I thought you were dead.
On your Facebook wall,
well-wishes and then nothing.
The mitosis of what if:
worries twirl and spiral
and settle into clock-cogs
which lock and jam.
The metal creaks and smacks.
Spins, orbits, pulses.
My fingers catch, my nails bleed.
I couldn’t pick you out of a lineup now.
I hope you’ve found
your still pile of bones
to rub against.
You filled my lungs
with asterisks and commas
and lately I fear my cunt
is a dying star. I fear
it is packing to leave me.
Please know you’re allowed
to remember me by things
other than bacon
and my forgetting to turn off the lights.
I want you to remember
the time we folded a summer sun
into a winter sky and sewed
sequins onto strangers’ shoes.
Not by my constant pleas:
drive safe, come inside me,
open this jar. I remember you
by your hair, spare straw
in a November field.
And by your soft uncorking of wine,
like grandpas popping cheeks at toddlers.
If you come back,
I’ll tongue-kiss you where your legs meet,
conjure tempests
when you’re sun-sick & weary.
I’ll twist under you
like rosepetals dropped into a creek.
Holly Burdorff is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. She serves as art and design editor for Black Warrior Review and as director of the VIDA Count, and her poems appear in inter|rupture, POOL, Pittsburgh Poetry Houses, and Duende.
