you can't make a god of somebody who isn't even half of a half-decent man.

i wind my mechanical heart in the mirror. i fraction my face until i don't look real. then, i sit with my crooked reflection 'til you come to find me.

there is no man on earth i have hated and loved like you.

do you want it? do you want anything i have? will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands?

sometimes, when i am alone like this, i think i hear your mouth, your stupid mouth agape — the wet earth of my desire. and i want to hook my fingers into you: a hunger still unraveling like silk in my stomach.

in the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones.

every time i open my mouth, i think, "wow, what a loud noise." still on the soapbox, just hoping i seem underwhelmed.

i could be a liar. i could be remembering the wrong details. .. details: her office is still a lost thing. darkness holding the ember hostage. there is nothing in this story that's not a dagger.

venom prison, eliran kantor.

i should've been the guard dog. i should've had the teeth.

but ask the right saint and he'll tell you that death always comes more than once. that every wound, like regret, is both itself and its reflection.

dear jimmy, my mouth is full of blood. jimmy, when you spoke of hell, did you mean this place? did you mean me?

from the time i was very young, my father told me that we were one person, that i was just a part of him. i grew up with that inside me. i grew up with him inside me.

i belonged to no one. not the right daughter. not the right sister. not the right friend. not the right lover.

does the church board their windows? do boys wilt when you kiss them? did you cut the blood out of yourself and try again? what do you look like in your dreams?

i promise, despite the knives in my throat, there was a time when i was soft and belly-up for you.

you will survive, but you will become someone else.

every daughter has a cage around her head a mother on the cross. i always hope to take it off, and rarely do. instead, i climb up, like a child into the bed. i nail myself beside you.

you fit into me, like a hook into an eye. a fish hook. an open eye.

oh, familiar bones. how i love you. how i hate you. how i am made of you and you of me. just us two, in the end. right? it'll always be just us two.