I loved her once.
Through cigarette smoke she
licked,
tonguing cuts and pricks;
"it's dry out," she
whispered
but I remember shouts
of figments climbing fences
behind us—
she advised me not to turn around
and I found it
almost too easy.
Then her mouth split,
lapping up
the seams of my bones
to reverberate away the loneliness
that
had seeped inside when she was
absently philandering,
and
flecks of blue were born
until a sea grew up to swallow down
the
walls of fall (she called it autumn)
and spring and
wintertime,
but left the summer standing
at our backs.
"Relax," she breathed,
still
heaving with the effort
of living lungless after smoke burned them
up,
pink flesh decaying, graying
with experience—
I'd
long forgotten the taste
of clean kisses,
but I didn't care
when she was there,
beckoning my affections haphazardly
between
flickers of a butane flame.
Through it all I wondered
how
encumbered she must be inside
that cloudy shroud of
nicotine
eating up her impulses with the promise
of hands that
wouldn't shake
if she took another drag.
And then one day she vanished;
empty
sheets sterilized,
bed remade before she faded
because we
always knew what would happen
eventually,
her vice would set a
price we couldn't' meet
and she would die.
But I loved her once, regardless.