lily hills white

un amour prédéterminé

lucille.

she was everything, do you hear me, everything.

my sweet lucille, dark roast coffee bean eyes, scarlet dew cheekbones, and nimble fingers ashen like molten moonbeams over a raven lake turned transient blue.

she spoke in anagrams and riddles, fiddling my mind to its peach pit core with her razor teeth and whetted words.

and on a random august day,

i watched as her body danced
underneath my fingerpads,
lucille revelling in the final golden hours
of summer's heat.

blue ash lakeside

and popped-cherried-lips,

she beckoned me like the sun
to her alabaster skin.
the difference was,
i didn't pretend the burn wouldn't come.

it would. it would wilt, or rot, or expire like jam jars, sweet ketchup, and the ends of summer at the cabin of my youth, and bottles that had stayed far, far too long in the cupboard.

it was too late for protection of any kind. i'd just have to embrace it—the hurt of sweet, saccharine lucille—when it inevitably came.

and oh, did i know, it would.

she would.