Rings Let

by Sophia Warren

Frigid nothingness

My legs wrapped around your torso

and I wept into your warm shoulder.

Pressed my cheek against your death.

Everything in between.

The way the hairs on my arms rise in both the warmth of the sun

and in the floating frost bursting into prisms against my windshield.

Nothing in your eyes but open pupils and empty anger.

You flipped me off across the grocery store parking lot, the same fingers that grasped around my spine. Called me a bitch, our friends laughing as I wove a blanket between rusted cars with my cart of white bread and cheap wine, prying open my trunk with the broken lock and laying plastic bags down against the beer soaked carpet, stale-odored remnants of the cans thrust on to conveyor belts, a beep response to each ten cents back appeared on the screen before me like a holy offering to someone who doesn’t deserve it. You know as well as I that no one can really afford toilet paper.

You didn’t drink with me any longer. 

I knew where you hid;

there were no kisses between eyelashes and noses rubbed against one another

in the twin bed we shared that one summer.

I could stick my pinky in your perfect ringlets,

but my fingers couldn’t reach as you turned oily,

my grip lost amongst your teeth 

gnashed at my gnarled hands,

tormented into tangled branches. 

I thought you’d lay me down on sand;

you buried me beneath hardened soil.

 I felt no hot breath against my creamy neck. 

The heartbeat was gone and I was suffocated by your lifeless grip.