remember,
beneath her hollowed cheekbones.
and it was like she was trying
to mask the gauntness
beneath the freckles.

but see,
freckles are only pinpricks in your flesh,
and even if she had
a million and a half
pinpricks,
they still wouldn’t conceal
the two blank paper cuts
stenciled on her cheeks.

seven freckles
meld into seven days. i want her back.
i want the smile that trembled
and the eyes that breathed liquid
light bulb,
i want the swollen belly
that played peekaboo beneath the gaping ribs
and the indented nipples. and i want to

remember her. but every time
i try to think of what was beneath the freckles,
the salt stains beneath my eyes
re-emerge from their calloused scabs
and my lungs decide to stop
working.

i had a party once.
and i told her not to come,
but she was there.
and she was wearing this see-through
purple dress with white moons on it
and you could see
the skinny blue mound of stomach,
pockmarked and splatter-painted with freckles,
through the gauze.

and everyone laughed
at the girl whose name they couldn’t remember.
and she just stood there
doused in plastic light
and freckles.
and i laughed
at the girl whose name
i pretended not to remember.

i found the dress
shoved in my medicine cabinet.
but the girl wasn’t in my
medicine cabinet. i didn’t know where she was.
and i didn’t know
where the pills were, either. I’ve always wondered
how it feels to be eaten from the inside
out. she used to tell me
that it hurt to blink –
to swallow.
that it hurt to breathe,
that her own jugular vein
strangled her in her sleep, and that
killing herself bit by bit by bit
made dying a little. bit. more
bearable.
i didn’t understand.

i do now.
it all hurts. look in the mirror.
if i squint my eyes,
sometimes i see
eighty-seven pounds of freckles
drenched in prismed moonlight. and sometimes
the moonlight masquerades
as something god-
like. but there’s a reason i’ve given up
on the invisible bastard who gorges us
with electric kool-aid hope: she isn’t an angel,
neither am i. We’re broken little dolls:
fallopian tubes
tangled in the orbit of hairline fractures,
spiderwebbing
into shattered porcelain bellies.
watch me wither away.