RIVERS

your skin is paperthin, scars marring hands like papercuts, 
fingernails digging in like shovels desperate to reach some unspoken deific treasure

but they dug too far, hitting the purplebluegreen rivers carved in the wrong place by

a childish cartographer, fatal mistake. 
 
my skin is paperwhite and yet i feel the mould growing beneath the surface. i

think about how your house used to be by the river 
and one day your hands turned inside out, exposing the red mess of roadmaps, and

my stomach turned the wrong way round but i turned out fine and 
 
i sometimes think the snowdrops will suffocate the grass. and 
isn’t it sad how lambs are born white but die red? purity has the greatest capacity for decay. and

isn’t it sad how i held your body like a newborn lamb clothed in christening dress white, skin

scarred with empty words carved by a carnivorous cartographer. 
 
the valves of my heart are ripped open and choked with salt water, your sockets clotted with crimson,

mine catching tears like flies in cobwebs. my blood is meek and mild and it never dressed in red

adorned with oxygen and escaped through my skin but my brain rots from the corner where i buried

your bones. i am sick but cannot die. you were flourishing but died anyway.