Lighthouse
Editor Underground
Nazaneen Kaliwal
The air is humid, but dry enough to start a fire
to warm the shallow cavities within me.
My lungs are punctured.
You donate air as quickly as you steal my breath.
Like a vine, I remain tangled around you,
bending together, my limbs become yours.
Your hands cradle my neck as if I am made of glass
not dressed in jagged thorns.
My heart beats within your chest,
your pulse lives within my veins.
As though treading on thin ice, you slip
secrets into my mouth.
Like a potter’s carefully crafted clay piece,
you mold me, remold me,
your fingers varying the pressure,
leaving me to spin in your hold.
When I crumble from within, you unfold me
from the contorted layers, you unearth me
like a phoenix born from the ashes,
you dust off coarse fragments of myself.
Like an arrow held taut against its bow,
the absence of one will leave the other incomplete,
you lean against me carefully
to bend as far back without breaking me.
Your voice drowns my scattered thoughts,
deserting my demons in a dusty corner of my mind.
Your warmth melts the cold inside my soul,
softening every harsh edge of my tired body.
Like a pen that presses into paper,
its ink flowing onto the page with each fluid motion,
your lips sear your name into the hollow of my neck,
etching yourself against the blank canvas of my skin.
As your fingers trace the thin veins on my wrist,
cuts covered by the curtains of time unstitch at the seams.
Memories buried within my heavy heart resurface
when your eyes see past the paperthin skin clothing my ribs.
Every fractured heartbeat was mended when your light became my shadow.
Every drowning thought was dissolved when you became my lighthouse.