the ghost of you; you know the colors of my invisible; sixteen days

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.

*****

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.