I’m nineteen,

and I love a girl who is both

heaven sent and hell born,

who wears a halo atop her horns.

Her red hair sets flame to my pillowcase

when it’s fanned out like a forest fire.

She’s narcotic, all honey and heroin and haikus.

Marionette strings grow from her hands

like fingernails. Her hand moves and my heart

turns puppet in my chest. She makes me

a vixen

a villain

a victim

out of the “V” of her hips.

I steal kisses from her like a thief,

I worship the deity of her wrists,

press prayers to her pulse with my lips.

In her gray dress that rolls and unfurls like storm clouds,

her legs, pale and bright,

are lightning strikes and I wanted

them wrapped around my head, electrocuting

me to oblivion and skin heat. My

switchblade smiles

her machine gun mouth

our tongues are daggers we spar with

and I was taught that

a woman is a weapon

and I learn that

she is never more lethal

than when in love.

For her,

I want to be the shore

she builds her sandcastles on.

For her,

I want to be the tree she carves

her name into,

a declaration that she was there,

she’d climbed my branches,

she’d touched my leaves.

I’ve heard people say that

the person you love is like

your favorite novel and

here is my greatest fear,

my cobwebbed covered secret:

she is a book I’ve borrowed

from the library,

she comes with an expiration date,

with the inevitability of return.

She’ll be consumed by others

who will bookmark her pages,

and will memorize her passages.

Will they find solace in her

soft similes the way I had?

Will they read between her lines?

If our passion is borrowed,

I’ll return her dog-eared,

her spine cracked from my love.

I’ll leave my favorite parts of

her in fingerprints and tear stains.

Whoever takes her off the shelf,

will find the flowers I pressed

between her pages

and know that she had been loved fiercely.

I’ll remember her always

by the scorch marks on my pillow