play, pause, replay

love bites

Love nibbles on my skin, harder than usual,

almost making it itch in blood red.

The whispers clog in the hollow of my neck like

the cluster of dried lavender between the pages of

the novel you never got to finish last Wednesday.

Love's teeth are sharper than the meow of my

neighbor's black cat, sinking into the moisturized

skin of a cobweb of lies on an October evening.

I never noticed the wide gap between its two front teeth.

Love bites harder when I wake up each morning,

cursing at the mirror and clinging to your worn-out 

pieces of denim. And like another verdict, they're

a slow nibble suddenly turning into a chomp.

The bites burn hot and feverish; all my shades of red

bleeding onto the mo(u)rning air. I can hear the clock

ticking from the living room, each tick bringing me

closer to the moments I could've walked away from.

Love leaves me cavities, more hollow than our abandoned love.

A subtle ache grows every time I think of

the moment you traced your name on my left thigh.

I stand barefoot on the weathered moss, watching our

garden burn in tangled limbs of green and yellow.

The tea kettles were whistling, but you kept kissing me;

We sang Ella Fitzgerald while making your birthday cake;

The pizza toastie remained untouched after the call.

Loverboy had teeth sharper than my claws; my skin

stinging red from the bone of your gnaws.

Some days feel like the wilted lilies left over 

from a festival, celebrating someone else's joy—

not mine, never mine. We met at Rosie's today.

It was perhaps another hallucination, or maybe 

you were there for another second.

We didn't talk. Time bled faster than the drooping

petals; your woodsy cologne thick in the air.

Gray light, empty bed.

The night died over a loud jazz song.

There's a choked fragrance of

last night's crushed lilies.

There's a hungry graze left on

the left of my collarbone, a bruise

already blooming beneath the surface.

The space beside me is left cold,

devoid of the warmth of a sun that

slowly dies as we reduce to shadows.