My ghost boy

the boys & i sit in the back against the windowless wall, knees knocking an awkward windchime, in that house with nails for floorboards

& we watch as lukas gets another coin for being a good boy

as the man with a barbed wire face tells a story about stealing cars at sixteen 

the same age as us, but we are not the same, because i am raw & fresh as a first skinned knee 

& i wonder if it’s true, what the boys tell me between buzzes of cellphone buttons, as if recounting yesterday’s weather, that he took a drill to his face in the bathroom of that motel in santa monica

last winter, back when i was still an open wound & lukas was dying 

back before i knew him in the same way i know his camel cigarettes, the ones i have never once smoked 

but the point of this is to say that the man with the barbed wire face has seen the devil, so i take his word for it when he preaches the twelve steps to heaven

& i take his word for it when lukas looks up at him with eyes like a wildfire, swearing then, round & alive in the vending machine light, that he is his savior 

& then lukas turns to me & i shudder in the heat of the flames, trying to tell him with my closed mouth that i am not his heroine, even though my buttercream thighs make him think otherwise 

but watching him there, elbows on jeans, alight with the possibility of a metamorphosis, 

i believe him when he says that he has rinsed his hands clean & blown his skeletons to smithereens

but out in the biting air of the parking lot under the lightless sky, his knuckles are bruised & bloody

& back at his place, watching the night settle in, i swear i hear a scream from the closet, one so soft & high-pitched i know it must be passing over from the un-dead

& i do not believe in anything anymore

& so, that is all to say, that every night now i sit by the phone, 

knitting my hands into my thighs

waiting for simon to call & tell me that lukas has become just a body, that no savior could bring him back this time 

& when simon tells me how they found him, i will reach for the carpet, hold it in my fist

remembering back to when i believed in the good boy, believed that maybe he held horizon in his mouth

believed he would make it out alive

& i will ask which it was, if it was the heroin or ketamine in a voice so filled with sand it will not be my own

& when he answers, when he says that the remnants of him were found on the floorboards of that house off of hollywood boulevard or in the bathroom of that diner we went to once, 

then i too will be obliterated, bodiless--the opposite of boy 

& i will say, this is exactly like how i imagined it

what does it mean to have been loved by a boy who melted in the waning sun?

does it just mean that i am averse to certain kinds of drugs?