the devil's gymnastics

they’d called it the devil’s gymnastics
the way you’d played on lines,
cut legs with your prize-in-the-box cunt glinting;
cut smiles thick with saliva. you were everyone’s
perfect little pink-girl. the body on the block,
all sex no soul. all hurt no heart.

but you were too busy to notice, popping foam capsules
with your just-add-water spirituality. “na-mu-myou-hou-ren-ge-kyou”
sounded cooler in the movies, or when your grandma
had heaved at it on hilltops, frantic lungs,
meaning it more than you ever would. and in the same spirit,
when you fell asleep and your skin became placenta, it was she
who lathered you in boiling oil until you were gorgeous enough
to leave her alone and never come back.

--

when i’d asked why you’d been so stupid;
you’d said “don’t you know dead girls got no brains?”
balance-beaming up at me, daring my answer.

i did not have an answer.
i did not need an answer,
because i’d been so certain that
with you as the gymnast

no fall was too far,
no rope too thin,
no dream too sweet,

to tempt departure’s rise to its feet.

--

and i hadn’t been wrong, for it was you
who’d been tempted.
and it was by your call to convalescence
that departure fell to its knees.

but in the wake of that call,
i’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference.
hell, once the wave-warps washed away
it was too easy to sway the scene for spaces
where your breathing would’ve been.

i spent (forever) too long in those spaces, blaming myself
for all things you would’ve thanked me for,
flattening your body against the ages of rocks,
pulling apart your hair for tunnels through your sight
which had been so enchanted by the sky
‘till the sun side-eyed it into char,
and i shut the skin over it (forever).

you’d had an orangey sheen in that sun,
but oddly enough, you hadn’t smelled like orange.
you hadn’t smelled like colors at all.

and i can remember the space inside my palms—
the warm splinters of morning breath
—when i pressed them ‘cross my face.
and the way that same sheen shone
though my fingers, when i looked at you
and you were smiling, and

i couldn’t help it.
i smiled too.

--

you’d made such a pretty corpse;
your mother would’ve either been proud
or jealous. you cleaned up way better than she did,
with your frozen meat still ripe and buoyant, eye-charringly beautiful
in ways she could only imitate through glass.

oh, you would’ve loved it, how the sky was bright-white,
and the bone-picking felt like apple-bobbing,
and everyone brought seashells instead of koden.

--

naturally, people called it selfish.
and they mourned you, selfishly.
they mourned your cunt, they mourned your smile,
and they did not care that you were happy
at their expense. as though happiness
was not it’s own price to pay.

but you had texted me the last of your love, happily so.
it was the failsafe of an urn built for speed—
you had wanted to live inside the hills,
to be alive as they were.

--

your grandmother had pressed your ashes through her stomach
and chanted the hokke-kyou. she carved three deep lines
in your stone, instinctually, because she knew that someone like you
would be facing the serpents in the sanzu. she wouldn’t stop worrying
because she knew that they would bite at your ankles,
and that they would gore your spirit whole.

--

so it’s a shame, really,
that with your body twisted in green/
carrying an orangey sheen
everything in you was the lights.

and for all the days you’d rotted out,
with the smell of your skin unlike colors
why it was plain as the hills, my dear:

in the farthest fall
of the thinnest rope
of the sweetest dream

you came alive.