ANNALISA HANSFORD
Abecedarian for My Future Lover
Autumn: the color of bruised peaches. The season I painted your
bones in my breath. The soundtrack of October slicing loneliness straight to the
core. I have wanted you to halve my emptiness like a pear for
decades. Lifetimes. For you, I would gash the New
England clouds from the sky. A trinket for your bedside table. A
fragment of my longing. Because to me, you are a
god in the shape of a girl. You give my sadness a reason to go
home. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I wonder
if you would still love me if I woke up in the shape of a ghost. No pulse,
just marrow rotting into marrow. Promise me this:
keep a piece of me in your back pocket. Whether a
lock of hair, or a faded Polaroid, or a wrinkled love letter. Promise to think of
me when my anatomy bleeds into carcass, to burn my
name into your muscle memory. Until then, let’s
open our future like a bottle of chilled
prosecco. Watch how moments that haven’t been born yet
quiver with a desire to live. Look at our hands. How they’re
ripe with hunger. I dream of being held by you the way a
switchblade dreams of being held by a fist.
Tomorrow, I will want you even more than I do today. I’m asking the
universe to postpone our epilogue a little longer. Instead, let me plant
violets where your limbs only know ache. I’ll
wake up ready to gouge the wounds from your flesh all over again. In a dream,
xerochrysums drown your organs of hurt. You ask me to count the spots on
your body swelling with grief. When you ask how many, I tell you
zero.
Annalisa Hansford’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in The West Review, Vagabond City, and Ghost City Review. They are the editor-in-chief of hand picked poetry and the head poetry editor of The Emerson Review. They are probably listening to Gracie Abrams and drinking peppermint tea.