Stephanie in Bloom
The last time we were together you held me down, squeezed my wrists until purple roses bloomed. There’s only space to write about us in the margins now. The world has become more fractured, more confused. My grief is my art. My gift is my pain. I wrap it in packages you’ll never open. I hide them in wardrobes for you to find. I gift you a mirror, glued back together, shards in jigsaw formation, without traces of my dried blood. A mosaic to commemorate each time you dropped the tiny robin’s egg of the union you held in your hands. No excuse as good as the first one. No kamikaze jump as free as the first time. I carry an empty space only you can fill. The body in the street is my own, fingernails dug between cobblestone crackwork, crack-up singsong orchestra. I stuff my corpse with feathers. I write my own obituary.
Painting Credit: Nelson Jaimes