Who were you in a past life?

• You burned your clothes stitched with Aeropostale,
• rich in lava lamp glow. The fire flickered
• through these memories quicker
• than images of naked old men on Chatroulette
• gazing at your moon-laden skin,
• crawling with apparitions
• and online sadness you costumed
• through singe-red hair extensions.

How were you turned?

• You wanted it to happen. The way you softened¹
• in his husky hands. The way you touched
• in youth group when you were hiding
• in a holy room swollen by night, basting your body
• with cloying shadows. You softened again
• when you wanted him to consume you,
• when your skin crawled to jaundiced and gothic,
• when you knew he’d haunt you in absentia.

How do you kill?

• You asked him to walk you home in the morning
• slurred by birds and chrome clouds shapeshifting
• to omens. You thought you were so cool—
• he said he would leave his girlfriend. He never did.
• That night, he texted you küss mich in the crypts, tempted
• to delete it from your Nokia phone. You were too young
• when he asked to really see you, his body seared
• in the next text, grainy and gray like a graveyard when it rained.

¹ Loosely inspired by Olivia Braley's chapbook, SOFTENING