How to Drown a Planet in Your Mouth

Love—you kept it

pressed between your teeth. I watched.

Venus drowned in a shot glass,

licked the rim clean.

We were moths

with burnt wings,

still circling. Still leaning

into the heat of each other's

leaving.

The flame ate itself.

We called it beautiful.

We called it

again, and again—

your silence

a fist I kept walking into,

soft-knuckled. Purple-blue.

The kind of ache

that counts as touching.