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 andi 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.

Thumbs by Lucy Dacus

her radio-wave remedy held me down,
floodlights flatlining along the oncoming road.
both our hands itching to embrace steel beast to soft limb,
to be pulled, metallic, bloodied, esoterically etched into eternity -
but fingers kept vigil on the Wheel.
(which is to say that you had tried this once
and I would try it soon)your eyes front-facing, preyed on animal.
I closed mine and opened yours,
hand-me-downs from your mother,
but both reassuring as deer to concrete bed
that looks likened to her were the sole look-a-likes
a soul severed ties, we both promised.
(which is to say that our bond was based in bane)this is the first time.
a thousand white windmills glitching in summer heat
chase after us, a child racing cars.
you can’t outrun home, but god we did try.
stars stab scars in our skulls, space helmet strainers,
Lucy the soundtrack to our great escape.
(which is to say that only one of us would truly make it out)you assumed I had heard the song before.
(which is to say that you vowed to do good,
this time.
spiting the several preceding stems
who failed reaching sunlight.
who is to say you’ll grow farther than them?)I, silent in my response,
like some locked dialogue video game character.
(which is to say that I felled the tree by the roots.
this is the last time, my intentions were set;
we both needed someone to hold.)