I Breathed You First, Even Though He Claimed You
by Maya Kanwal

That you were forbidden, not to be had, was something I had assumed—but only until the moment I brushed raven curls out of your eyes. That drenched winter morning you were still new to our town. You passed by my mist-laden window all kohl-lined eyes and plum lips, then you slipped in the mud at my threshold.
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i watched as you turned
two-and-a-half
times in the
air after

you had failed and
failed and failed and
failed and failed and
failed and failed and
failed and failed and
failed

fourteen years later
they still sell your video games in shops
and i question your motivations
and what i learnt

i think a lot of things
i think this may have been the street i was born on
this is a marble floor
this is the introduction to a great new experience
i think i will call it famous eulogies
or maybe auto erotic wedding announcements

        smoke is not a gas
        i am as content as a state of matter

youd be able to find it somewhere in the hills outside pinnacles
itd be in a box beneath a desk in a cottage rented by a young couple for the weekend

        pulp
        cute things

“Your beard is killing me,” he said to me without even attempting to bury his accusatory tone. “It’s killing me.”

They can never come back, once they leave their comfortable home. Words, that is. Those words split hairs. How could he say that?

“How could you say that?” I said to him. There was no blood running through his veins. Only ice. Ice cold cheap beer blood. Only ice. Ice cold cheap beer blood. I’m sure he knew how much my beard meant to me. How painstakingly I cultivated my hair follicles. He knew how each day would go. He had experienced the madness first hand. He had a beard of his own. How could he say that? This was a vicious assassination of the character of beards. How dare he accuse my beard of such atrocities.