Until it becomes a competition to see who can hurt the other one more.

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i write you love poems
because i don't know how
to say i'm scared.

these words slide down your hips like a pair of pants that no longer fit but which you can not bring yourself to discard. you cinch them tight with a belt made from the clothesline you no longer have a place for - the landlord doesn't allow them in the courtyard. cluttered, he says. eyesore.

and so your underwear, your sheets, are relegated to the tiny orbit of the dryer which sometimes contains relics left behind by the neighbors you never pass in the hall: today a penny, hot to the touch so that it leaves a small red ring against your palm when squeezed. last week a small silver button you have placed in the bowl by the door. some days it gets tangled in your keys when you pick them up, and you imagine that its owner will stop by with a letter meant for you which was slipped into their box by mistake, will recognize the button and think that you are the sort of person who saves things. wrong, you think. you do not save things, but you can not bear to part with them.

you slip leaves between pages of books, then years later open them to find just the skeleton remaining. veins, you think.

 you think, decomposition. you wonder where the rest has gone.

you carry language inside you
as the truly faithful carry
their gods.

soft-bodied and diurnal.

behaving as though love was something which we could digest. such slow violence and always at the end of the day we are left wondering why we feel so torn apart, so eviscerated.

i imagine the way dirt from under my fingernails will look streaked down your sweaty back on the days that i cannot wait long enough to shower after we have finished working in the garden. it will be the way you will bend to snap a leaf of basil, the way your hand will grasp at a tomato on the vine, the way your t-shirt will cling (softly translucent) to your skin, the way you will smell like the earth that will cause me to pull you down to the porch steps, to press my face into your flesh.

like the rhythm of prayer, this call
& response - smallest of alphabets reducing
syllables to ashes in our throats. we learn to
speak the tongues of the blessed, to pass
sacred vowels from open mouth to open mouth.