They say men are from Mars and women are from Venus but I fell in love with you on every planet. There are rings around my eyes like the limbs of Saturn from thinking awake about you instead of sleeping about you. I’m burning up staircases and tossing grenades and tearing apart orange blossoms for the sake of your smile, destroying myself whole so you can make me broken again and again. I want that first night you unwrapped me from my clothes like a bank of seaweed and skipped stones on my bare body with your tongue but first your eyes.
Scientists speculate that across the lifetime a couple’s love turns from romantic to companionate to eventually “just because” but you were never my “just,” you were my always and for and how and why and then and ever. Across my lifetime they could dissect my entire heart and it would never show signs of weakness or old age; you’ve made me immortal, made me turn like a knife in the night, made me burn and throw myself on crosses made of flame. You were my religion; you were my atheism and every circle of fate I formed from salt and tried to lose myself in.
Geology says that rocks form layers and strata and shale loses itself in charcoal and bone, that plates shift and rise through the earth and break through with the force of teeth through flesh. I broke through you with palms like knives, with fingers that wanted to explore every valley of your skin until the floods came and wore my nails down to the bone, down to sandpaper.
On early winter mornings language moves through the window and shatters like pane glass, and I look at you and your body with eyes fluent in everything buried inside you.