You Said You Lived Another Life

By Christen Lee

You raised the fluted glass to your parted rouge lips,

silence swirling, thoughts tumbling, melting,

breaking into the shape of words.

And I listened, rode the waves of sound and sadness.

I held you at table’s length while your heart broke onto your dinner plate.

It was your eyes that bled,

not only the amber leaves but also the autumn rain.

You, two years locked behind an unshakeable mind,

and all I could say was, how few have traveled this far,

have plumbed such depths of loss.

You’ve been two years beneath the scorching sun,

begging for sweetness, a small salvation in this obscene desolation,

to salvage a single rose, red petals outstretched, pressed

hard against parched mouth, your body a quicksand of oblivion.

It was magic, you said, the way the stars scintillated,

danced sparks across your canvas of skin.

There’s a godlike hand upon you that raised you from the tomb of sorrow.

Like Lazarus, you were wrapped in gauze, half-alive,

heart beating to the rhythm of the turntable.

It’s now or never, you said, as you wrapped your legs around the night,

stirred the sleeping cosmos inside you, knowing that morning would break

too soon.

Here lingers the aftertaste of fullness,

the sad sway of the weeping moon,

the shadowed warmth of the solstice sun

hiding us from all that we can’t bare to see.

This is how it ends, you said, words pouring

through cloudless gray eyes, filling your empty glass.