Midnight peeled away like skin from fruit,
and the sheets became a furnace, cotton burning at the root,
her silhouette still pressed into the dark behind my eyes,
the phantom weight of hipbones and the salt between her thighs.
Concupiscent and restless, I am ruined by the thought
of the hollow at her collarbone where perfume pools and caught —
the way it lingered hours past the moment she had gone,
and I breathe the ghost of jasmine while the ceiling hums along.
Three a.m. keeps stretching like a body being bared,
every second is a peeling back of something undeclared,
and the blood won’t slow its sermon, and the pulse won’t find its peace,
and the wanting is a fever that the darkness won’t release.
She wore that dress like water wears a stone — slow and sure,
and the memory of hemline brushing kneecap is the cure
I can’t swallow, can’t administer, can’t pour into a vein,
just the libidinous replay and the exquisite refrain.
The mattress holds her absence like a mold pressed into clay,
but this isn’t grief or sorrow — this is hunger on display,
the rapacious kind, the kind that makes the jaw go tight,
the tumescent, aching, burning, wide-awake-all-goddamn-night.
I would pull her through the doorframe like a tide pulls back the sand,
I would trace the topographic inch of everything unplanned,
the dip below the belly and the arc above the spine,
every contour incandescent, every territory mine.
Three a.m. keeps stretching like a body being bared,
every second is a peeling back of something undeclared,
and the blood won’t slow its sermon, and the pulse won’t find its peace,
and the wanting is a fever that the darkness won’t release.