The Ones That Loved Me After
by Jordan Schouweiler

Runestone, volume 3

The Ones That Loved Me After

The sun was too bright, was only honey
melting off onto the sky, my face
a voiceless spoon, the metal garden
an overexposed photograph and there,
smiling with hopeful teeth
was the boy that said it all much too soon.

With a concave face to the nectar sky,
I let it slide into the dark of my body,
now suddenly a bursting sticky bowl—so that
my silence was not taken
as numb or as unfortunate disbelief, but only
as a mouth too full to speak.