All My Friends are Dead

After "the ritual" by Olivia Gatwood everything about this song is red, your wallet is brown, the brown a burgundy and the burgundy’s chalice has gold to dazzle rubies, carnelian, sard precious, semi-precious, the same- all the same, feel the same when you hold the cup to livid lips and send them on their merry way bumping into the ugly ridges of a throat lodged with stingy agate, oh but you know that and here we are, anyway. all my friends are dead, he says dying to kiss his wrist goodbye to be the soil those plantars indent, they open their mouths slick with sweat and pray for a lick, a step, a graze of grime wanting the must, the aftertaste to kill them, to fill them, to fix them he won’t love them still, and believe me- I know that yet here we are, anyway. all my friends are dead, I say but you kiss my heart instead tongue and teeth and saliva tinged red, lapping at the candied apple like a dog, like an animal, like you know already that it’s the best thing I’ve ever had. you chew and chew and chew and chew like a nursery rhyme, like a children’s story, like the poetic justice I do not deserve you spit out the core at the heel of my foot and don’t bother a peck farewell. I know how this story goes: I say I want it to stop hurting, so you turn my face away from yours when you bash my head against the wall I say I want some consequences, so you rub your red into the wounds I got from crashing my daddy's car I say I want you to kiss me, so you cover my mouth with your hand, when you push another gaping hole in my body I say I want a friend, and you stop your damn chewing. caution. warning. stop. proceed only when you can register what you asked for that's not what we're here for him, me, you, I we know this we can recognize there is pleasure in the pain you get from scratching a scratch, popping a pimple, but when it resurfaces a papule, pustule then a cyst, nodule cysts, nodules big words with big meanings it's simple you need a big stomach to stomach these things somedays it feels like that's all you'll be left with after he's done with you. so my darling, my savior, my applesauce: let it sink in___ the fact that I want to slam you into the nearest door, and then eat your soul so tell me you'll eat mine first, how we eat more when we're not hungry just to prove that we once were hungry.