Legs the length of comets and bones to match but I wonder if you’d let me touch you where it would actually make a difference. It would hurt so terribly – you and I and you in my hands, trembling. And I would stay.
I would collect your salt water scraps of dignity, shards of splintered faith to my breast, to my stomach, to my veins as we pour forgiveness into the torn sides of the demons climbing the walls of the mazes in your mind. Step into me.
How I would clutch you, how you would feel it in your brow and your gums, in your lungs, your thighs and your feet, my climax just a molten aftertaste. How I would like to unhinge this wretched jaw from your skeleton heart and heal you by the grace of a God you buried lifetimes ago, with the yellowing animal bones of a past they seem to think you had but you don’t recognize when you look yourself in the eye.
The mirror on your hands is lined with dirt, crooked. She’s brutal because she’s blind but how could they, how could any of us, how could we ever hold the reflection of those heavy heaving eyes. I’d like to caress your sadness and stay with it a while.
A few drinks as dusk turns to orange pepper evening, a cigarette in your mouth through bedsheets on fire.
To touch you at all seems so unlikely now, though I’m not one to give up, not on love, not on anything with as much promise as there slips from the holes in your tired lies. Spider webs wrecked, rebuilt; life regenerates, holds the misty dew up to the light of the moon. There is a resistance in your fabric, you wear it like desire and a bloodstain on the curtains. Wounds, blood without bleeding, plush summer mouths shoveling snow on the curbside of winter.
If you would let me do this the way you never thought you’d want it done, I promise beloved, I am only as forward as you’ll come undone.
Around my ankles grow vines of hopeful innocence. Around my wrists one thousand thorns collect my nightmares and I am waiting on the other side of the wall; I am yours as long as you imagine me here.
I know it hurts, I know the way the spine of the pain stays alive while the rest of the body’s room spins dying. Stay. Stay with me. Stay busy with me.
Tears on the bathroom floor, laughter long run away from my throat. The truth still dances where everyone’s afraid to look.
Vulgarize me. Kiss me harder than you can stand. The force of this birth. We are so brave in our fragile skin. You and I, we are not like them, they do not seethe.
You and I and you in my hands, trembling.
We don’t take the shape of what we are becoming.
We take the shape of what we’ve always been.
.
.
Allison Marie Conway 