Snacks

(My novel The Half Paper Moon)

He is dead

Dead dead dead

The man is dead

I am dead

Frozen in pomegranate panic

Frozen in death that lives onward in sinew that stews

In his arms, I linger with the notion of my death

The layers that choke

The happiness I ground into fine waste

I am that waste

As I slipped into the air-tight room of death

The sphere of Hell’s wrath fell down upon my sinful head

I was both Persephone and Hades

Chained to a specific time

But my sweetheart brings me to spring

He revives me

The one I found gave me fresh water

No liquid death

I remember as I wept, stuffing my face with old, stale snacks

The fake orange fine print cataloging my starvation

I tap-danced a frantic beat of my mother with her heels

Dropped by a few smarts

That crawled into my throat like a muscle memory

I was a child and I was killed

The man I became

Dead dead dead

And I find myself swimming in living droughts of death

Kissing my lover in a blush of midnight black

Grieving over the twisted guts of orange.

No moon because I shrouded it in a curtain of

A chalice containing

Poison I consumed with gusto

That read like a commercial jingle

Full of dead rats I built in my head.