Salem (Slim Lights)
By Samantha Styers
The stink of it makes my head ache.
Her lips taste like ashy poison,
bitter, her tongue as acrid
as the clouds she exhales.
I don't like how she slips
out of bed at night -- how she leaves me to smoke.
I watch her sit, silhouetted in smoke,
the window open to a neon bath, aching
green, purple, red -- onto the slips
of paper marred by my pen, my poison
leaked black onto the scraps like so many sullen, morbid exhales.
Like smoke, violating and acrid.
Fissures along the tiles, cracks spidering up to the ceiling, and acrid
rainwater drips onto porcelain, smoky
with the pollution that a million cars exhale.
The atmosphere aches.
This city is steeped in poison;
This city wears it beneath the lights, like underwear -- a slip.
Eventually, she slips
back into bed, acrid
stink clinging to her body. Her mouth is a stinging poison,
a bee's bite against my own, smoke
flooding the tangle of our tongues. I ache
to let her exhale --
to let her pour into me. But the push, the bliss of an exhalation
must wait till the burning glow slips
just above the horizon, the world's curving ache,
to shine on this city, the acrid
air not deserving even the pitiful warmth. The smoke
of the skies seeps into me. Poison.
Her lips are open, silken, poison
and her breath into me is liquid, the exhale
of her last lungful of the city smoke
and it slips
into my body, pure body, into my heart like acid, acrid,
burning into my fragile lungs. I ache.
She makes me ache for her poison.
Her mouth is sweetly acrid, sweetly acid, but her orgasms are cleansing exhales
that she lets slip into me, polluting me with her smoke.
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