ella siempre vive in forty-eight and a half

en que panteon, brujita? he types in the little wordbox below a cemetery photograph she shot, gravestones and mausoleums bleached and tilting like bones in the grass, etched in branchshadow, the silence of stories never told.

in a different life, in the serbian orthodox cemetery, where the dead in truth claim no nation, his face buried in her hair, soft and scratchy both, breezeblown, mexican shampoo, his body below pressing against, into, hers, warm, yielding, until she stops against mossed marble slabs, and he leans a little back and half-aligns their faces, righteye to lefteye, her red lips watercolor petals in periphery, faint smilecurve as she moves closer, black eyes only becoming blacker, deeper, until there is nothing else but the wind and her, all around.

she lives there, this decade later (was it so long ago?), in the lovely spaces where life has carved out tiny bits of his organs, fractured his bones, made empty places…her love girdling his heart, holding the bloody bits together when his parasite shot pericardium no longer could; her laughter filling the smokeflat alveoli and giving him breath when his air grew thin; the salt of her sweat satiating the atrophied and barren ducts behind his eyes, from which tears would never again flow; her forgivness settling his stomach, acidless and pure, as his gangrened gallbladder never could; her mischief in the slight downward hook of his broken nose, in the crowsfeet at his eyesides; her sadness in his sloppy scars, staplemarks and fossil sutures, burning in the night.

the baby they could have birthed, raised, together, gestating innocent and unknowing forever, where his spleen once lived before it nearly bled out and ended him.

he couldn’t imagine a time when he wouldn’t love her. i love a lot of people, another girl had once told him. it didn’t mean anything much at the time, but he understood, now.

simple, in a way nothing ever is.

Last updated October 28, 2016