the taste of blackberry blood in my mouth, the contours of pain a hard boundary around my body, a corset of bones that keep me in place, careful not to reach out too far to you — wouldn’t it be disastrous, then, to admit the truth, i could interpret your silence, too, as a boundary of thorns around a raw steak of a heart. what I have - no one knows if I can give - if it is even mine to give, a love that grew in the cracks, from puddles, sprouting with moss and lichen on concrete pavement. is it love, or serotonin and fantasy, if I felt it strongly in those twelve minutes tandas.

tasting blood in the mouth is much easier than the forecast of pain, is much simpler than phantom pain, projections of pain. blood has hard boundaries, has edges, leaves purple stains on the pillow from mouth drool pooling. in these cages, inside skeletal time I weave together pieces of body — i allow myself to look at my lover’s hand as a sex object, the other, as a secret. a man twenty one years my senior, a man with silver rings, who, in another universe, i married.

blackberry blood becomes something easier to taste, possible to swallow, more filling than fantasy. what does it mean to push at the edges and boundaries of my sorrow, for you.