Your mealy curls are a nest of black ants squashed to death
In bed and drowning
By the hill of sweat between us

How do moist lips running across my own feel
Hegemonic and corroded as machinery

Switzerland in February is a lamb being sheared
So the path to K Kiosk may wear a fleece coat.

Breakfast comes in a box of Lucky Charms
Small as my palm, and a sleeve of
Fox’s party rings to share in silence;
Not out of a desire to eat, but in an analogue of
Unspoken recluse within our rental car.

You look nearly half-born in your ashen flesh,
As if unprepared for the journey,
Having left something behind.

Sitting adjacent to me, your legs are folded bilaterally.
A lawn chair for my handbag.
They jolt as the car growls to life.

Between us, even a stale coffee
Begins to froth with angst, spitting
Faint flecks of cocoa all over the seats.
Reaching over to sedate it, I gently imprint with coral lipstick
A heart upon its gill.
The driver mutters like an exasperated babysitter.

Picture specks of menthol green, clouded by frost, like a mood ring.
If you’d looked out the window just then, you’d have caught
A lone bird pawing offhandedly at the
Blistered surface of Lake Zurich.  

At 10,000 kilometres away from home, I am unmoored,
Yet not away long enough to send
Rambling, sentimental postcards back.

There is romance found in ingratiation, in these chaste doilies, suffering implicitly beneath the burden of ***** bowls. Here’s one, illuminated as a pinball machine when you rattle that dung-brown stain about its shrivelled pupil. Above it, a cataract of steam squirms about in unalarming routine.

So many nights I adulterated merely for lack of better days were given credence by the gimpy sun, turned away with its blouse undone, and ****** back to the chalkboard. Somewhere along the past few days I must have become bedridden, indentured to prickly sponge baths by that ****** tongue.

How I’d like to stay sedated now. Another day of inoculation becomes an alibi for the adhesion of this numbness inducted to the soft-boiled meat of my temples, combing out my shoulder blades, running down my legs...

Stupidly, I almost feel a sense of superiority in not learning any faces among the indiscrete convoys of whitish heads popping in now and then, with the subordinate arousal of stiff knuckles, or other things compressed inward by their own come-hither fervor.

“You talk too much, you worry me to death…”

Precocious baby, tempered to a china-blue hue, you
Had not been ripe as a morning glory
Before riots mongered in the plasma of your shapeless head.

Haunting as an omen, you
Had drank from the cord of my cold-blooded artery.
Turned my insides out like a shimmering dime bag
As we fell to the earth.

I take the long way home after Lydia’s wedding
down 67 into the cemetery off the highway
I stop at your grave where I’m surprised to find
you finally have a headstone—
They’ve moved all of the porcelain angel figurines into a heap, I gingerly peel them out of
the weeds and find the grass yellowing beneath their tiny wings

Lydia got married today, she looked beautiful. Your mom—you know her, she said you were here. a beat, thunder, like carillon bells, rumbles in the south. The bottom of an incus cloud, thick and flinty, rolls over the Wet Mountains
I looked beautiful too
The sprinklers turn on across the service walk,
long jets of white water


I’m not angry, Thomas. It’s okay.


I love you.


.

3 a.m.

the dying town, dark moon,
the wolf lurks in a concrete tomb.

fallen friends and picnics at the graveyard,
empty stores and sidewalk ******.

streets of sorrow--
one-way roads to no tomorrow.

shadowed eyes, whispers in bars,
fallen angels, shooting stars.

sirens wail the ****** night,
and in every traffic light burned red
time never stops for the dead.

the ****** on the corner.
none to morn her fate,
a wink and a whisper,
"do you want to go on a date?"

the black butterfly,
soul of sorrow,
no echo, no refrain,
lost in silence, bound by pain.

One night, I lay on the roof of my uncle’s car,
the hush of metal beneath my back,
the sky a cathedral of stars above me.
I was ten—
barefoot, breathless,
a soft creature still untouched by the weight of knowing.

I gazed upward,
as if the constellations could answer questions
I didn’t yet know how to ask.

And a strange thought drifted through the dark:
Will I remember this?
This stillness, this smallness,
this girl stretched across a car roof
believing the stars were close enough to touch.

Now I wonder—
how odd it is to know someone so well
who knows nothing of me.
She lives in my marrow,
but I am a ghost to her.
A whisper never spoken.
A future never imagined.

She couldn’t have foreseen
the weight I would carry,
the cracks I’d survive,
the nights I would look up,
but no longer feel wonder.

Did she know
we would be alright?
Or that “alright” would mean enduring
a thousand quiet heartbreaks
before finding the strength
to reach for the stars again?

If I could fold the sky and speak through time,
I’d tell her—
You made it. You did so well.
Thank you for holding on when it was hardest.
Thank you for dreaming when the world was still kind.
You planted the seeds.
I only grew from your light.

And to the woman I am yet to meet—
the future self still waiting in the wings of time—
I don’t know your face,
only the shimmer of your possibility.

But I promise you this:
I will keep going.
For you.
Through every storm,
every silence,
every starless night.

Know me
as the girl who stayed.
Who bore the weight.
Who held on.

And when it's your turn—
fly.

where the eye understands the light &
the thought is not a forbidden zone
the sand is blue, the escape slow
into quietude

there we discover that
the tears have their own dying
dreams are not birds without sky
the prayers of the earth are heard by the trees

when I take you inside my temples
there the blood boils like a secret
from the depth of the moon

Like a fiery ribbon waving in the
wind, love once waved at me from
the balcony and wrapped my heart
with its choking burning inferno.

I saw magic within its blaze,
I thought it burned just for me.
I wasn't wrong it definitely burned
just for me, the wizard meant to hurt
me and steal my innocence.

The wizard was a fraud, a codfish out
of water. When I showed strength
he got hotter and threw me into
the fire.

He used me as fuel to feed
his fragile ego and tiny IQ.

As I weathered underneath
his heatwave, he mocked and
belittled me tried to steal
my power.

I felt useless, ugly and unwanted,
everything I did was not enough for
the wizard, he is a ruined beasty
with jagged teeth and an evil soul always ready to devour my self
esteem. His broken mind never
understood time or love, all he
wanted was for me to suffer.

I had to build a bridge between us
to protect myself from his illusions  
and cold heartedness, before he
ruined me and left ashes in my place.
I slowly grew wings of knowledge
and support from my community,
I built boundaries and got stronger,
I gave him to the wolves and took
back my powers.

I let him go and learned to accept
he never loved me, he wanted my life
and money, he wasn't a wizard
he is a monster.

©️ 2025 By Amanda Shelton