh and nascent high school graduate. he converses with ghosts, but mostly just listens. he is a faker and don't believe a word he says.”