My baby smells of lavender.
He is liquid gold like molten sunshine on my cheeks. He bleeds in supernovas and when he smiles the Earth blushes and grins, all teeth, like a child.
The asphalt is slick with rain and I’m falling into the sky over him. He lifts me up and spins me in front of his team and we only ever do these things for the theatrics, and the affection never really lacks. The bubblegum in my mouth has gone flat but he doesn’t pull away until my lips are sore, and my hands are on fire, and I smell smoke and sulfur.
At the cinema, we tuck our soda cans and snacks up under our shirts and roll the hems into our pants. When we leave, we smell like candy wrappers and sugar highs, and there’s lipstick on his collarbones, and his lips are stained blue-pink like cotton candy, but the girl at the concession stand will pretend not to notice when she waves us out.
He drives me home in his dad’s Jeep at 3 in the morning, and my mother is angry but I don’t care because he left a voicemail on the answering machine just for me, and my teddy bears are grinning, and it feels like someone cracked the world open onto a hot skillet and I’m burning up.
My baby doesn’t mind I’ve got skin made of paper and leaves and all the combustible things you can imagine. He’s a swimming pool filled to the concrete lip with kerosene and I’m on fire but I’ll burn anyway because I like the way the flames light up the roses in his eyes. I press my fingertips to his temples and wonder why they turn to ash.
I cut him open and find roses growing in between his bones. He’s got weeds made of hard-boiled pain choking them too much for them to grow properly, so I excise, cutting away his sad bits, slicing the hurt away with my fingers and teeth and the thorns cut my arms up and leave gashes on my skin, and I digress, they scar over in pretty pink crescent moons.
In the street I sing the lyrics to Hasta el Amanacer from start to finish, and when they ask if I know Spanish I want to tell them my baby is fluent, he calls me his corazón,  his sol, muñeca, preciosa y mona, on and on; his speech is watered with r’s rolled like bowling pins and his tongue dances over his n’s like ñ, even in English. But my words get lost in translation and come out like, “I picked it up in Spanish class.”
My baby sings Lou Reed in the shower.
His voice is choppy and off-key but it sounds like Tchaïkovsky’s Sleeping Beauty made love to Mozart’s overture to The Marriage of Figaro. I want to tell him I’m living, I’m drawing paradise into the fogged up bathroom mirror and I don’t think I’ve ever known religion but I was thrown out of Eden and crashed my car into his bedroom and though my knuckles are bloodied and my knees are sore I’m okay because it’s the closest thing to heaven I’ve ever felt.