Love Poem for Vampires
by Izzy Toy Rettke
I
I met her first in a bleached-stone crypt
Barely dead, full-lipped, holding a corpse by the ankle.
Her hair covered in grave dirt like cells of electric eels
She dislocated my shoulder and I knew I loved her instantly.
Then again, behind the factory that used to
make automobile parts and smelled like pitch
these past years.
Old blood running thick and coagulated on her chin
This time I ran across the highway, and made her chase me down.
The first words I heard her speak, an apology for the
shoulder and a brush of her arm to her mouth, her
self-conscious smear.
So long dead, I had forgotten to hope for
company. Lonely little plasma-sipper.
Her lair, her hideout, her gritty gothic mausoleum
Was a rusting RV half-buried in garbage.
Under threat of the day, the sky went soft and
naked I watched her watch the rising,
bug-eyed and hopeful.
The grievous sun, the ash-maker gave her no fear
Daylight shamed the air, and I thought of asking her name.
II
I showed her the stumbling sights of this our world
The sewer tunnels, the moldy foreclosed townhouses.
Taking her by the hand to the gas station of favor
We ate for the first time with company, gristly mirrors.
I learn her slowly, star-mapping her small preferences
As she tugs desire out of me like a hair caught in my throat.
She likes truck drivers, drunken strangers, meaty
mouthfuls I like easy meals, tender flesh, lean
blood like veal.
She the wild child, dog-boned and insistent on sleeping
In the earth, wanting me to dig her up come twilight.
Me, fretful and carefully brave, I collect bent silver coins
To watch a movie for the first time in my life.
When we got tired of living like paper bag princesses
I shred padlocks and tear holes in chain-link searching for better.
Our night-bed among the dead machines; a warehouse next
To dive bars and motel lots. Wanderers pass us quick and guarded.
She recognizes their steps and sounds, almost familiar
and once kin. I think I was never alive, maybe born with teeth.
Through board slats, she eyes the sun, unquenchable, heat-hungry
For another after. By pain or rapture, I do not know.
III
Once I woke to sunset barreling through steel sheet walls
Her arm thrust in a hole bored through the grey.
As she healed the smell of her charred skin
haunted the air I held the vein of my wrist to her
blood-needy mouth.
I am not blameless. I spend weeks inside, sleep through nights,
Let the thirst crack and dry my secret wineskin body.
Like flighty gods, we rise from trash heaps to drink rivers
When hunger or woe dries one home, we go to the next.
We might scour the world and find ourselves alone I fear her flight;
She fears my sorrows.
I think one day we will take to the dirt and wait
For the sun to crest the horizon, the red nuclear explosion.
I see her joining me in deepest sleep and knitting twin dreams
She sees me palm-knowing her grip, giggling into hereafter.
A time when there are no more bodies to suck
like summer fruit, no nests to dance through like rain.
We cannot absolve a life of blood, nor would we be forgiven.