sliverofciel

There is a ghost doing handstands on my front lawn, wrist-deep in fresh soil. Her hands are birds in flight. It's late, but no one comes to take her home. The pale moon offers a silver smile - the clouds disapprove. Too tired to dream, she buries her legs in sky. Tonight she is invincible, untouchable, this frail girl beneath the stars this death in light. - There is a ghost doing handstands on my front lawn, falling to her white knees. Her stare is a pane of glass. The eyes of the living are often murky but the eyes of the gone are windows.

It's early autumn and the war is far from over. I am unable to travel the winding streets of your inner city, to claim each building as mine. Rome remains unconquered - you are still my Caesar. We sit in darkened rooms together and our bodies turn from ashes to ashes to night. At all times you look out the window, dreaming of westward lands. Your hands are strikes of lightning. Light of my life: today the sky is a house of leaves. There is the silver sound of gunfire in the air. The season passes quickly, but before snow kisses the ground let me find peace in the temple of your heart.

Happiness, a hundred ways: unobtainable me and irrepressible you slumped over sand. We draw the briny scent of sea into our nostrils, lungs expanding with light. You and your limpid eyes so dark that crabs could scuttle into them for shade, smile lopsided from the time you stumbled down the stairs, a flightless bird and knocked out two front teeth. (You were still laughing when we drove to the emergency room as if there were rainbows lurking in the pain that made your vision hazy, as if the rain was already long gone.) What a beautiful day. The tide's coming in frantic and furious like it's two hours late instead of right on

honeybug, you have a smile like the polished june moon, remote eyes and reckless momentum. I wanted to tell you that pleasure is beauty that it resides in every nook of your body - the fit of your frail bones, the shell-like whorls of  your ears, the sweet apex of your thighs. We are as untenable as this melancholy season. Lovely lovely lovely  chants the refrain of the rain, whose white hands leave me soaked and sobbing. Your words are acts of arson. I'm covered in third degree burns the roof's burned down and robins in my ribcage are singing spring. It feels so much like the moment before goodbye. I'll mis

We were plants standing intertwined in underwater haze. My roots had come loose during lune hour; the June moon was a polished orb oozing mellow light.  It trickled, that brightness, into the clear river where we swayed (there was no traffic, there was the sleepless sound of cicadas). Untenable, you said, remember? We wanted so badly to stay but the river paid no heed. I understand now how the current is aching, urgent, always carrying us away from those small numinous spots of soil we call home.

Feverish, from cheek to bark. You were a blazing willow tree, an act of arson, heartwood on fire— boughs bright with Sahara heat. You were all but gone, stretching up to meet a birdless sky. There was no way to sate the scissoring flame and no way to please you.

Last week we took a walk along the pebbly beach where waves bit our heels, starved whippets dark with wet. The sloe-eyed sun was peering out from behind bar and showing thin slants of brilliance. It was a numinous day. There were sharp jagged rocks lining the shore—you took one, drove it into the highways of my body, rollercoaster red looping like a boneless dance or clover interchange. Your hands, at the steering wheel: steady stone. The naked knees and loose lips were all aquiver. The tide was shivering, silvering we clothed ourselves in blue and little else. I warned, "you'll make yourself sick." Now I have hurt your

From the first I thought you transcendent. Your body silhouetted in the doorway was thin, long like a length of rope. There were lanterns bobbing outside, flooding the night with dim orange the color was on your face and hands as if you had eaten slices of the noonday sun; your skin was velvet on fire. - a fatherless boy, you learned your first words from the television. I took that to be why at times you were like a blank screen, arctic eyes unresponsive— there was a problem with the signal. The beautiful moving images started and stopped I wanted to call a repair man but my friends told me to pray. - your sleep car

It was raining copper today. You were lying under piles of pennies, shame like a dagger parked into flesh, pious in prayer; you were streaming hot music through your ear canals as if you believed that happiness could somehow be scalded onto skin. The fight scene was set in the kitchen. Pots and pans skidded across the kitchen, a rush of gleam; you ran but her voice nailed you to the linoleum floor. Metals jangled rudely and, my god, you were so sick of making your way through life like a catfish with the barbels sheared right off. You wanted desperately to reside in New Zealand, sending postcards and scraps of love to you

The days are like some mockery of babushka dolls, each uncapped to reveal a more compact hideousness. Eventually there remains neither fine detailing nor any hope of a pleasant surprise, only solid wood, a lathed baby, a perfect metaphor for my round and complete unhappiness. We shed our hope with our skin, dead cells on the floor. Onions may be peeled into nothingness even as they incite tears; stories end with the narrator suspended by the neck, chair kicked to the side, cares misplaced, love slumbering soundly somewhere on the east coast. Blissful only in oblivion. Strange as it may seem, I used to think that joy could n