We both got burnt raw that summer, a tangled mess of

Tired arms and bare feet licking against the wild ground.

I found myself skinned-knees deep in loving you,

Long before I had learned to love anything.

The way a sunrise looks as it crosses the bridge of a nose,

A passenger seat, the beauty of such fractured light -

The way it filtered, a tilted slant, through my bedroom window,

Soaked into a bed that had become more yours than mine, or ours.

Your head pressed against the pillow, each breath a ghost

Washing sweet against my face, a whisper I taste in my own mouth.

Ear pressed to your ribcage, the jackrabbit beat of your heart;

Gentle hands with rough palms, held me at the back and

Tried to put me back together again -

But I was always made for falling through the cracks.

Still, I learned the sweet summer song of your sleep,

The way the breath rattled in the hollow cove of your thin chest.

How I scooped each swell into my cupped palms,

How I drank it like water, how I swallowed it like air -

How I fell in love first with the sound of your being beside of me;

The reassurance that someone could think they loved the ruins of this body still.

Beside of you, I learned to plant an ocean through the cracks in my chest

I watched you float, the softening of your straight-edged face,

How a jawbone begs to be kissed smooth, how clenched teeth carry secrets

That you do not know how to spill,

How you were always so full, how you poured into my empty.

You will always have a place to come clean here, to come home.

Lay down your weight against my twisted sheets,

The threads here are well versed in the art of secrets,

In the art of you.

How I would wipe the hurt of your faults away, and

How I would call the stains my own, this weight you cannot carry.

You are the softest place that I have ever rested,

Each crack in you a crack in me, a roadmap to the collapse;

And how each of my bruises take the shape of missing you.

This heart you broke is the only thing that I can taste in my mouth;

And now I beg a foreigner's god to unmake of my prayer your name.

What does it say about me, that the only nights I find myself willing to remember

Are the nights I fell asleep to the sweet summer song of your breathing?

Each inhale and exhale a promise, a mending;

Press the shell of my ear to the home of your rawboned chest,

Close my eyes each night - learn that it is possible to drown in ghosts,

And the ocean of you.