The Slaughterhouse

The mundane will save me. It promised to.

I will swallow it the way vitiligo swallows melanin,

the way a whale swallows plankton,

the way you swallowed my heart.

March is a slaughterhouse and I am a little lamb.

Your thin voice sets me alight

and my skin puckers with each word that drips from your lips.

Summer is over and the marigolds are melting.

I kiss each flower I wander over in the hopes of

cross pollination and the creation of a new species

the scientists would name after me. Or you,

since it would be your name trapped between my teeth.

Each droplet of rain burns like a bullet

as I whisper my love for you into a conch shell.

Please hold it up to your ear one day?

God, I have so much love to give,

it wells up in my eyes but refuses to spill over.

Slowly, it stagnates and starts to grow algae,

and this is how I decay and rot -

full of love and unable to share it with you.