This is my baby, he said, as he hiked

His black Dickies jeans up past his left knee.

He circled the 9 millimeter scar with his index

And pivoted, revealing the exit wound

On the backside of his leg through the hamstring.

And this was when I was in Juvie, continuing,

Leaving his leg, and lifting his shirt, revealing not only

The faint three inch slash right above the waistline,

But his expansive tattoo scrawled across his torso.

“Until I Die”—a tribute to lifestyle.

We smoked a joint at the kitchen table that night,

He got up mid-hit, and rummaged through a box in

the storage closet. He pulled out a ragged, over-used

notebook. No cover. No back. Just ink-riddled pages.

Landing on a temperate passage he starts,

“I am the boy with paper skin, who longs

to touch the girl made of broken glass.”

---

I moved in with a masked hot mess,

who told me I wasn’t walking

face first into a shit storm,

that she was cleaning

her wild ways and starting anew

Tabula Rasa.

I love him she says, about

this speedfreak that moved in,

just days after the heroin addict.

I didn’t get it.

There was nothing left of him but

a couple of coughs and a handful of twitches.

She told me over tacos about her relationship

with her mother, who’d let her have

prescription heroin patches if she’d sell them for her.

She used to strip, and wishes she made the money too.

Xanax, suboxone, and someone else’s

problems are in our bathroom cabinet.

Cigarette smoke rolls out of her thin lips.

That makes a pack, give or take, today.

Her parted lips match her cracking body and

her anemic skin salvages its luster through

tanning beds and avocados. I’ve counted the empty

pill capsules around the house,

they lay like wounded soldiers.

I see her swagger though, like she knows what she is,

hair blow-dried like Bo Derek, nails painted red,

She walks, long legs on shattered ankles.