How you put coins on my eyes before I ever get the chance to die. That’s not love. My corpse, breathing, on tile-cracked desert ground, your knee on my neck. Tuco, Angel Eyes in your fingers, lifting the silver discs, laying them back down. Your mouth telling me, “stay dead”.
The metal feels like butterflies against my lids, but I don’t tell you that because I can’t breathe because your knee.
Because I don’t want you to receive anything of beauty from me.
I have been face-down Bobbie Kristina Brown in a bathtub for a decade.
I’m inside a compression. It’s sweat sock hot. A heated wet smell. Both sides pushing in and me running out of room.
I am laundry.
I am silver-wrapped ugly. Fingers inside me. Wound-filling flash mob, cowboy boots stomped into my stomach in front of a brand name coffee shop until a guy named Brad cloaks me with his obesity against the sidewalk.
I love feeling smaller.
Remove the coins. Lay them on my tongue.
For me to swallow.
For I am not dead.