Nepenthe

I wrote you while the lights were still dim and the air was dense with quiet. I wrote you dizzy, how first sun falls through trees and rests against early-morning wet in the air. Like the weight of finger prints left on anxious skin. I wrote you as the damp of your words stroking my thoughts with the whispers that make me sleep easy. I let you curl over and around. Dripping, slipping, unwound. And as the sun set, I wrote you into the dreams that leave me aching with the want to wake and breathe from the same place your mouth pulls the oxygen it uses to feed your lungs. I let the ink flourish and bleed into the shape of you. And I wonder if you dot my last ‘i’ cross my last ‘t’ lay yourself down, a period, rather than ellipses, if I could feel content. I wonder if I could stain my insides. Burn you across my rib-cage. Leave you as a masterpiece buried in my bones. Tattooed into my skeleton. I would paint your arms and legs and smile and eyes to match the exact weight of lightness that you fill me with, but my palette lacks the tones of down-blossom feathers and dust motes dancing in sunlight. So I settle for eating you whole. And it’s like swallowing thunder. Deep and satiating. All the thrill of lightning yet missing that violent spark. It’s you as the first drop of rain seeping through my cracked landscape in a drought. It’s me barefaced and stripped raw. I wrote you as closed fists. And you poured over me into open palms.