They hire him to take up gravestones
in old cemetery grounds.
Pay him by the hour,
to tease out lichen lost names,
note them,
in neat, thin rows of records
only his eyes will read,
and murmur each syllable
into the fresh split of dark soil
before the groundsman comes
with his sack of grass seed,
already whistling
to no one at all.
You striped your shins raw and red
spilling from an open window
onto the porch roof outside.
Hands flat against the bitumen
you brought yourself upwards, tall,
bearing gravel bitten palms.
My hands will ache at the thought,
of your smile through the lifted glass,
half shadowed by the sunset.
Second, I was more careful in the going,
kept my skin as it should be,
clean, whole, unharmed. I did not spill.
Then we watched as clouds scudded
east to west on slow, hidden winds.
Your slips always taught me lessons.
Like how to pick old wounds clean.
They told me you were hard to puzzle out,
a riddle wrapped in a conundrum.
Like an onion, I would have to peel back the layers
to find what you really were beneath.
In reality,
your smile was so open,
I walked in uninvited.
There are snowdrops growing on the hill beneath your house.
I don’t think they’ve grown there before
or I would have seen them.
Felt their green stems bend beneath my back
as we tumbled one over the other
down the slopes free from winter covers at last,
bathed in the chill of spring days
which looked warmer than they were
when the curtains first peeled back those mornings
and our breath misted on the window panes.
You would have plucked them singularly
with the same precision you gave to cakes
on birthday celebrations,
determined everyone should receive the same.
My hands always tremble,
when asked to thread the eye of a needle
but yours would have slipped each stem
between the brambles of my hair
to build a crown of tiny buds,
pockets of white inside the calamity
that I would soon shake free.
When they ask me why I left
the roof of my mouth becomes fly paper.
The words stick and clot
until my jaw aches from the press
of things I don’t know how to say.
I’m sorry is somewhere among them,
and so are the excuses
that turn over each night beside me,
convinced they can make me believe
that they were something more
than simply fear.
Despite the warning signs
I pressed myself against your skin,
let the acid burn away my fingerprints
until only teeth were left
to identify the body by.
You were poison and venom,
though it’s unclear how
the first dose was administered.
If you closed your mouth
around my throat
or if I sank my fangs into you.
What doesn’t kill you
can make you stronger.
Or shift the basis of your DNA
until the mutations
become the building block
of something new and half done.
When I recognized us
for the first time
I didn’t know my own face.
Something that toxic
could never be real.
Carol J Forrester 
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