IOU (Poetry Preview)

the ghost of a parasite

Her heart melts like sugar sorbet in your hands, sticky with promise, and it's funny — like a tragedy — how you wiped it off your cotton jacket as if it meant nothing.

It starts to tether. A bruise blooms where your thumb brushes, a cut splits open as you wipe it clean. When the mushy, wrung thing realizes what you've done, it bursts in your mouth and leaves an aftertaste. A sweetness you can't escape no matter the salt you rub onto the burn.

You start to grow tired of the saccharine words that leave your tongue as a curse from her memory. Of the cloy cotton left in your stomach from her kisses, of the pages that spell your name that sit forgotten in a shoe box, lost in translation. Some abandoned fragment left to decay. So you drown the sweetness out, the last bits of her still intact. Her name, a parasite that needs to be fed, breaks under the same hands that once held her softly.

You tell her it doesn't matter. This is how it goes. You extract the promises left in curds, drip honey wax all over her words and strip her off of you like a bandaid. A one-time use type of thing — a useless type of thing. An unnecessary girl made for scars, but you say you're clean.

The broken pieces from her body left stranded in your pockets don't mean anything. They don't cut when you try to hold another face. You once told her so, and the remaining fragments follow what you say, like they always do.

For the first time the useless thing learns — to round off its edges, to not hurt. To not matter, not burn. They're nothing but crystallized crumbs of someone's guts. Someone's name left half beating dead on the floor, staining what's left while you look at another.

You come back to the mushy, dead thing left on your coffee table after what seems like the forever you once claimed. The remains of a decayed name you grew tired of rests in the center, its sweetness still pungent, and you make the mistake of touching it again. It's warm, still melting after all these years. You ask it a question you know it'll no longer listen to.

Before it hardens, empties itself until there's nothing left, it stains your hands blue as an answer.

The same shade of ocean, where you once tried to drown her in — and the memories of her out.

"The Ghost of a Parasite"

© Rizu Lu
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