Phase One: First Encounter
Tiny in my veins, you inserted yourselves into my blood cells and hijacked
amino acids to replicate the RNA code of you and,
cell membranes full of you, my blood cells exploded and flooded
my arteries with even more of you.
Phase Two: Rejection
Every device was a nanotech construct made of you.
Each night my blender deconstructed in front of me
and rebuilt itself in your image. Ten billion microscopic
molecules, each one of which holding in its nucleus
the memory of blond curls, the guilt-love
gravity in your eyes.
Phase Three: Recovery
Say we're living in a multiverse.
It is full of infinite parallel yous, and each night,
I forget one of you.
One down, infinite to go. Two down, infinite to go.
Phase Four: Recovery, cont'd.
Eyelashes plucked and chopped into a fine dust or
ground into a powder and then burned, and the
ash of which then dispersed into the stratosphere
via rocket propulsion, still grow back.
Phase Five: Remembrance
If I cannot remember our legs entangled and a cool
breeze through the curtains and across our skin,
I can remember certain atoms within my heart
entangled with certain atoms on the bottom of your heel.
I can remember how that felt, each day, each bloody pulse.