There’s nothing romantic about our fate-
we’ll die of cocktail overdoses and broken hearts.
Once my father loved a woman who, as a girl, could not bear
to take her shirt off in front of him. That’s all he ever wanted.
Show me your skin, he’d say. I want to consume you, entire.
But that made it sound like he wanted to devour her, to eat her up
llike a hungry wolf. We all have wasp nests hidden between our bones.
We are all
sinking ships.
The anchors have been let out. The curtains have been hung to dry.
We’ll avenge our deaths by swallowing syllables
that ricochet around in our mouths like bullets. We’ll never get used to it.
But it’s so compelling, when you see the old husk of an insect,
to want to find the body that was in there before.
There’s always something
housed inside nothing.