Shapeshifter

Tommy Bracken is fire and ice. His words spit at me searing blame, blame, blame across my forehead. Then in a moment he transforms. Cooling to a frozen, solid block of resentment. My words slip-sliding off his skin. How does someone whose face you could trace by heart suddenly become a stranger? Yet there is that flicker in the depth of his dark, foreign eyes; I think I recognize something. Or maybe it’s just my reflection. Tonight I climb the stairs; I choose again. I slip under the covers and shape myself against him into a space that we can share. The heat from his familiar back radiates towards me; I get chills.

Tyler Elizabeth

You sat in the dark and you waited.
You were hidden from the world, but not from my heart.
The sounds you heard were foreign and harsh;
Can a noise feel cold?

Gone, the soft humming of your hiding place.
Gone, the safe walls of my skin, the crook of my arm.
I wept and you waited;
Can home be a person not a place?

I wore a path into the floorboards by your bedside – sacred ground now.
I touch new wrinkles near my eyes;
Precious signs of your existence.
Should that joy be the scars left from suffering?

Blood of my blood.
The very physicality of love is its trademark.
Marking its territory all over us.
What gift is this life?

Whispered or boomed into existence by the very voice of Love.