nicotine for breakfast; water; empath, resurrected

By: Brooke Boveri

nicotine for breakfast

health-nut never-smoker sucks nicotine 

for breakfast in my chair at sunrise 

since I died 

a single puff

so she can taste me, satisfy her 

craving for that stale-smoke coffee 

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 skimming 

surfaces of riverbed stones

wrapping itself around you 

  different every second

 eroding you 

bit by 

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

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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.