fleurishes:

You ate everything that day.

Pools, change purses, sweaters, pavement, 
butterfly wings, leaves, watermelon seeds

that three dollar china set you ended 
up paying twenty dollars for

the fingerprints on the wine glass stained the color poinsettia, 
candle wicks, a seashell necklace, blankets, pillows,
flight, that replica of Starry, Starry Night, apple peels

that vial of tears you swear came from Ariel herself,
coffee beans, words, violin strings, church steeples,
secrets whispered behind children’s cupped palms

I don’t know where you got your appetite from
and when I asked you

You licked your fingers and grinned
(I swear I saw some sunlight caught between your teeth)
and you told me: 

“You are what you eat.”

When I finally thought you were finished, 
you came back to me with your stomach

singly faintly of lost moons and birch trees.

You put your arms around me like I was a 
burn victim and maybe I was at the time, 
and it turns out that teeth are 
tiny windows into things.

And I know what it feels like now to have
someone eat through my ribs to this noisy heart
orchestrating the clock of my body 
with the music notes scrawled on my lungs.

You ate those, too.