Cathexis Northwest Press
nicotine for breakfast; water; empath, resurrected
By: Brooke Boveri
nicotine for breakfast
health-nut never-smoker sucks nicotineÂ
for breakfast in my chair at sunriseÂ
since I diedÂ
a single puff
so she can taste me, satisfy herÂ
craving for that stale-smoke coffeeÂ
breath she despised
warmly i cling to the fiery end
as she inhales, drawn through
into her mouth, her throat, her lungs
i embrace her from the inside
water
life is like water softly skimmingÂ
surfaces of riverbed stones
wrapping itself around youÂ
  different every second
 eroding youÂ
bit byÂ
bit
you want the current to stop
are you afraid
of what the next layer will reveal,
or that one day
there may be nothing left?
empath, resurrected
i walled people off, those inconsequential
nuggets of fleshy, bony
resentment
intercepted energies traversing
mine, repelled them with the blunted
chill of a consciously
stopped
    heart
then, you
not of my volition
in the moment we shared a
glance i saw
that body housed the soul
i’d withstood lifetimes with before
thawed blood hugged my veins
and we were home
Brooke Boveri doesn't know what she is doing. She writes in her head and spends most of her time forgetting ideas. Her poetry has been published in The Write Launch, and she has published short fiction under a different name, as she cannot quite decide who she is.