Mouth wide, bloody and pleading, palms extended, my need is ugly and unrelenting. Long after my head has processed the loss and my hands have adjusted to the strange empty air, there is still
my traitor heart to contend with, hungry and howling.

The larger pieces fall away quickly and details too specific to weigh become ether and drift. Those things which remain linger like smoke, yellowing the light, casting dirty shadows. Remnants of smells, coffee, and amber, wet fingerprints like bruises, salty lips cracked and
forgotten.

Sometime later, obsolete messages appear like harbingers. Long after dreams of rescue have been discarded, strange fortunes told in hindsight wash up along the shoreline. These warnings, of lukewarm sex and tepid tongues, come too late to save us.

The heat of betrayal and oaths disavowed burn away flesh, leaving only teeth and bones. Artifacts of a story told in reverse. What remains is only the forgetting, which wears away at this story like water along stone, slowly erasing details and changing the landscape.

Suzanne Lea is a coffee drinking, bleeding-heart liberal, bookworm. She has been published in numerous online and print journals, including the anthology Crooked Letter i: Coming Out in the South, with a foreword by Dorothy Allison, published by New South Books.