It depends on where you live – it's either
the moon

or streetlamps

making a skeleton of your body,
arched-back against the light, bones more visible, breakable,

as though it is the light stretching you
and not your thirst.

The birds wake us from this torpor.
They sit in their artificial trees and wonder out loud
why they are the only things awake.

I snap your spine so lovingly, and carry you
in my arms until
you weep to be laid down.
Then I cut shapes

in your plaster cast,

making your torso a hieroglyph,
the language that I trace with my finger like Braille.

The stencils I glue all over my body,
creating myself
a sarcophagus of stars and butterflies and rats
so that I am you, but inside out.
When I lay on top of you,
barely breathing,
we fit into each other so I think we'll never come apart.

There we lay in our plaster chrysalis,
metamorphosing,
until we emerge, blinking and new-skinned,
into the morning.