Or albiccoca when spoken softly
on a Sunday morning over soft-boiled
eggs breaking open against muscles
like those lining your back &

 

threading along the veins of your arms,
pushing up skin in beige mountain ranges.
Is there nothing to be done between us?
our last glances given? as if pierced by ice?

 

I can trace my finger’s shadow, its past
maze looping around your shoulder’s crook,
finding prize in the unkept hairs that split your stomach
in two comforting halves, I can trace its shadow

 

over & over again. The sound of a stranger’s fist
beating into your eye, leaving behind
a soft black streak, rings in my mind,
my mother breathes—Do not let yourself starve.

 

I try to forget what we once were,
if only briefly, sunken into each other,
like knotting driftwood against
an ocean endlessly cresting & crashing.