Aubade Featuring a Worm – Madeline Chandler

We settle on both.

I wear sunglasses and a raincoat,

and trod across soggy, squelching grass

my hair slowly soaking

with every raindrop racing past.                                

A block away, my arms are around your waist,

whispering sweet nothings, like rain on a tin roof;

and in my head there’s a foggy thought

that there was something I needed to do.

I patter through puddles

in the dusky dawn light

and dance around the corpses

the sunbeams won’t be able to revive.

In my mind’s eye

I laze like a goddess in our bed;

you annotate another article

I annotate your hips instead.

The pavement is a graveyard

I know would make you cry and so

I pick up a bloated form-still writhing-

and place it where the rain can’t go.

At home, still buried in your neck,

I don’t feel the slime.

And that class I was supposed to be at

has entirely slipped my mind.