I Need You Like I Need a Hole in the Sky
There was suddenly a blackout ripped in the sky. I asked into it, What do you feel inside? The mouth about its hole crackled electricity. The clouds were afraid of it, the sky was afraid of it. I see myself in you, it said. I felt it in my heart, a hole. There was once you gave me a red heart and I gave you a red heart, a red heart smaller than your red heart, then you to me a smaller red heart, until neither of our sets of fingers could hold the hearts they were so small. I see that you are very small, it said. And that I am very big. There is no chance we could love each other.
My Little Man
First you were just another growth. And you kissed me every time I cried whether on the bus in the rain or in the locker room after a swim. Sometimes you reached around my neck inside the shower when we were at home. You only kissed me on one side under my chest, lips red and wax like candy. You kissed me only ever on the same spot so you left a constant bruising with your lips, the only place that you could reach. I thought it would be there forever. The bruise eventually faded. But the scars from skin graft I needed after you burst out of me—you parasitic slimy monster, skittering away like a dying owl with your quarter-formed limbs, leaving me to die bleeding, gaping and searching for any doctor open in yet another severe weather warning—those scars never faded. I can touch them everyday but there’s no one now to kiss them.
Edward
The Cullens and I ate dinner together then they pulled apart my dress and threw me on the table and ate through me opening my stomach like a package. The Cullens and I kissed, all six of us, in a gracious circle on their lemon couch, then they poked me full of straws and sucked me dry of blood. The Cullens and I set fire to parliament and then they turned me inside out, first my skin and then my organs then my veins, licking me, licking me. The Cullens and I asphyxiated each other in the crushing of a diamond mine. The Cullens and I crushed our pelvises together in a hot spring made of blood. The Cullens and I stepped up to the altar but I turned afraid and ran into your arms, Edward. For I only ever truly loved you and only could love you and you—can you just please hold me please.
Ghost Monkey
The orangutan was afraid that his lost lover had returned a ghost orangutan. From one lover to another: ‘ooh, ooh.’ From the living to the dead: ‘What on earth is it you’ve said? For I’m alive and aren’t you dead?’ Orangutans see everything in a grave mist, pale and grave and graveyard-like. Here we have a headstone and one bereft, orange, manlike creature having prayed once his one true love rest firmly in the ground and here he is closer with his shovel and his pail. (And close behind him, moaning, the ghost of the one who once nibbled his ears and encouraged him in everything he did.) ‘If a shallow grave by my own hands isn’t enough, we’ll see how you like burning.’ There were plenty of moments where we held each other, where either I was the weaker one or you were. Here now our man unburies his. He sets a pyre and burns the other, dead orangutan. ‘I have nothing but these bones now and they’re so hot they’ve burned my hands. I am too sad to write my name on every bone. I am too sad to burn myself alive from the flame still eating away your head. I am too sad.’ Our man crawls exhausted to the gravesite wherein he lies flatly on his back and waits for the rains to drown him. ‘Ghost, oh ghost, hold my hand, for I fear deep clouds ahead and yet feel you near beyond them.’