ZOEY MORRIS

Love Letters

I went to Glasgow, Kentucky, on the Fourth of July.

Misfortune grew along the banks as I walked,

and music wove through the air like smoke

from the red Toyota where we fell in love.

I didn’t know I could sing like that—bits and pieces 

drifting through the sun-drenched days of summer

when we took our time, when love was some sort of virtue.

It was an intermezzo with a conversational lilt.

You were too absorbed in the music to hear me:

You must be wild sometimes to keep me happy. 

You must beg to feel something unsafe.

To keep me stable, to keep me from being 

thrown from the delicate balance of impulse,

to keep me from drowning underneath the lake house.

You’re honest to god a good person at heart, burning 

into my skin soft-spoken melodies of your name and mine.

You’re an honest-to-god ghost, opening up my lacerations, 

making me bleed anew, making me sick again

at the magnitude of every new surrender.

You're honest to god like a foreign language,

only ever serving your absolutes.

I’d sit in my casket and sculpt you out of clay:

a nose, which I simply adore—in an invasive way;

a mouth, raw and animalistic, a hauntingly present image;

two eyes, wonderfully translucent, opposite my predatory gaze.

Then, I’d hack away at it with the bluntest blade in the drawer.

You’d probably be doing the world a favor if you

broke off both of my hands.

You’re honest to god something that makes me afraid,

something lacking a single tarnish to its heart—

Do you want to get married? Do you want to have kids?

Something that makes me dream of us dying together—

Should we just buck up and do it in a practice room?

We’d feel wonderfully naked, we’d be like my parents,

who can’t stop fucking arguing. The music stops— 

how much did you hear?