The longer that you are gone, the more words I have been given to rewrite you.

I plunge my hand into frigid waters and reframe you, circumnavigate freckle to mole, brow to delicate trough.

Without the memory of touch, I do not know you; I drop my heart into frozen waters to still time. Here and now everything stops. On a clear night you come unbidden into my dreaming as brazen as a sky of burning stars. When I reach my hands up to constellations broad and far, you burn me still.

Finger grazing burns and a touch that pulses me back into being.

A being that is one long inconsequential dream of you—where we dance like lovers admonished from the world, in step only with a languid and timeless desire. From sleep to waking, I am trapped in the florid hush of your swaying hips and steady arms. You bleed me like ripe fruit only to open me when memory has thickened and I am heavy once more in your mouth and sweet on your tongue. It is a divine torture this meeting in moonlight, this dancing in the thicket of dreams.

I only know this secret branded on my chest hidden by armour and breast plate. Fine steel and brass to entrap the weight of a thousand losses stacked in my chest, tarrying for room along the shelves of ribs that close the gap evermore between beating and breath. I am bended knee and smuggled sound and yet there is nothing more to tell. The sum of your lies grows sweeter still in this embrace under moon fingers and flaming sun. I shiver with the desire to burn, while the shadow cast trips me up. All the while they mistake my fall for a pirouette, my grace is lost. My skin marked and thickened by scars.

I have nothing to tell you and yet my ear is bent to the earth begging that it will breathe your name.

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Assistant Ed: Miciah Bennett / Ed: Catherine Monkman

{Photo: Flickr.}