My love is the shape of canine teeth and claw marks
I leave around your neck,
the way I leave poems decaying in an unforgiving landfill —
the gods have turned away in disgust
as I sit and lick, like a rabid dog,
the maggots chipping away from the inside —
the entrails of my grief, all pulled out without mercy,
without a deathbed confession,
without a god to listen.
I long for something else to unfold;
something sacred and beautiful
when you turn my body inside out, but lo.
This is as deep and far as we go.
Tell me, I beseech, does my filth look better inside out,
uncovered, on display,
penetrating your very skin?
Take what you need, love, they are all yours —
my sins, my wounds, my impiety
in exchange for your darkened heart — I’ll spit it out
and swallow it back
down to my underbelly where no one can ever take it —
not you, not the gods, not their fallen, forsaken angels.

Forgive me — forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.
Forgive my unforgiving hands, forgive my unforgiving poems
if our sick, twisted, defilement is all they ever know.

Such a classic mortal blunder to lay
my spine as it erodes, graceless, inelegant
on Galatea’s cold, ivory arms;
such delicate carvings can never be human, look human,
feel human under my lonesome bones.

I long to see you flinch and break
into fine, liquid, rain of dust blinding me,
covering the walls of this room
in a blameless shade of white: a new asylum ward
for my kind of insanity,
you say.
It envelopes like light around my awe
and my forlorn limbs,
tangled with Galatea’s unmoving ones.
I look for comfort within brittle carcasses
scraped of everything they could ever give.

The quiet persists eerily.
But here, Pygmalion’s gifts remain untainted:
the apex of auger shells, the beak of a songbird
the blunted ceriths, the rusty chisels
all impaling my spinal bones.
Yet the sculptor’s kisses, long erased,
the careful carvings, long defaced,
long reduced into a Grecian ruin.
I bury my body on your arms yet they find no rest
against the ghostly pleas of mammalian tusks.

How many for your fingers?
How many for your hair?


Tell me, Galatea, were you carved to bear the weight of
all the sea salt I swallowed as I drowned?
Soften under my meandering thoughts; I long
to see you flinch and break — like all the dead elephants —
any reminder that you yield pliantly to the voice
of the love goddess, that you were once turned human.
Break now, your solid arms, under my own collapse
over the sea foam caught on fire.

I am no longer bending and weeping to pick myself up.
Here it all goes down and ends:
my bones,
and yours,
burning,
snapping.
Nothing —
nothing less glorious will last after us.

— Fray Narte

slice my tongue until the pieces resemble flower petals — until poems tremble on my very lips. on summer afternoons, they will look like the dried amaranths on your bedside table — in a city apartment you left. slice my tongue until the pieces resemble smoky quartz. it will sit quietly — each side showing the wild and quiet ways of aching. slice my tongue until it heals its wounds — until the sunset casts what's left of its light, and maybe my state of decay will finally look beautiful.

to kiss you senseless until i am a seaglass buried deep inside your skin. to lick salt off your palms with paper-cut lips, until each breath has gone haywire. to quietly sigh your name until it baptizes my heathen tongue. oh, the wars i would start; the wars i would end — darling, there is something soothing about all the violent ways i can love you.

i.
the scent of sorrow, hanging in the air
rotting away what's left of this skin.
wrists — sewn shut
are wrists undone:
the morbidity of it all pervades —
this i confess.

ii.
look not. turn not, for
each careful stare, each scornful gaze
has me falling back into darkness;
maybe eurydice has found comfort in its arms.
maybe so have i.

maybe this is how it's always meant to end.

iii.
lately, sunsets no longer melt
into an afterglow —
they just turn into the night.
at least it dims
the futility of drawing each shallow breath
from places filled with smoke and dust;

there used to be something there:
this, i confess.
this, i remember.

there used to be something there.

there used to be something h e r e.


— fray // november, must you be so cruel to my trembling hands left with no heart to break?