In my stomach
is a little leaf with half one side torn off
and your name on it in black pen.
Except
that’s a lie; it’s still on the tree
whether or not
you’ll ever know about it.
Even if it falls and curls into itself
in winter. Or is picked off.
Or carried godknowswhere by the wind.
That permanence
keeps me soft at the tips.

I could digest if I had to.
Bite you into neat green shards
and swallow you whole. Or
try. Try.
I wonder if the letters,
rough-hewn grace quiet
across sap-sown verdancy,
skewed in a way I never used to
let you be, would smear and blur
as they slid down my throat.
If the sticky testament
would pool somewhere behind my
breastbone. Make an inkwell.

I think I could paint you then,
lines of calligraphy with
too many flourishes
to recognize the name beneath.
I think I could lick salt off your
lips, and manling, boy with steel eyes,
I know the difference now
between a kiss and erasure.
I think I could swallow my
tongue.

In my dream
we lean in and tell each other,
you are not crying. It’s a secret.
But in the moments before morning,
you bleed into my hands
and spot my fingers with ink.
Leaf, leaf; sunlight finds me speckled,
and I can lose you to
a leaf alone. I want to keep you
in my throat. I want to learn to swallow.

I saw you yesterday. You’re still there
in one syllable, dark intersections
with slender veins in the leaf.
You cross spines like sidewalk cracks.
And I, I inhale, I inhale the sky
and maybe you mingle
with the air against your name against my leaf
(my leaf).
I breathe in. You dot my lungs black.

My hands are beautiful in ink spatters.

I hope you know that.