cigarette constellations

you bore a baby more worthy than i: eta orionis

tropical sunrise in your frenulum. mama used to watch the sun set on the sharp of your tongue and wait for it to cut her.

the lukewarm languor crept through her bones like hide and seek, but she'd smile like caustic chamomile. the kettle of her soul teeming with the feigned felicity of puerile ring around the rosy. mouth upturned, eyes alight with french vanilla, cinnamon coveting every sip so covertly that mama didn't mind the burn.

an elixir-coated tongue like sapphire white washed in asphalt. you never did leave things the way they were. evergreen she was, a paragon dressed in the elegance of peplum. fluidity akin to celestial pink-lemonade, she poured from a pitcher like liquidated sun rays beneath granny apple skin. she harbored the scent of sautéd pomegranate and tasted like the virgin bite of a star-fused plum. oh, she was the fresh of the earth, the mellifluous tune of evolution in a forsaken wasteland. [she was made of zest-ripened music and you told her not to dance.]

a hoax you were. a ruse of lyrics like honey and maple. a sweet soothing ginger and passionflower chorus, a peach-pacifier bridge to soothe the quails of a malnutritioned love. you were sheet music, a haunting end that she'd placed her fingers over in hopes of a blossom-stained fairytale. you coddled her from all that she knew until she only knew you.

you bore a baby more worthy than i. brown like outdated patchwork with a neck made of glass and congested with the beguiling inebriant of starry-minded malignancy. you'd carry the weight of her own your shoulders and spin carelessly in a game of airplane, she dizzied you with admiration. you'd dress her up with lemon and garnish her with olives, chase her with the bittersweet flavor of pineapple, her bliss a toxicant in your mephitic bloodstream.

[it was her who made you curse.]

mama said that your voice was usually a cool-mist humidifier's hum, pursuing the tail-end of summer-braided pigtails. [less of a nightmare's bellow and more of a daydream's sigh.] she told me that your hands were a home before you tore ours apart. that you had soul beneath your nail beds and benignity in the cradle of your palm. she avowed that, before, your eyes were white like classic cotton candy and that once upon a time in the worn out pages of a pansy-printed passion, she loved you.

mama built a home for us on her tongue. a hallway of remouillage broth and green tea tales. when she felt the flames of your wrath birth smoke, she'd close her mouth to protect us, and mold us into the hollow of her cheeks like a saturn-smeared secret. she'd wait with nurture in her sweet nothings and pillow-fluff our trepidation into somnolent, inaudible birdsongs. [she never did cry, for what is strength if it bleeds.]

five thousand, one hundred and ten days of rose-washed veneer before violence became a vertigo of veracity. you implored at mama's feet like she was death and you were pleading to her holy shrine. the abscission of an abysmal marmalade tie severed by the heat of a honeybee horizon. mama looked at you the way a saint looked at sin, the way vivacity perceived prosaic art. the way stars peered at sicarian supernovas. [mama looked at you like once upon a time in a nightshade-nuzzled nursery rhyme, she hated you.]

so mama left. placidity like plaque on the basal of her bare feet. music vociferous and jocular, strung between her teeth like wind chimes. a pugnacious zeal stringing phlegmatic fairy lights awash in her eyes like perennial candids.

and i didn't have to
hide beneath mama's
tongue any longer.

[she built a home for
me in her hands.]