CIGAR FANTASIES

I have this pipe dream of the doorway to my home

being filled with the abundance of your shoulders,

the unmoving light painting our bodies celestial,

and you enshroud my waning shame

with your cashmere tongue.

My friends remind me that it’s really

a cigar fantasy

as I pass by the hotel where we used to burn Monday evenings

down to their wicks and our bellies were round with ill-decisions,

where all the handsome men speak too fast in geometric languages.

Do you still taste the same as you did

in the driver’s seat?

Or has the ash rotted your molars

like Pompeii? 

I keep a jar of quarters for every time

I think I see you on Mount Street.

I have enough now to buy a top-shelf tombstone

for all the bodies you’ve buried 

in the interim of my longing.

You call them by your father’s name as you dig six feet.

How many nights can a girl waste

running until her lungs drown?

In the kaleidoscopic dark, someone will ask what I’m fleeing from,

and I’ll point to the place that reeks of dark chocolate and brass finery,

where your timepiece rattles in a crystal tumbler.

I’ll light it for you if you promise to stay a while, 

I say, exhale swishing through the empty spaces where my molars used to be.

I forgot I gave them to you

for safekeeping, along with all my other favorite things.

Now I’m just a girl 

lugging a tombstone down Berkeley Street.