bloodrot

I am touching the hem of your jeans. The elastic snapping like my stitches I rip, the blood seeps in with oxygen. And with each breath of the blood-soaked air, comes a calmness washing over earth’s tide. The moon is rotting in the sky, its milk curdled with grief. It drips onto your collarbone wipe from sour skin The trees gnaw their limbs to bone in winter’s starving life I press my palm to their bark splinters to my soul A scream blooms in the throat a black orchid petals sewn from silence no one dares pluck. Your absence is a thunderstorm pressed behind the ribs. It rains inward, soundless screams Even the sea forgets how to rise. gulls drop like secrets, their wings folding into the hush of unspoken names. Now, the air is still. Skin no longer flinches. Even rot loses its stench when nothing is left to decay. A pulse once echoed here now moss grows in its place. Teeth buried under roots hunger without names. The wind speaks in tongues no mouth remembers. Somewhere, the forest bows to a god made of forgetting.