i wanted to say your name but it broke inside my mouth and what came out was a mouthful of blood and birds and i carried them to you like a gift, here, here is what i am when i do not know how to hold myself together, and you took it in your palms without flinching, let the blood smear your fingers and the birds peck at your wrist until they found skin tender enough to disappear into, and this is what i mean when i say hunger, not that i am starving but that every time you look at me i remember i am alive enough to ache and isn’t that what devotion is, to ache and to keep aching, to unravel myself thread by thread and still press what is left into your hands, to say here take this even if it is ugly and not enough, and you keep taking it, you keep swallowing my pieces until i can no longer tell where i end and you begin, and i am frightened of that, yes, but i am also singing in the fear, i am also opening myself wider, splitting ribs, baring marrow, saying look this is the place i saved for you, and when you touch me there it does not hurt, it only reminds me that i have not died yet, that i am not done loving, and there are days i want to stop, days i want to go back to being a body untouched, a body locked in its own shadows, but then you appear with your hair dripping with the scent of rain and i know i would burn everything again just to see you touch the fire and call it beautiful, and so we keep going, you and i, not lovers not friends not saints not sinners but something between, something tangled in the ache, something made of mouths that never tire of opening, hands that never stop reaching, and we do not need a name for it, we do not need the world to see, we only need the hunger, the devotion, the way our bodies do not resist but fall, fall again and again into one another as though gravity has finally chosen to be merciful.
