When cleaning out the closet I find your needles by Suzanne Richardson

Next to a photo album, a shoebox full of mixtapes, a lock of my hair— is your portal glowing like a neon in a liquor store window: OPEN the metal blinks. The door to your other life is ajar as I hold them in my hands, like monster’s teeth, like jewels from outer space, like long stem roses; thorns still on. Boundary lines on a map that mark the parts of you where I have not been, the parts of you, you grow in the dark, the parts of you that sleep whenever I am awake, the parts of you that come out by the dim single bulb of our square bathroom light, your eyes sloshing with tears, your tongue slow and deep and plunging in my throat, plunging in yours. You are the slowest fish when you shoot up, a gentle body of water. I am on the couch next to the ocean. I am drowning in a hot blue liquid. I am weeping into you, we are salt water, a blind bed of eels biting each other for warmth. Your veins are open tonight and when you talk pieces of blue fall out. Hooks in your arm you filet yourself. You are the doctor and the patient and you always need more medicine. Only on the other side can you see yourself clearly and you can’t see me at all. The saline of your soul blurring.

You are the deepest rabbit hole, the scariest ride at the carnival, and when I tell you this, you say, I love you, I love you, get off.

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about the author:

Suzanne Richardson earned her MFA at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She currently lives in Utica, New York where she teaches English and creative writing at Utica College. More of her work can be found here

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