His eyes are sulphur and granite - his touch hot volcanic ash. The picture of you on her wallpaper walls shakes until it shatters and spills, violently, across the floor and down the stairs. In the morning you step on cold glass that brings words to your mouth you'd rather not taste.

Her candied irises draw in sharp breaths
Across a thousand years.
Her name plays with the heartstrings of the wind
And drags in summer storms
To cool hot blood.

“This time,” she said,
Wrapped in my arms and the white cotton sheets,
“We won’t be caught off guard.”

She paused.
The afternoon light crept through the drawn curtains.
“This time...
We’ll cut our own throats.”

She lies out of alligator eyes.
She says, "You'll learn to understand,
It's easier this way."

Under bridges, a blanket of seaweed and mold
Wraps and grows and breathes around her.
She coils beneath a rotting city;
Dank and dark-- she can feel
It's laborious sighs,
Mechanical motions rusting
Under a steel blue sky.

Her forked tongue flicks out of razor and steel,
"You'll want to stay."

She has a ring of diamonds cut from the stars around her finger. Her eyes are silver teardrops - an ocean of blues and greens - encased in scraps of tinfoil and old bicycle chains. She hides her heart in a cookie jar on the highest shelf that she can reach, afraid of something she can't name. She counts all of the promises he has made in the tears that crystallize when he is gone for so long. She sighs softly and slowly turns the ring around.