Laurel Tree On Fire.

I have Eyes closed and suddenly everything feels better. Believe it or not but I am beginning to understand why my mother picked me off the cold sodden streets and dressed me in up clothes
Again. How she reminded me of the choice to wade in your pain or to scratch it out of the very seams of time. So I wake up the next day with the beautiful boy gone but his smile still sketched

Onto the wall of my bedroom, & I freeze at the sight of his fire leaving blazon tracks towards the door and down the left side of the street. I hope he gets hit by a car, recovers and comes back to

Remind me the difference between victim and stupid. Remind me that the cold isn’t the only thing that can grope a girls bones in discomfort. & the therapist hears me out when I talk about fingers

Tracing my collar bone like they were trying to erase each pore of my body, and how these fingers do not have a landscape that they breach from, they are just a home on fire bleeding out moths. I

Mention how no birds sing near my house and maybe that’s because my mind makes too much noise that the outside can’t quite crack through, but still, each painted wall of my sanctuary has his

Scent. But oh how she looks at me with disappointment because I still can’t bring myself to explain how I am not angry at to him leaving, but more the fact
That I refuse to remember when he left and oh god what Does that say about me? that I am the girl who bleeds peonies like a field vomiting up bones,

that his touch on my body is all it’s worth and is That it? Aren’t girls supposed to be born of flame? Yet here I am, sipping oceans out of teacups and breathing in airs of smoke. Dancing around in an old white dress, singing songs with my tongue a

Lit match. And I watch Apollo Burn.