You taste the way that pennies do
after they've been sitting in a
fountain for too long. Like iron,
like blood. You run hard red and your taste
lingers in my mouth the very same way,
too. You’re that much a part of me.
Really though, I’m sure that you just
taste like all the wishes that I made on them,
those little copper disks that I held in my
small, white hands— what I felt the world with.
The wishes that were never answered, never heard,
never seen. The same wishes that backfired, feeling
too much like lashes, and not the pretty kind.
The wishes that only came true after you
left. You didn't have to leave and I’ll
keep telling myself that until you come back.