nullius creaturae expers

galvinism

'my persephone,' heather murmurs, her voice false in its smoothness, rich and worn, her rough hand stroking your cheek. you wouldn't cast her as hades -

eurydice, maybe, opposite your orpheus; temptation personified, love and lust woven into one magnetic tenth-grade dropout -

she's a living corpse with one eye unfocused and rolling in the socket, the scar below her bangs puckered and ugly. she's something horrible and lovely and you are sick with want. 'my ophelia,' she says, and her lips are on your cheek, her breath of smoke and gin, and maybe it should make you worry to hear her voice in that way;

a tone she rarely takes with you, something for persuading and pushing and pulling, always at the threads that make up other people -

never so expertly directed at your unraveling -

you've kissed boys with too much aftershave and girls with too much lipstick and she is something else entirely, virgil to your swooning dante, the river swelling around you, boat rocking faintly; she holds your face with one broad palm and there's something sitting on the tip of her knife-sharp tongue, you can feel it tense and humid, but she must shelve it for another time and place and life because she's silent. you want to reach into her and instead you tuck your dry lower lip between your crooked teeth and stare.

is it your imagination, the swelling of her pupils? the black tide consumes and enchants- you think richly of sirens, half-drunk on her nearness- and she regards you with something ancient and fevered and nervous. there is a version of this written in someone else's memory where she kisses you first, one where you meet in the middle and shatter, one where you went to your room without a thought to her half-invitation, but you've read the script already and there are no understudies. men played the womens' roles historically, but still there's something - deja vu - about the way you reach for her, sappho and aphrodite, i cannot weave -

something like a seduction and something like a murder have melted into each other with all the grace of a sunset. something dionysian is breaking loose in your chest- oh happy dagger this is thy sheath. she kisses you and all at once you feel as though you've done something guilty and wonderful, set fire to your father's house or threw up in someone else's dorm or died. maybe you've died.

(she is kissing you, in all your deadness, cpr-certified or so it feels, her hand in your hair.)

when she stops -

it feels like highschool, like west-coast mid-west nostalgia dunked in red wine and swallowed like a pill -

sitting on your bed and pulling away from this terrifying creature so that she can inform you, in a rumbling tone that could be a whisper if she had ever learned how, that she has somewhere to be tonight, if you'd excuse her.