the ghost of you the ghost of you still dips my mattress with a warmth I reach for but never achieve – I wake from a sleep that made me forget that you’re no longer within my reach. paint your shape in my impatient pillows like an imprint you’ve left of yourself, I can still taste your Baltic sea skin, taste of wine on my chapped, salted lip, weigh my tongue, make our small lifeboat tip, ache for just one more velveteen sip; you’re my blessing that some call my sin. your hands on my hips haunt my crimson tempest dreams feel your gentlest touch, bruise I pinch ‘til I scream; carve your voice into my soul where you’ve whispered to my secret-keeper skin – take my heart on that plane, dear, and promise you’ll come back and fit it right back in.
you know the colors of my invisible lay bare the fabric of secrets hidden beneath my fears – know me as I long to be known to the white of my bone. yesterday, I found an old notebook, left there by someone I was – pages sticky with truths I never quite knew I forgot. your eyes are the black starry nightsky; they see me with no clouds to hide – don’t look away now, my darling, I’ll vanish forever from sight.
sixteen days the nearing calls of future airplanes call me to you like the song of cicadas you said you heard outside your open window as we laughed – the static in my cheap headphones, my late night and your golden afternoon but here, now, me, you. there’s the echo of your voice over films we hardly watched as we shared lifetimes, stories we each missed when I don’t know how I could not know you for so long and not miss you like I do now, even when I still haven’t touched your hand to mine or breathed the air you know. how could I call you stranger when our first meeting is – not introduction but reunion overdue, and my rib cage creaks and bends, a violin’s string wound too tight through the makeshift corset I wear like a blessing, waiting for your gentle fingertips to find and unravel me.
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Jacqueline Koshorst is a graduate student at the University of Kassel, Germany. She loves fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, and prose, loves words written or spoken, loves queer and female and loud and quiet voices, loves her cat and shelves stacked with books and her impulsive, adventurous people.
