Our Early, Reprise

You said,

They’ll never love me for my face, and I said, 

I will love you for your face.

And you lay your head in the bend 

of my arm and I told you 

the old reasons. 

It was nothing you hadn’t heard before.

It was everything you needed to believe.

It was mother’s milk. It was oxygen.

You retched, but you grew still.

I thought you slept - 

then,
thank you,

soft as dawn.


That was how we whispered 

when your skin was raw 

and blistered and your sleep so fragile 

it was was broken by 

a shaft of light.