I aimed my shotgun at the sleeping man. Using guns and slipping into a home always came easy to me. I've never been afraid of getting caught. I've been imprisoned before and adapted. Thrived. I learned how to hunt monsters. They look like us, but there's something else beneath the skin, a dormant predator waiting to strike. He's not the only one. I've had practice. I'm page twenty in the photo album in his safe, the one f...

You couldn't be farther from what I know, maybe it was in the way you move, stirring heat through the night's cold mist, it was so much more to me than a bright flashagainst the dark backdrop we lost our silhouettes in. You wanted to know the animal, what really drives me beneath this nervous gaze, and I wanted to know the sparksbeyond your blushes and sighs, beckoning both a soft touch and the wolf that whispers below. I...

Like marks wiped from a chalkboard, particles spiraling apart, braiding back together unnaturally, I once had command over them, autonomy unquestioned for years. You were possessions, all with a set purpose. Some to make me realize the sudden flash of pain when skin breaks, or how my mother's necklace gleamed, shimmered like the sands we strolled along that day. Some were far more cold, secret skins worn at night when the...

You've already unmade one worldto tether yours to another, all of the numbers and names, a river's cold cleansing hush to meof details far too dangerous to hold.A lens cracking from the strain of tryingto see there has to be more to you, instead of devotion turning me into a cautious ghost, blind to all of time's afflictions.Unable to let anything else out or in, so I just stay as a symbol watching over you, still and dis...

Amelia aims the gun at the front door, pouring sand from a glass vial onto the table. The grains fall, forming patterns identical to her own handwriting. The world has always whispered stories to her, alien languages she can almost skim the oblique surfaces of. Giving her dark and ominous vague flashes. Black bags over heads. Laboratories. Needles. Medical saws. The woman who hunts them, one with violet eyes that can touc...

You'll sail through my blood, the first time I've ever ever been so entirely consumed, an exotic element to you as you pulled me away from monsters As if the telling of those tales spilled war's memory from me. There will be no solidarity to me, love, no origin without cracks or foreign blood coating my restless blade. But you come to me without pretension, with ceaseless devotion no man should question. There will be a w...

You've always known how to bend mewith a note and breaks me with a song, and in between, my love, I know where I belong. Standing in the road to brace for a storm, when I think I can't be your ghost anymore, you pass through me and I absorb all the pain that wrapped around you before I couldn't help you becoming all that I know. So leave a melody for me wherever you decide to go, through falling snow or a summer breeze, I...

I want to still the blinking fragments, ones that time will want to break apart, like ashes and snow swirling through the faint cold sigh of every January wind. I could keep you so close to me, cling to seconds otherwise edited or stolen by memory's shuttering lens, none of the narrative would be lost or translated into unreliable histories. We'll be to remember what soothes one another, what gives us flight when the faul...

When our sleeping bodies contour entirely,nestled in the other's surrendered essence,whether our dreams join like interlacing fingers,or are eras and universes apart,I still want youTo breathe in the night sky,to cradle the stars in your soft hands,and never burn from sneaking awaya fragile piece of the universe.This is what makes you unlike any other,your eyes can be much more than orbsand complex networks of nerves,they...

A knock on the door, as soft and hesitantas your first touch winters ago,when I was falling apart,when my secrets could keep me safefrom what comes after we turn the lights off.It would be wrong to giveso much of myself away,just to summon the warmthof you so near again.To take all I am in the darkand hope it's enough to not cast a shadowover what we were supposed to be.Look into me and see who I really am,not the dark re...

Time moves and unfolds behind your eyes,I see myself when those fragile colored orbsbegin to blossom and constrictbefore you pull away from me. If I am to be nothing more thana bright flash across your sky,hold on to that split secondwhere I am pure energy. Where I make the above an intricate patchworkof electric veins singeing the oxygen,strobing across the land and lightingup all the cold and dark roomsyou thoughtyou le...

There's never been a start or conclusion,only a lock waiting for a key,whether buried beneath earth as hard as frozen clay,or as unknown shapes spiraling just out of reach. You are already as familiar as the cells coursing through the rivers inside methat cannot end until we truly begin,until we chart the specific turnings. A pulse beating softly against mine,morning's first hints of sunlightcutting through the blinds,one...

If the moment arrives where our hands unclasp, I would rather see you leave without a word, to never once glance back at the embers covering me as you exit. I would memorize everything,dissect every syllable and pause when your eyes could no longer meet where mine have always remained. Looking for possible codes and clues,buried like poisoned roots spreading. Turning every hallway in the home we madeinto haunted corridors...

I'll hear you calling out to me no matter where I am, the voice that can pass through walls, flicker among the candle's glowing wick before spreading deep below to crack through winter's ice. Marking the places we've imprinted entire lives on, the lived before and after one another, energies that are the pieces we gave of ourselves, memory's residues mingling to make our shared worlds. The places far beneath that are hold...

We're more than just a simple collection of skin and synapses reacting to one another, more than the blackness sweeping over after a star's collapse. After a constellation enfolds, you are the burst of light, existing only in a space of seconds, to cover me with your radiance and the vapors lacing the still air. The beauty we make together may not stop time's violent bloom from splintering into us, or halt where we drift...