Poem Madness: "I am a cynic about love. I don’t allow myself to fall for just anybody.”

us whiskey women with our teeth so white 

they gleam like the stars that kiss the mountains, 
us late-night storm warnings with tornadoes in our fingertips, 
the whorls of our hands 
getting wrinkly in the souls we spill across floors, 
us danger-zone high-risk disaster areas, full of sharp bone slabs and falling emotions, 
full of the moon because we feel wolf, 
full of the wind because we feel empty,

you find us in your bed with your skin raw 
where we have dug in, you find us in the corners of rooms because we don’t need an audience, 
you find us in your classrooms where we sit just-so, 
the long lines of our necks like the sickle of a blade, 
we are death’s mistress and he is seduced by our riskiness

but in the late night if you catch one of us and let our thorns find your veins and hold our petals so gently that we feel safe, 
if you tell us we can leave when we like and refuse to chain us by your side, if you love us for our wild - 
this is when you find the warm hearth with slow passion, the
sweetest honeysuckle all wrapped up in barbed wire, 
this is where you find the heart we have patched up and surrounded with briar because we were sick of being broken,
this is where you find our scars and the places we stitched
together with our own sinew, this is where 
we will love you with hurricane walls, the fury of a tempest at 
your command, if you find us here we will give you our
whole beings with a fierceness that would break
our mother’s heart -

and good lord, do not make us let you in 
if you just intend to leave again.

- N xx