Your scent lingered on the floor
That he used to step on. I put
My cheeks on your olfactory remnants
And absorb you, the shrill traces of your
Skin, glued to depression, stigmatised
By the act of needing more, wanting more.
I imagine your lips and touch them in my mind.
It can never be. It is an image that rests.
It doesn’t want to know better.
It has breathed you in already.
A fantasy engulfed and transparent,
Contracting into thin air and away on people’s foreheads.
I think about your death as if it already happened
And am slightly disgusted, yet merciful, your arms
Feel foreign to me, threatening after all, I’ve tried so
Hard to walk in all the directions unknown to you.
I’ve been those women, I’ve acted like them,
Looked and smelled like them, it is a voice distilled,
I know what you did with them, I did it too,
I try to love them unlike you.
I turn the pages of my book
And forget you were ever there.
I long for her voice to reappear from
Within the margins, the halos, the tenderness
Of her gestures, the ability to give it her all,
The signs of love over her eyebrows, her face,
And I surrender and smile and sense that she’s still here.
Croque-Melpomene 