Coldest Days of Hell

Tracing outlines of lips I will never know, the shadow of embrace threads through my nervous system, and I am aware that even the act of leaning is a theft, stealing warmth from someone who does not deserve to stumble into my gravity. A hand reaches toward me, and ever-so-slightly comes into contact with the tip of my index the kind of hand that would linger without complaint, and I withdraw myself, because to invite it is to write a poem in fire across someone’s life that they never asked to read. I walk in the curve of absence, to bend toward it without breaking, to greet what cannot stay with a reverence that is almost prayer, because even reverence will not forgive the body’s insistence on taking inventory. I pine for a hand that does not recoil, but it is always behind glass, because I must let it know where it belongs Over there, away, and not here not near my skin. I have a habit of noticing how shadows settle into the cracks of someone else’s skin, and I count the moments until they vanish, because I know the way intimacy creeps in unnoticed, and I have no room for intruders. I represent the witness to my own absence, the afterimage of a life erased mid‑pulse, still insisting it once existed watching the future turn its face away in real time holding the shape of a life my body has already vetoed never to arrive.