Letters

I need to face it:
that dark-shaped leech
across my breast, that red-
faced feeling when I gave
myself into your hands and 
it was pitiful, not enough.
I should hold on to it:
the arm I tried to wrap
around your slippery,
woolen chest, that you
shrugged off, slashing
diagonally across my eyes.
I could take it in:
the growth in my side,
the corner of a vision’s
path, carved deeply 
over years of denial,
but it’s too large a leech,
and too distant a need.

I sometimes ask for rain,
that you will not join me today.

Here comes another crossing,
unprepared for my trembling
feet to tread;
forgiveness had me laughing
my way to insanity, leaving
crumbs of truth—shed—for
some unfortunate version
of me to find.
I sliced you up good, and lost
track of which form you took
in my head;
though you are constant and kind,
the crossing is not wide
enough—yet.

End-
-ing on a fast note,
I tried to hold on to the
cracks in the road, the slow
of help, the slew of faces,
half-opened cans, before
I imagine something
I cannot 
begin.

I—now castaway—can ask: but what
do I expect of friendship? I slip
through months, pushing past faces,
brushing by shoulders; I get on like
you. Still, your picture provokes in me
something too essential to utter; I rose
for air desperately to find it again
(maybe you were there too), yours the
face of an entire future. Well, the 
night has long expired, and a 
friend forgotten is no feeling 
at all.

Bear the safe ending:
the one where I am not in your skin
and you are not airborne.

But you lift like the dust under my bed,
and I breathe you in as easily as the
midnight sky.

You’ve coated my hollow skull in
a softness seeping into my vision, and
it liquefies as it stings down my throat.

Your edges shed as I approach,
as I can barely see, all your life
lifting before me,

you little thing.

You swept the room clean of yourself
after you pushed out that itch in the back
of your head;
I kept my silence.

I needed it to enter my ears slanted
from the prickling of your untouched gaze
at my sides,
though I couldn’t keep still.

Is this the part where we say yes?

I want to open that latch on the 
ceiling and read what’s written there,
that tiny sliver of a bare heart
I saw as you fell asleep and invited
me in.

In the mornings our memories are erased
and we start over;
you roll over on the floor
as I turn away;
we can’t believe our
own waste.

This is the part where we speak in
hushed tones: it’s the place for the
disastrous vast, the untamable pummeling—
the high-speed rail.

In a moment, we forget our truth as suddenly
as we lose our foothold;
and so this is how I switch off:
this is the part where I say no.

love,
suzanne

summer & fall, 2019.