Three Poems by Sloane Eliot

there will be bruises

Dark bar, dark stares in candle light
champagne on tap, funneled into my mouth
with alarming speed to
keep from thinking the myriad ways in which
i hate you.

Your thinning hair and skinny lips and your
itching skin and smelling clothes;
you left a sock in my room
and it reeked of you
for days.

Your big talk of your slick tongue and
how it would disseminate pressure
on my neck in specific patterns that would be
so. distinctly. “you”.
Not like these present day bruises
from some lesser god
which you cover, moving my hair
over my shoulder to block your view.

I still taste Your spit in My mouth and
the playful violence we’ve established
that now has borne holes in me;
sucking, needful pits that have left
me drawn and,
nearing quartering, I cry out to you
and any like you
for pity
or mercy
or a pittance of hope and some
Remittance which is owed.

For wasn’t I a friend to you
when you asked, didn’t i oblige?

---

breakup poems

i am sick with the love i feel
overcome by it in great feverish waves
sweating and freezing
in turns
under covers
alone
sleeping for days then
not at all

i am sick with the love i feel
whole swaths of my innards
turn black and cancerous and harden
i begin to slip out of this human shape, to
feel my shell weaken, wait for its discard

i am sick with the love i feel
starved and
all fire to touch
my skin
sparks,
burns,
slips away like ash.
i am engulfed in flame.

i am sick with the love i feel
i wait it out
withdrawal
sweats seeping out in dewish beads
across my brow

i am sick with the love i feel
in my guts,
churning,
then spilling out across the floor.

i am sick with the love i feel
though for months i resisted, raged
against the dying of the light

i am sick with the love i feel and
it’s terminal; deep in my marrow,
the futility lives inside my cells

i am sick with the love i feel
it eats up my blood
the white rush to heal slows and
weakens in dejection

i am bedridden with the love i feel
the rot has taken hold inside and
buzzards circle outside and
a man in black writes my will and testaments
my pores swell and burst green pus

i am dead from the love i felt
my body is black and
blue and all
open sores and
leprous, but you should know
that my last labored breaths
were hopeful
waiting for death’s embrace.

---

bones

i get sad when i shower now. i see the soap you handed to me, standing side by side in the warm plenteous water less than a week ago and i remember your hands on the bottle, like I remember your hands on me, and i know soon it will be empty, and then gone, like us, and i’ll have no choice but to toss it into the garbage bin with your memory all over it like that, sunk into the plastic, part of it, and you can call me a romantic, but i’ve never been very good at letting go.

i can still feel your fingers interlaced with mine — not one, but both hands gripping the other’s tightly as we cross that border into sleep, as if we’re afraid to lose one another on the other side. and this was how we went, nightly, locked together in these little ways, never not touching, always moving legs between legs and heads on shoulders and fingers between fingers until we were almost one entity, tangled and imperfect, all skinny useless limbs and clumsily pieced together, but together nonetheless.

i want to feel your bones on my bones, still. but i’ve felt them too intensely, those bones of yours on mine. i’ve felt your knuckles graze my cheek and the sticky wetness of the blood it left behind. i’ve felt your fingertips, all dug into the sinews of my throat; felt elbows on breastbone, knees all down my shins. i should want nothing more to do with your bones. if my bones break, I want to be the one who breaks them still, i watch a little sadly as the bruises fade away.

do you remember the child you put in my gut? that perfect union, all blood and genes interlaced like fingers before sleep. when we cut it out of me, we drew closer in the space it left behind.
our bones are all fused together now; sin is a glue and it binds us.
when i kill you, it will be a suicide.
when the soap runs out and I throw you away, I throw myself away too.

---

about the author:

Sloane Eliot is a piece of fiction living some kind of reality in Brooklyn. You can find her on Tumblr and Twitter most days.