Chatham Grey
KOOLAID OR SOMETHING LIKE IT 

i catch the sound of some distant hood hanging on to your identity like the spit between the words seamlessly strung together and falling out of your lips

i think of how you talk like the way a melody sounds,
   smooth enough to be almost forgettable,
   secure enough to let a girl breathe for once

when i see your body slinking toward my car from the relentless and gaping mouth of summer’s close,

i wonder if you are the night that precipitated the burn or the charcoal birthed from the ashes of the gathering heat rising off of the un-even cinder blocks

before we kiss,
i only suspect that there is more boy than man feathering in the dark gums gardening your smile

and I tell myself that it takes one to know one.

__

the frequency with which we collide is a clumsy and violent knee jerk

we make the sound of a ball point pen rolling across graph paper and only the twilight is interested enough to watch as we shave the orange peels from our lurching skins, —

((a taste sweet but out of season))

i tease him about his age by calling him a baby.
i finger my way across the soft and surprising unarticulation of his shirtless torso.
i make a treasure hunt of finding and kissing each of his ribs.

and just like that, he has me

i soothe myself in my head,
my heart is rocking in his arms,
he is just a boy,
he is just a boy


i push him off of me to interject that this cannot be something serious
he says, “yeah, yeah, me too”

((and having passed eachother’s tests,))

i fall back back into the chiasm of our hunger and I let myself go limp and malleable in the underside of his palms.

hours
later
i
notice
the
blood
from
his
stab
wounds
has
formed
a
thin
crust
along
my
nailbeds
like
the
trace
of
something
that
cannot
be
undone

_

for a week, i write the same sentence: i did not see this coming.

i think of your feet and how they dance with reverence in the base of my ears and i tell myself that your apartment is so close to mine that i can almost hear you tossing and all i can do to keep myself from driving myself over and into your restless hum is to drive through the belly of the night to the twilight instead and when i find her she says that she remembers too and i wake up aching on the side of the road facing the sinking marshes past mammoth valley and they too are defined by the void of their famine that lusts to see what the frozen ice caps that puncture the sky above them see and i cry out to you over and over:

i will rip the chain from your neck
i will rip the chain from your neck
i will rip the chain from your neck

 

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CHATHAM GREY is a PhD candidate in philosophy and women's studies from Stony Brook University. She lives and works in Los Angeles, where she runs a poetry open mic called the P.I.E. Collective.