my beloved, IV

you let me take and eat
the body you kept offering up
salted, trembling, half-lit with want

i said this was sacred
while something in me rotted soft as fruit
in the dark

i was already dividing myself
into betrayer and beloved
tongue split down the middle
one half praying
the other counting the ways to disappear

i swear i tried to pour everything into you
every second i was allowed
like blood into a basin already cracked
like devotion could outpace decay

but love like ours—
it gnaws
it eats from the inside out
it makes a cathedral of bone
and then leaves it empty

I kept mistaking hunger for holiness
we kept kneeling at each other’s mouths
as if absolution could be bitten, swallowed
as if sin could dissolve in bathwater

and now—
you are gone

not in the dramatic way i always imagined
no thunder, no splitting sky
just absence

quiet and complete
like a body finally finished with breathing

everything we touched
has cooled
the water is still
the air is dry
my hands don’t remember yours
until they do—
and then it’s unbearable

but listen—
i will not curse it
not this

i will keep the memory
like a relic that still hums faintly
like a wound that refuses to close clean

i will remember how it felt
to be seen
to be wanted
to be ruined gently
by someone who knew how to stay

you were not nothing
we were not nothing
even if it ends here
even if it had to

i lay it down now—
all of it—
the water, the heat, the hunger, the lies, the love

i bury it in my own body
where it has always lived
and for once
i let it rest