It starts with me sitting in my bed,
a stack of broken bones,
counting my bruises, my cracks, and my wear and tear.
I’ve been flipping through too many magazines, pictures of women
that look like cheap cherry-flavored candy.
I’m just about to leave
when, suddenly,
I hear a knock at the door.
I click my bones back into place and open wide
to see you standing there,
in your sundress.
The one I told you was my favorite,
and I smile—
like a fault line.
Your image envelopes me like daylight
but when you walk into the room,
you are a solar eclipse in Ancient Egypt:
Absolutely devastating.
Tonight, you like when I’m corny like that.
You bring your hands to my face like a declaration, and I sense it.
You and I are coming to the edge, to the pencil tip, to the roses ever-trembling on the cliff of your lips—
I feel my toes curling underneath the weight of this just before I take the plunge
Girl, you are living, breathing proof that disorder increases in the universe.
My heart skips likes a five year-old  kid on a Pogo stick attempting Hop Scotch for the first time when you kiss me,
when you’re near me, as your mouth blooms to receive me—
We shed our clothes like we are burning, and my
half-digested-love-once-churning-too-large-to-be-released comes dripping
down my chest. Aristos, aristos, aristos—
The first time I heard
that that word meant ‘the best’ I knew
that a wordsmith long ago
had known what it meant to love you.
For one night, I am the whisper swallowed by your tide.
For one night
THIS night
you are angel-blue liquid sunshine
and I am your humble prism, chosen to filter the light—
You fall asleep in my arms. So deeply wrapped in dreams that all nearby alarm clocks
commit suicide,
because your minute-sized hand won’t separate from mine
This night? Defies time.
We are everything we seem.
We are so much more than the most.
We’re in love, or we’re something close—

but when the morning breaks the evening’s seams,
I remember.
You and I,
we got so close.
We were
only ever close
to aristos, aristos, aristos.