She said, in you I fell so hard that when I hit bottom, I broke my spine.
She said, in you I perfumed myself with le sangre, metallic in scent.

He left tufts of hair everywhere, her blonde chastity
strewn through the sink and the sloping bedroom floor,
laced through the fibers in the afghan his mother
sent for Christmas last year. His first mistake, her last.

She is twenty-six years old now and almost married to
somebody else, who doesn't leave her a caricature of
bones and glowy skin on the kitchen counter. He still
carries that picture in his head of her knees to her chest,
the firm line of her pale t-shirt touching bare golden thighs.
Sometimes he talks about how her body was like a child's
in size; the narrow flattened stomach that's usually only found
in preadolescence, the slender limbs and tiny, delicately
formed feet with their smooth sparkly aquamarine nail polish.

The admiration in his eyes, glassy buttons on a stretched holocaust
face is almost palpable; she'd promised to wait, to save herself. She could
blame her own je ne sais quoi for his failure to understand; he needed with the
raw red wetness of a carnivore, and for some reason he still believed she'd
forgive him.

He thinks of her fiancee as the other man, you know how
the jealous types are; excusing her unfavorable behavior to himself
with "well, he's a doctor," pretending she's given into greed and
not self-assurance, and not adulthood. He tries to send her letters,
but they all come back return to sender.

On his thirtieth birthday she called and told him about her
full womb, her thickly seeded abdomen and how it would swell
with what had nothing to do with him. The girl was never lead by
malice, not even then; she asked him to please understand. There
are fairytales, and then there's the man I have devoted myself to,
the man you never were; he is what's honest and good about the world
you write nihilism for. He lacks naivete, and he's sometimes dangerous
and powerful and often salacious in my presence; conversely, he's
sincere and challenging, safe. He is grown.

You were ravenous and starkly anti; you'd paint yourself in colors
the world has never seen, not to appreciate their newness but merely
to be contrary, to disagree. You took from everyone, most especially me.
And you never, ever, believed in me. And you never, ever saw in me
the things that make us human.

She said, in you I am not a woman; I'm only innocent.
She said, in you I pose the question of a virgin.