Your letters read
of how you want
to taste my wine-stained lips,
how I am
your lovely girl,
how you cannot wait
until the next time
she is off, abroad,
and you can visit me
without shame,
without worry.
They are a flutter
of butterfly wings,
fragile and transparent,
real and true,
but all the same,
ephemeral,
made of smoke and mirrors,
constructed in the wake
of a glassine ego.
You who never correct my grammar,
you who touch me with reverence,
you who, if I but breathed it,
would leave her,
leave everything,
and walk away with me
to begin anew.
You don’t offer it,
knowing I am the one who is timid,
and unwilling to make a leap,
wine-stained lips
and all my loveliness
aside.