Edna St. Vincent Millay once wrote to her lover and said that she was summer,
summer to her heart. You are all my seasons.
Some nights I stay up and smoke cigarettes on top of the roof
with the wind blowing through the French windows, and I think about
the 63 men who found their way into my body and left holes
but never once bothered to patch them up.
We’re sewing blankets made out of our own skin,
with only our eyelashes and fingers as needle and thread.
It is said that death is a decaying orange that can be peeled
down to the very rotting core. I don’t want to peel you;
I want to tear your layers apart like an onion and bite into you.
Kiss me harder.
Take me to Vienna and teach me how to waltz
with my arms around a lover who has already gone.
Yesterday, my father suddenly began to return my phone calls
after a two-year hiatus.
I never loved you, he says. I met your mother in a church and said her
name like a rosary, then our mouths met. I still wish they hadn’t.
So tell me, then: if my own father doesn’t love me,
then who will?