D E AR C A N N I BAL Q U I V E RI N G W I T H L I P S T I C K A N D M OO N L I G H T
I was nominally yours. You were abnormally mine. We loved with our fangs out, our truths in. I licked fifty-six square inches of your lavendered skin. I begged for the first two psalms and received your twenty-four-hour flood. You hand-washed six figs, fed me one per night. I listened for your three deepest breaths, but your mouth was a drain painted Harlot. Spring delivered the first four steps of happiness and I tangoed in the mineshafts of your moonlight, unsutured. Summer sent us your slow-clotting cuts, your sugar ants, your human dark with honey. It was all a little too sweet to believe in. The truth is just another way of saying I always hoped you’d stop loving me the next day. And that you never would. And each of those meals in between, I longed for your ingredients: your sweet cream and your curry and your over-ripe bed. I stayed. Not for the cancer or for your skin beneath me, but to watch your soft hands flutter and flay the green skin of the mango, its glistening flesh exposed, alone on the white cutting board.