You are only love, a child of the underground, flower of the morning carving images on the walls all night; soft petals dripping from your heart and your thighs and your feet, cold are the hands which once held me.
To sleep is to breathe oceans through broken windows, to leave is to return, to break is to be rebuilt without bone, without walls. In the depths of your bruised ribs I am swimming, I am changing from sea creature to animal to woman to lover as you paint my lips from blue to lavender to vanishing.
This fervent greed which laces his gruesome tongue through your palms, which suckles the wrists of your newborn skin, it is passing, passing, passing through you, you the arms of a finely crafted instrument, you at the beckon of deliverance, glistening nude in the bronze cured sun.
Would you kiss me here in this baptismal fire. Would you and I – the way we taste like salt on the froth of a moonlit summer, the way we plant our ivy gardens beneath the rings around our fingers – would we turn out to be the end of every silent war, the end of the currency of blood, would your chest to my chest be the end.
You are safe, you are full in your emptiness, you are listening and this, beloved, this listening for the fluid stars in the womb is the promise of our kingdom to come.
I would trade everything I wish I could become for a taste of you.
You, closing like a flower, lips together, legs together, hands together, the hymns and wails of all the world sewn together since the beginning.
My only song is your prayer unspoken.
My love is the echo of a word worth believing.
You are fading because you look like me, and I am fading, too.
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Allison Marie Conway 