“These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey Is loathsome in his own deliciousness, And in the taste confounds the appetite.”
His smile was a wound, teeth glistening
like broken bone protruding from a garish laceration
of flesh. I winced at the strangeness of the sight,
the straight line of his lips which I tightrope walked
slashed apart—laughing at a joke that I didn’t
understand.
When our thighs would accidentally touch
I’d burst open like the fourth of July, shamefully
lighting up the room for everyone to see. He
most likely murmured something about noise
ordinances and debris as I willed my lungs
to re-expand, fighting against the soot and ash of
my own burning need.
A seventeen in one hand, and nines
in the other—I fell for a man like a weapon that I wished to
turn on myself. I studied his mechanisms, the way
in which he might be dissembled, where
his safety may be hidden. I yearned to dwell
within his chambers.
When one day he passed the heavy metal
backwards to me from the passenger seat,
it was the first time I ever truly felt the heady
bestowal of trust. If he’d have told me to aim
for my knees rather than the guard rail,
I would have obeyed.
Every night I sent out search parties
for his love, only to awake among wet leaves
and exhausted hounds. No ballistics expert could identify
the ammunition with which he riddled me. The broken magnet
that it was, I extracted the faulty organ which cowered
between my blackened lungs—I pierced her with a long needle,
and trained her as a compass instead.
Even now, years later, fireworks and gunfire still
sound the same—no matter how far south
I roam.
Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022