I feel this chasmic, inexplicable urge to touch the space between your abdomen and ribs. To see if, like me, you are a creature of salt and desiccated bones.

I have learned that well dressed words are meaningless. So I replaced them with fervent kisses—phantasmic touches along the curve of your nape.

And when you look at me as though I am one of Icarus's melted wings, a hydrogen ion betelgeuse forgot to claim, the iron skeleton over which caryatids are built, I feel that urge again. To lie with you on my moth-eaten carpet all day long and wonder why this concrete ceiling is trying to plagiarise the sky.

I want to be your muse, the incantation burned along the back of your tongue, the ballad etched onto the mossy green of your pupils. I want to be revered, painted, immortalized and I want you to be the one to do it. I want you to cartograph the contours of my skin, taxonomize my acne scars as if they are constellations. I want your lips to trace the line of my vertebrae and adorn my lumbar curve with flowers. I want you to make me a site of burial, drenched in enough chrysanthemums to hide the stench of decomposition.

I want to be your red-lipped japanese shin-hanga girl. I want to be the venus to your Botticelli and I want you in the darkest shade of red. I want to rework the work of God and add phosphorescent stars along your sternum; and I want their helium to spill onto mine as we coalesce into our own kind of art. Does that make sense to you? Our very own binding of melted stars.

Strong enough for you to wake up, with the taste of my name on your tongue. Weak enough to collapse into a supernova.

I see it all the time, between the space that inhabits you and me. Anti-gravity, threatening to expand into a universe, just by a microscopic quantum fluctuation. I desperately hold on to the baryonic matter between our chests—the one that separates but never dissects.

I want to be the other, Carson talks about. I want to be Eros the bittersweet and I want to be Adonis to your Aphrodite. And when I am gone I want you to cry big-iridescent tears, worthy of metamorphosis. into flowers. I want my breath to be your map home. I want my ribs to be your four walls, that you decorate with paintings and souvenirs from countries you never visited.

I blame the night sky for who I am. For filling my amphora with starlight and miserable hope. I blame myself and wonder when all this stops. When can we both, perched barefoot at the edge of the world, spill melted crayons on this decalcifying bone of a planet and drown it in our blue paraffin. I wonder if you will still worship me after all my petals wilt off. When I run out of nectar, out of the sun's bronze light, out of songs to saturate the air with. If you do, maybe, just maybe I'll show you where I buried the corpse.

And then perhaps you will understand the menagerie I wear on my skin—a taxidermy of creatures; perhaps you will understand me when the vultures tear it apart and find everything but flesh. My body lixiviated by potash and soap, I have forgotten the owners of the skin I wear.