Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. - Anne Sexton

June and July?
These are the months
we call Boiling Water.

I am unbalanced — but I am not mad with snow. I am mad the way young girls are mad, with an offering, an offering… I burn the way money burns.

Do you like me?”
No answer.
Silence bounced, fell off his tongue
and sat between us
and clogged my throat.
It slaughtered my trust.
It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.
We exchanged blind words,
and I did not cry,
I did not beg,
but blackness filled my ears,
blackness lunged in my heart,
and something that had been good,
a sort of kindly oxygen,
turned into a gas oven.