Written by Melissa Lemay

This is written as a contrapuntal. The italicized lines are a poem by themselves, the unitalicized lines are a poem by themselves, then the two unite to form another poem. Separately, the poems each tell of one experience in a collection of shared experiences.

I longed to know what your body looked like,

as it lay, decomposing on the floor;

longing slept in me–

your body mingled with concrete’s pores.

I drunk in your smile those first moments,

punch drunk, I never thought we’d meet our end,

as I dreamed endlessly.

Now the blowflies, your skin, they rend;

in the dark, on the floor,

you’ve been cold, dissipating alone.

We made love for the first time animalistically–

I wonder how long before flesh fell from bone.

Fireworks sparked in the night,

reality left your eyes covered in chemicals

as your body called for mine–

fleetingly, my thoughts chimerical,

climaxing rhythmically.

love’s death song, ephemeral.

We were spines melting into one;

our organs together were temporal and atemporal.

Longing sleeps in me

to return to the start,

becoming so undone,

to before the beating from your heart

stolen by a moment

was eaten by aphids;

where God only knows

the microbiome that was created,

lacking in love,

devouring.

Pain.

Flowering,

indistinctly–

less slowly in the cold.

Flowering, nonetheless

nightmare taking hold,

blooming with immediacy.

You rotted from the inside out.

My heart could not withstand;

my mind consumed by violence, doubt.

From fear I wanted to collect–your heart.

There is nothing left but ashes to scatter on the ground.

The back story–my youngest son’s father passed away after only two years of us being together. Our son was four months old. Mason passed away from an overdose of heroin that contained a large amount of fentanyl. He had been getting high in the basement of the apartment building next door to ours, there were community laundry rooms in some of the basements. Nonetheless, his body remained in the cold, on the cement floor, in the boiler room of that basement for exactly one month until he was discovered.

Text © Melissa Lemay