With Her Six Words Etched in My Skull...

Phoenix Rising

She masks her love in sardonic laughter, diagrams

her breaking point with chalk, maps of boundaries.

She says, “We don’t mix well, I’m oil, you’re vinegar

or water; I’m no chef, I just blow smoke.”

It’s too scary for love to be written in cursive on her spine and her heart

is too fragile a package. She says,

“I’m use to packaging other’s pain, it’s normal to hate

me.” Tries to mask the scent of fear in a strong stature, the unmarked change

in her spine. She stiffens

at the thought of weakness, chalk outlines of her tiny deaths

exhaling the smoke of burning funeral pyres

where tears are as good as oil.

Oil paint mosaics of lust have smeared with live creating

an unwanted package, a miserable masterpiece. Alone

she smokes long unlit cigarettes, leaning against life, wearing

a ceramic mask of cool confidence; feelings,

momentary butterflies, chalked up to indigestion—bad food—

she imagined tingles on her spine.

Sometimes, spines have been known to compress due to pressure, grinding axes

and bones make sharp edges, not body oils, unable to move without stabbing;

chalk-up inability to change to re-learning

history. She is packaged jade: smooth and hard. For years, she’s juggled

her handful of makeshift masks or she hid

underneath a thick screen, walls of smoke.

Through the smoke clouds, she watches a wounded back disappear, sees

her red handprints, a burden of proof, seared in her lover’s spine

time can’t mask the force of a shove, unwillingness

to oil a rusty heart, locked and lost

packaged to survive life, a war?

She never crossed the dividing chalk line, just sat

in her self-made cell marking off victims in chalk, comforting herself

with smoke, matching black lungs. She makes

perfect packages of heartaches, numbs

the tingles in her spine. Remembering to keep

her steel doors well-oiled and ever-revolving, someone has to perfect

wearing masks.

When love tries to ease the mask away, erase the chalk lines, she disappears

in the smoke of her oil-fire tears, off

to package her heart along with the awkward tingle in her spine.