IN ARLES

i. DAWN LAMENTATIONS

7: 26: 15 P.M.

you are scabbed with the breath of dawn, and perhaps this sounds far more appealing than its actuality. you sit in the first room of your house at 6 am on a tuesday and here is where you first discover that your bones fissure at the junctions of your body when light spills from them like egg yolks down to the parquet. at first you do not tell me this is only because your mouth tastes sour and of rancid milk, that your stomach aches and you cannot live only off bits of your own skin. you never tell me of the foreign (a euphemism for unwanted) tongue between your thighs. 

despite your secrecy (a sin???), you are still somewhat of a half-formed deliverance besides me. your lips cradle the hot goldenrod sunshine like the swollen breast of the moon cradles the darkness. i tell you this, and you show me it's not a crescent of eclipses and florets but rather melted butter. you are holy to me, still, with your cherub thighs swathed in a dirtied checkered tablecloth, and i try to be like you. i cannot. my bones do not yet know how to twist and bend. promise you'll teach me how?

you carve open my chest with a bread knife, for your tongue is not as sharp as you desire it to be. a voluntary murder: i pleaded for you to slice through me clean so my blood would burst hot ochre from my lungs like a further away sun. my heart pulses as sanguine & heavy in your cupped palms as the ruddy angels that pause in their searing trajectory to stoop their heads through the slats in our shutters. i presume that when they look down upon this carnage, they will smile.

☽

???

(last line adapted from gitanjali's "please don't die")