it’s something about the creases around her mouth,
              like cracks in granite,
                     porcelain fracturing—
too young to have smiled wide enough for all these
fissures. from far off, she glints like shattered glass—
      a sugar rush,      a sun-smear,      a smoldering.
heart-shaped sunglasses and quick, gagless swallows;
       this quiet ravaging,     these chipped white teeth.
her smile, leering, too young to have been punched
by so many stone-clenched fists. a mouthful of blood,
      a swish without a swallow,   staining the teeth
that once shone white in the dark. she used to be the
shared heartbeat in a crowd, the same pulse sprinkled
                          from mouth
                                       to mouth
                                               to mouth,
but now, she swings back her head, bashes her face
into the steering wheel, car alarm howling,
     arms flailing,    salt dripping,     all this flush-hot love.
all these touches unreturned,      sweat-soaked mattresses,
growling breath.             love in these shadowed halls,
     in the patter of footsteps,     fingers run along drywall.
love in these silences,       love before the back door
and the scamper across a stanger’s garden,   dirt-caked
     stilettos,     tears snaked dewy along morning skin.
no one else knows her holler—
           the twist of lips,     the chattering of teeth,
                          the hunger left caught in her mouth.
fists beaten on glass,     this spider’s web splintering,
                   silver shards speckling her bare legs.
             dead silence,      a half-beating heart.
someone else should be here,        after all this.
she should be touched like in her drugged-up dreams,
                   benadryl dissolving on her tongue,
but no one sees except the streetlights—hot and hovering and
                                                                                       rolling their eyes.