I should have left when you left and not be
exhausted in a walk-up, years past, wasted fantastic
and underdressed, strenuously cold, cold
and blinding. Steam heat tricks its hissing out to grease

the walls and stick me molded to the sheets.
I must think of you always to know you are not here.
Drawn of it bloody, bitten myself porcelain
and fainted for this mess of shade and floorboard. And now

the smell of maggot, crisp and feeding curbside
on rot and poundcake. Steady feast as you are mine,
fog on this numbered street, this afterlife
reason I cannot see between. My God, I am imperfect.

A heart at my throat. Wishing for a wooded, a slope,
a junction, whatever not knowing where to step,
mound of hybrid branches or dunghill mushroom,
whatever silly from the impact. Bound to you by air

and fleshless and what could almost--
Listen, ’tis just the hour, the awful time--
save me. There are so many ways for a body to yield monstrous.
But I do not know how to die

to be where I would not see you.
Just glass between us, just universe.

--Lynn Melnick