Portrait of Loving a Girl Like a Religion

Take my hand. Stitch the most haunted parts of yourself 
into my flesh. I was born wanting to carve some girl’s 

name into my tongue like a ritual. Tell me about your past.
The memories you wish the rain could wash away.

Watch how I don’t love you any less. How my desire
grows like a ghost in a graveyard. How I never get tired

of licking your wounds clean of grief. Before you,
I didn’t believe in daylight. Thought the only time I could

cry was in front of the moon. Let me pour you a glass
of my favorite wine. I’ll watch you consume the only thing

that keeps me living. Later, I’ll plant your baby teeth 
in my backyard in the hopes that a garden of your bones 

bloom. I’m sorry about the tears in your eyes. I wish
they were mine.* Your weep is the only sound I turn up

to full volume. If I could have anything I wanted, I still
couldn’t have you. You are a church waiting to burn.

A prayer waiting to be recited from some sinner’s lips.
A god waiting to be worshipped. You are an alternate

universe away. You are a slaughterhouse and I am
the animal waiting to be slaughtered by my desire 

for you. You are a butcher dismembering me into a 
creature unrecognizable. The sad thing is, I would 

let you kill me if it means I get to be touched by you.

Poem in Which I Learn to Purge My Body of Want

I was born into this body
	begging for another.

I was born into this world
	with knives for hands,

slicing everything around me
	into grief. The first time

I loved a girl, she spit 
ghosts in my face. 

I learned to sliver 
desire into silence,

shear longing like
	loneliness. Taught

myself that love can
	be punishment, too.

The next girl I love
	won’t know. I’ll bury

want between my teeth
	until it ricochets in 

my mouth like a bullet.
	I’ll skin my knees

on the pavement
	outside her house

until my bones bleed
	themselves of hunger.

There is more than
	one way to purge

the body of want.
	Trust me. I have

taught my mouth 
	to unlearn the name

of what could love me.
	Or kill me. I have

taught my hands to
	hold nothing but

Somewhere, in an alternate universe, 

I’m not afraid to love a girl who may not make it to tomorrow. In return, she doesn’t laugh at how I hide memories under my bed like monsters or how I hang ghosts on my wall like postcards or my obsession with loneliness or crooked teeth. She doesn’t point out the irony of how I live on a street named after my father’s favorite flower even though the last time I hugged my father I was still a teenager, though I’m twenty-one now. She doesn’t ask why I take photographs of my friends’ wounds with a Polaroid, framing them on my nightstand instead of their faces. She doesn’t ask why I get sentimental over body injuries, like how my sadness multiplies as bruises fade back to the color of my flesh. She doesn’t ask why I want my suffering to develop like a roll of film: wet, cold, murky. She doesn’t ask why I’ve elegized the month of July, when the only time I go outside the entire month is to bury sparklers in my backyard. Instead, she loves me back, even though I may not make it to tomorrow.

My Therapist Asks Me to Remember the Day I Realized I Can Only Want Someone if They Don’t Want Me 

i remember baptizing the space between 
my fingers with rusted memories. the sky 
bleeding its skeleton of desire. my hands 
wishing they had something to hold. maybe 
a mimosa glass or the moon but never a lover. 
i remember thinking about the definition of ache. 
a continuous or prolonged dull pain in a part 
of one’s body. and isn’t that what love is. 
craving someone until bones blister with hunger. 
isn’t that what any of us dream of. to want 
someone until we wound. when will some lover’s 
ghosts dig their teeth into my flesh and give me 
something to cry about. when will someone 
give me a reason to forget about the past 
tense. isn’t it sad. to be full of so much 
longing and no one to share it with.

It’s Been Years Since I’ve Received a Phone Call from My Emptiness

Golden Shovel of “Diorama of Ghosts” by Paige Lewis     

listen: i am not all haunted. i sing of shadows and sadness because there is music even i
-nside darkness. look at midnight rusting through the windowpane like daylight. i have spent
my youth in the depths of uncertainty. but look at how the most dusky years 
of my life brewed into melodies. look. i’m just like you. i too have stopped loving living.
but now my mouth foams with desire for this thing we call life. i’ve adorned my body with
my past lovers’ loneliness. and isn’t that something. to bathe yourself in the ghosts
of what once loved you. before my ache took its last breath, i strung
memories on my bedroom wall like fairy lights. i hid grief between
my fingers like a blade. now when i call for my 
emptiness, there’s no answer. i think it’s buried somewhere between my teeth.

* Inspired by the line “Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine” from Richard Siken’s poem “Little Beast” 

About the Author:

Annalisa Hansford’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in The West Review, Vagabond City, Ghost City Review and The Lumiere Review. They are probably listening to Gracie Abrams and drinking an iced vanilla matcha latte. 

*Featured image by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash