Magic with Skin On

by Morgan Nikola-Wren

She is breaking, you see?

he's got a tease in his lips that she would kill to taste, but never can.

He sounds like all the poetry she can never tie around her tongue, fading hopelessly into the distance.

give me life not survival

so give me back myself

i'm homesick for a feeling that has yet to meet my fingers,

it's a struggle to breathe through so many dreams

there is nothing that leaves you feeling quite so small as having to shove all this being into your one allotted body

there's a sea of unsaid roaring through me; shy as white lace waves on a shore, but strong and stubborn enough to carry ships on their back

I would sacrifice days of weeks of months of unwritten poetry to soak up the soft of you

wrap me in roads that never stop winding let's take all our time out on each other

wondering how your eyes became my favorite music,

call me crazy but i swear you've got a wild and ferocious love sleeping in your smile

X .

slip into something more daring than naked more honest than skin

Found out exactly what genius tasted like, glimmering on her lips.

She is wondering when exactly he realized she was not worth anything he had to give.

Now, all she can feel are her guts curdling with the ghosts of everything she is not, clouding their way into the space he left behind. She wishes he had never once touched her! She'd have rather gone ignorant of the delicious rush of possible against her fingers. Never felt deep breaths of could-be, diving down her lungs, coursing their way out through her chest, coiling daring up her spine.

She could never stop being unsplendid, but at least she had him with her. All the powder-keg potential a person could dream of, sometimes just inches from her.

All of her trying made her rigid.

i wish all pain left poetry in its wake

your smile is just my favorite ghost,

you live like a bruise on my brain,

is there a word for needing someone to tell you it's never too late to grow up all over again? is there a word for wondering how you're ever going to tumble your way home if you're not even sure you've ever been there?

would it kill you to carry my name in your smile the way you used to?

do not call her fragile simply because she is in pieces you'll never know what it took to break her

this pain won't be around forever to teach her how she feels beneath it

She slides another stray word into place among them. Watches years of misguided yearning rearrange into something she can barely make out, but wants to.

She takes to bed each night, dreaming herself between sheets of paper, then wakes with ink in the blacks of her eyes, so that the whole world looks dipped in story.

so hungry for adventure, i always used to beg you to weave your bootlaces up your words so i could taste every land you'd been to in your kiss

the terrible truth is anything can look like love if you've got enough lonely in your eyes

and here i am, still insisting every dream that does not hand you over to me is a mistake

IV .

pour me a glass of your favorite grief

every day is a fight to share my secrets with myself

XI . give me a year and i'll be proud to recognize myself for now, i am busy unbecoming all the mistakes i swore i would never melt into "waste" seems such a cruel word for it but what else do you call all this time spent being a stranger to your spirit?

the next time you come at me, with charm in your eyes and a throat full of "would never hurt you," i'll remember that i'm just a mistake your memory couldn't carry, and you're just an apology i'll never hear the air explode into,

She is courting herself. Getting to know the twists and turns of her. Intimately. The way you can only do when you have been shattered. Running your hands up every small piece of you before you put it back into place―or even somewhere entirely different. Because it feels good to remind yourself that some changes are still within your control.

swims across the room to him.

he tastes like every word that has yet to be invented.

she almost thanks him for the way her chest pangs with frantic regret when he slides out her door.

But she is still standing this time.

i cannot say when the no fell out of my words

you were the most beautiful lie i ever pinned to my lips

your kiss is like honey just not the way i'd come to expect: i can't ever decide how i feel about the taste but heavens, how it sticks

i'm ashaed to say how long it's taking to dig your voice out of my veins

I am here. I exist. And I don't need your love to be beautiful, but heaven, how I want it.

Something more than a life whisked right by her, and the question of why she did nothing but simply survive it.

Others just wonder what gives her the right to walk as though the very pavement was made to carry her to something greater than this.

There is, after all, magic in her hands. Maybe there always was.