With your head thrown back. Watching your throat,...

With your head thrown back. Watching your throat, like a mound of sculpted wax bridging me to my brokenness, letting it be passage for the air that expands you. The girl I’ve loved for six years caressed your obsidian locks she saved from cut, and I could only wish I could endure it without caring.

Then, I wet my face, pressing my forehead into the counter top, to make a faucet of my own. Forming a right angle of myself, to pretend that at a different angle, I lived a different world. Indulgently wishing the corner cut through me. Letting the worms eat my stomach like they should, to bring myself to surrender.

Mahogany couches are base in the game of surrender. When the silence was comfortable, guilt sucked the movement from my body like frost bite, from the fingertips inward. An honesty stripped of mascara or timed action. And when I couldn’t take my eyes off your beautiful profile or the slant of your lips stifling humor, my legs turned to colored yarns, weaving, uncontrolled. Behind me, the 6-year-loved eyes seething into my soul, hating all of me. Her unrelenting eyes threw flames at me until I couldn’t bear them, and long afterward. And mine were forced to water the fire before I found rest.

submitted by roxannabailey.