You ask me to unzip you.
My hand trembles,
green brocade peeling away
from your corrugated ribs.
I can feel them under my fingers
as I guide the dress down
over wasted waist, bone hips.
This is a body that does not
allow itself comforts: it has traded
its lush hills, its fertile slopes
for rock crags, dust plains.
The dress falls, crinkling,
and you step out of it.
You are unpetaled.
You are unpetaled,
and now I cannot escape
how you have diminished,
beautiful, still, but like a flower
on the cusp of withering.
This is not a beauty to admire.
This is not a beauty to desire:
you can only gape at it,
aching, speechless.
Where has the girl gone
who once inhabited the space
between this skeleton and this skin?
