horribly beautiful ✔️

cleo

she would always
talk about the boy in her class,

about his smile and his sandy hair.

the way she could feel the nerves in her fingertips

light up when she lit up

another cigarette.

i loved the smoke because it simply adored her.

and they pressed their backs to the plaster,

their sneakers would kick
the asphalt until they burrowed their way in and

dug out the gravel.

her face

had the shape of buttercream,
round and soft

and you could spread it with your fingers

he said her lips tasted like lipstick,
but he
was no poet.

according to

sorry, who again?

she was not a beautiful girl,
but

she had a cats eye the color of the almonds i ate
with my former friend,

she had wide hands
and firm posture

her shoes were white until they realized they loved her.

what happened to cleo,
i wonder

and her thin angel hair.

what happened to her desire for the sunflower boy whose
bare arms were blessed by a cloudless sky.

she had a ravenous gut that told her she wasn't good enough,

she would text me for hours about how she cried and screamed from her woodland eyes

and i forgave her for her
self destruction
just as i forgave the sun for leaving me each night.

cleo
was a breaking girl

no matter how she tried to stand tall.

she only ever spoke to me of two things-
that boy
and what was killing her within.

this disorder grabbed her like a lover

and it sept into the darkest parts of her.

it infiltrated her like the devil,
it wiped her of moral.

the last thing she ever wrote was,
'i had a friend over and things went downhill from there'

and i know the girl who remains the lion in my friends bodies
is still struggling.

unless, of course,
what is destroying me
has already destroyed her.

it's me again, call back.