play, pause, replay

heartbreak on the bathroom floor.

I painted a field of crushed lilacs against dead green for my sister's funeral.

She died at the swell of a sunbathed winter morning.

I was twenty, and she was seventeen.

The last time I saw her face, is now a 

blur against the amber marks of victory

upon her framed portrait.

The sky was a shade of mourning gray,

clogged in the failed birthday wishes of mortals.

I once saw a field of dead sunflowers

growing inside her ribcage.

The white scar on her left cheek burned

golden in the butterfly laughter. 

Stories would grow on the iron railing

in the thick air of honeysuckle summers.

We would paint our skies red,

and etch crescents of honeyed pain

in the curves of our thighs.

Phoebe wasn't my adopted sister at all.

I've always thought of her as something more.

Something as profound as the blood running through my fingers,

Much like the drenched fairy tales I've

woven inside my little pillow castle.

Poetry was the cheap version of my sweet Phoebe.

A charcoal sketch of buried chrysanthemums between

the growing spaces of her last suicide note.

She weaved her falling stars and shipwrecked princes

in the stained pages of her book.

The bloodstained tiles and her name lipsticked

across my maroon wrists.

Time wasn't real when her mouth bled,

and her stars wrote the art of living.

Her world died before the sun, buried

in my field of blistered eucalyptus nostalgia.

Phoebe knew she'd die right there, right

now, when the remembrance burnt

the collarbones of her last sunlight.

So I let her die in the poetry of unseen chaos.

I let her believe she couldn't weave the stars together.

Her evenings were charcoal like the last sketch

I painted her dancing in a field of withered lilacs.

But I didn't let her give up on writing.

- A shadow of memories, a winter of red death.