As a child I always had nightmares of someone removing my heart
and replacing it with a broken shadow box.
No matter how hard I tried to fill its shelves with the trinkets of my childhood-
gravel, honey, scissors, torn pockets-
the shelves emptied themselves as soon as I filled them.
It’s the same with you. I try to remove you from my mind,
spill you from the cavities buried deep in my eye teeth,
but you’re always there, a city pushing its metal ridges through my skin.
There are anchors in my eyes when I look at you.
No one else has dragged me down the way you do.
I’ve been walking the tightrope between in love and over it
for so long that I’m not even sure which side I want to fall off of anymore.
I guess whichever one involves a softer landing.
But the thing is, even your laugh shakes me to the core.
I’ve been burning long before you knew me.
My stomach doesn’t just get butterflies when I see you;
it fills with a flurry of bats flapping their wings so hard
that the sound of flight tears holes in my inner lining.
I wish you could see me, but that would involve a magnifying glass.
In my dreams I swallow your hipbones whole-
right before I wake up, the archaeologists come to remove you
from my windpipe like a dinosaur skeleton, but every bone is rusted
because I’ve spent a lifetime learning how to oxidize you.