my veins lay cracked like the ashen porcelain plates mama kept on display, arranged like a tableau of her deliverance / tucked tightly into a vitrine — pretty the way dead things are when sitting prim and proper in a casket,
far too perfect
— hands crossed softly at their fronts / awaiting an audience and a pastor preaching the word of his god as proverbs drip down his chin like ichor,
dare i compare the filled rifts of the sheen marbled ceramic to that of the slits screaming beet-red decadence on the shredded bases of my wrists / spilling from my fingertips like genesis and into my tub like sanguinary starlight til im drowning in peach-stained skies with limbs that feel honey-coated and free
i don't think i was ever meant to feel anything but this
the moon bids me and ivory farewell as darkness caresses me like a lover would / carrying me heavenward with his lips on mine until death tastes like rośe
and glass castles fall from the sky like asterisms, raining sharp porcelain onto our skin / mama wouldn't be pleased, not at all
not with her deliverance in ruins like this
but mama isn't here
and now
neither am i
tell the birds i've bloomed,
will you?
