Gone

I suppose we wear our traumas the way the guillotine wears gravity. 

Our lovers' necks always seem so soft. 

She speaks, and her heart trips across her heartbeat.

Each word limps into the air. 

We are gone. 

I am no mortician. 

I have no idea how to put makeup on the dead.  

Have no idea how to un-erase, 

so I step out of the shower 

and stare at the features that make up my face,

which frankly looks like a deck of falling cards. 

I'm realizing there is no shelter from the world

and that the heart forms long before the rib cage. 

They say the womb is where we learn that love 

is knowing that the cord that feeds you 

could at any moment wrap around your neck. 

On that park swing, I learned to hold my breath. 

Tornado chests and swollen eyes, 

I trace the contour of your lips, 

And for the first time, 

I try to hold them shut.

Even through the storm your absence brought.

I still try to sled in the snow of 

your cold shoulder.

Even through goodbye 

I still leave love notes hidden in your suitcase.

I called you Love,

but I know Einstein called himself a pacifist when he built the bomb.

People ask me why I stayed, when you always kept one foot out the door. 

The truth hurts the same way light hurts when you turn it on in the middle of the night

but I had to see for myself, even through the ruins, 

if what we were burying were seeds.