Love Letter To a Christian
I didn’t care about you.
What I cared about was the core of it, the purity—
that I would willingly offer up my ruin
to be baptized by that love.
I didn’t care about you
such that when you left me
broken by the bayou,
I didn’t read it for what it was—
I read you stained with love,
calling you just one of grief’s verdant skins.
I didn’t care about you.
I cared about the whiteness of feeling—
when being with you meant I didn’t have to feed my own thoughts
and how you’d trace my nakedness in silence behind the milk of your eyes.
So when I was faced with the question
of how to get around your absence
I cast my eyes down, all but fainted,
and disappeared into the abyss of grace.
I didn’t care about the distance
when I could do this in remembrance of you.
Though I doubt you’d understand
which is how we end up back at the beginning,
which is to say
I didn’t care about you.
I didn’t want you as property,
or to make a temple in your bed.
I was holding for the humid,
more concerned with how “something sticky”
is an adjective I could apply
to both your vomit and your spit.
How did you manage to fit a cross in my mouth instead?
Perhaps because I was the one who fed you vomit, I suppose,
that summer in New Orleans,
when the reach of your dick resulted in such a gag reflex,
I had to pay my respects.
I’ve always had a tenderness for the way mothers
regurgitate care into baby birds but
I guess, I just didn’t care about you.
I cared about the Plasmodial Slime Mold
that grew in the tea cup I left waiting for you
by the kitchen sink.
Nettle and chamomile debris eaten
in web like patterns by living decay.
Pink, and sponge-like
I thought to myself
as it spread it’s tendrils across the liquid,
clinging to bubbled glass—
“God, what a lovely cunt.”
This is love’s body, which will be given up for you—
and how it quivered when I flushed it down that porcelain drain.