New poem:

Kiss or Kill

It's like a cut I lick

red like the velvet dress
Maria wore that night outside the bar in november
she refused to wear her jacket
she said it clashed
her goose pimples
were like braille
I wanted
to touch them with my fingertips

Maria kept talking under the streetlamp
she wouldn’t go back into the bar with me
to get warm
I wondered if she wanted me
to kiss her
and I wondered so hard I felt sick

her breath kept spurting out
in white clouds of syllables
from her red red mouth
shaped like a big o or maybe a zero

I just wanted to shut that red mouth
somehow
I wasn’t sure how