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I have forced nothing out of my life
except love
and its ten thousand variations.
I bleed on nobody's carpet
except my own
which I dyed red just for this purpose.
I want nothing from you
except you
and every skeletal bone from your past.
I want your present too
and your future and your death
so that I may be the one
to carry you into the next life.
I want to be laid beside you
in a grave below roots and detection
in the same coffin
so that we can be put to rest
front to front, our mouths touching.
It's all I can handle. The wet weeping
of rain. The sky consumed with shadow.
Chasing him in my sleep, miles pass
in minutes. He is quick to show off
his glorious hair and I am too slow. As
my hand reaches out to touch, he's gone.
That I loved you even in childhood
at an age when I still confused
dust with grief, rustling leaves
for whispers.
That I wrote your name in notebooks
and on the underbellies of playground
slides, that I carved you into my
flesh with a pin dipped in ink.
Where differences flourished
in terms of peoples' lives but mainly
their purpose in life, I used my time
between childhood and madness
to express this need, informing the trees
with my pocket knife. I was nagged
through every school day by love's
bitterness and by its dynamic wings.
That I love you still, regardless of who
it wounds, shamelessly. And that I
will continue to love you the rest of my life
and when I enter into that other life
where everything is mute, by the immensity
for all that I was, I will love you
until all the world closes in on itself.
Listen, you will be dead and I will still love you.
Lisa Zaran's latest works can be found in two anthologies, Velvet Avalanche and Words-Myth The First. Web-wise, work should be up or is forthcoming in Mastodon Dentist, The Dande Review, Chantarelle's Notebook, Dispatch, Juked, Winamop, Feathertale and a few others.