I cover my lips in toothpaste

and pretend I am kissing Mr. Colgate himself.

I avenge my sister’s death

which either will happen, has always happened,

or never happened at all.

I trace my body in chalk and yellow caution tape. I tongue

a glass whiteboard. I stab myself with a Swiss Army knife

while trying to open a package from China.

I get ignored. I ignore, but mostly I get

ignored by you.

I am waiting for a pixelated Godot.

I break up with my fantasy. I stop thinking of you before bed at night

or if I do

I am thinking of only your ghost, heavy against my hips

it feels real but I know imaginary you only exists

in the moment that I choose to summon her from the brink of oblivion.

I call you mine in tongues that no human could parse.

Code me into you like binary, turn my body into a tattoo of ones

and zeroes and the spaces in between the lines of a paper.

I oscillate on your margins.

Oh, let me taste the acrid sweat, the powerful aphrodisiac of panic

the recipe of your lips just one last time.

Let me burn it into hippocampal stuttering,

twist the fibers of my future.