Still giving me butterflies
I was delivering your family the news that your brother, the colonel, was trampled by his own men. You were unbraiding your hair with a knife to remove the butterflies. I waved but you have not spoken since you were seven and there was an incident with a crow. Follow me overseas?
Chronicle of a marriage foretold
You: ninety-three, a whore, kneading dough with the heel of your shoe. Me: the village vicar, smelling of breast milk, black boots, double-barreled shotgun. I want you in my hammock by noon.
Everlasting love!
I saw you in the hills where we buried that man with enormous wings. Me: black eyes, alone, probably immortal. You: still in hiding, dark hair, often overheard cursing angels. I find feathers in my bed every time I dream of you. Keep me company tonight?
Sleeping beauty m4w
Me: The man sitting next to you on the airplane right now who bought you sunflowers and saved you from harm’s way. I appreciated your silence when I spoke to you of my overwhelming fear of suffocating from my own melancholy. You: Still asleep. I hope you like sunflowers.
Lost in your labyrinth
You: hair freshly-cut, a scar from ear to mouth, green jacket with dangling, golden medals, sense of detachment from life, have committed genocide. Me: twelve, usually painting with feces. Tuck me in tonight?
To the climber, I hope you read this
You climbed through my window the last three nights. Love how you said you like dreams. I also like dreams!!! You: hallucinated glow in your eyes, upset by the fatal grip of your own nostalgia, smell of basil. Me: taller than my sister, pregnant. Will you ask the president of the banana company permission for my hand?
Rabies in the time of cholera w4m
You: speaking in Latin while holding a crucifix to my forehead as I was roused from my last fever-induced delirium, concentrated aroma of sacramental oils, soft hands. Your silhouette was blurred and wobbly but I like the way you held a bowl of water to my lips and smelled my skin. Me: long, copper hair, locked in isolation, trailed by rats, bad case of rabies. Break your vows and visit again?
I see you in my family tree
Your mother had a child with my sister’s husband, who was the last of my grandfather’s offspring. Last week I awoke in the house your nephew built to the smell of bone marrow boiling in the kitchen. The smell evoked an intense hormonal pleasure and reminded me of a time, many years ago, when I faced a firing squad. You were looking in from the window when I saw you, chained to the tree. Meet me right where you are?
Of love and other magic tricks
You: ice. Me: very sad, missing the way you looked before you disappeared and traded our friendship for water.
Cuckolding my heart w4m
You: tormented by love and distracted by cockfighting. I saw you on the first night of festivities celebrating the end of the despairing ravens. You dropped a letter you wrote to me in your brother’s fields, and the wind carried it to the oak tree where it shook in the branches until it fell into my cousin’s basket as she was walking to let the dogs out from the house, but it slipped through the basket and was caught again by the wind and whipped through the garden where the dogs ran to chase it before it fell near the rose bushes, and the dogs licked it until it was so wet that it disintegrated at my touch. I dried the pieces and sewed them back together with the thread of my dress. Does the offer still stand to sweep out the birds out of my house?
Can’t get the night we shared out of my head
Me: man. You: dead.
