***
some nights, the air tastes like your ghost;
rain wrung from bone, a hymn exhaled into the hollow of a throat and left there to shiver. I tilt my head back, dumb with want, trying to sip the sky in case your name is hiding in the clouds, bleeding vowels. you live in the margins
— in doorways, in dreams that forget themselves, in the breath I almost catch but never hold.
you aren't memory. you're residue. you're the cathedral I've never entered but could draw blindfolded; every echo of your silence etched in me like scripture. there is no word for this yearning. it predates language.
it razes. I want you the way dry earth wants water;
feral and willing to fracture only if to taste softness again. and still, I pray in silence. fingering my hunger like beads, counting each ache like it redeems me.

that bitter pressing of soft kisses, as if she could kiss away the sorrow that lies within, as if she could kiss away all the frailty of the fog with the wind of her mouth.