Foreign Flora

I'm still picking out pieces of you from in between my teeth. You've wedged yourself between my molars; dug deep into my gums. You've sprouted like a poppy—roots weaving between my bicuspids and canines; blooms bursting through the roof of my mouth, escaping through my bloodshot eyes.

My stomach sours anytime my tongue grazes a memory of you. The imprints of your hands on my skin still give me goosebumps, but not the ones that made my nerves dance from an electric current of passion. No. My skin recoils at the ghostly touch of you, at the mere rememberings of your fingerprints. Fingerprints on my arms, on my neck, on my tongue.

I coat my mouth with the strongest weed killer I can find, but to no avail. Your roots continue to bury themselves deeper and deeper into my jaw, causing the brittle bone to ache from you.

I was an empty victory; a plot of dirt easily tilled and fertilized so that what you wished to grow could. And you grew nightshade. You grew hemlock and you grew opium. The roots of your garden continue to grow down into me. They wrap themselves around my fingers; they pierce my sallow skin like a needle and thread might pierce a piece of old cloth; they fill my ears and eyes and nose and mouth, closing me off to the outside world.

And I sit here. Decomposing. Awaiting deliverance by the season’s deepest frost.