I can see the blue veins in my hands and
long, tapered fingers like spider’s legs.
The knuckles are hard, like smooth water pebbles,
a white ball under translucent skin on my wrist,
twisting up with thin twines of muscle to the crook
of my elbow.
A skinny arm of nothing with thin shoulders
that hunch over, perpetually curved no matter
how much they insist I pull them back.
My collar bone protrudes and catches on the necklace she gave me,
it dips and creates pools where water falls when the shower runs,
curving to a neck with a heartbeat barely visable.
When I sleep sometimes I feel her stir and she doesn’t know
but I watch her listening for my chest to rise and fall.
I’m told often I look dead when I sleep.
My breath hardly forming, my ribs never moving with air.
I lay like the dead.
But I feel her watching.
Her fingers running the curvature of each knob on my spine,
plinking over the ribs that nearly show, the dip and point
of hipbones, too sharp.
I’m longer than her, taller than her, but she still manages to encompass me.
She made my skeletal, drifting form full.
She fills me up.
The frame that is hardly stitched together, a corpse to those that glance
but she knows because she watches me when I sleep.
I feel her reach and thread her warm fingers through my cold hands.
A puff of warm air on the back of my neck, stirring tendrils of hair
as it falls into my eyes, figments floating across my vision.
Her lips.
So warm.
I am full.
