PRISONERS AND POETS

Her spine was a question mark bent over gutters,
each vertebra a cracked streetlight flickering doubt.
Knuckles fossilized from sifting through static,
she rolled cigarettes with torn eviction notices,
blew smoke like forgotten prayers to a sky
too drunk to answer.

We met where the city exhaled its bad decisions,
me baptizing glassware in cheap regret,
her sitting in a pew of peeling vinyl,
a sermon of silence pressed between her lips.
She wore hunger like a designer curse,
spoke in a voice rusted shut..
"Hey prisoner, what locked you behind bars tonight?"

Outside, the streets chewed their own tongues,
Junkies pacing like ghosts stuck on repeat,
dumpsters singing hymns in the key of last night’s leftovers.
Gunfire spelled “goodnight” in Morse code,
bullets making period marks in stories that ended too soon.

She translated drunk confessions into bedtime stories,
whispered them to a moth-eaten journal,
pages thin as stolen napkins.
"I write their lies into lullabies," she smirked,
a laugh like glass breaking in slow motion.
Her apartment was a shoebox full of coughs,
walls sweating candle wax and secondhand dreams.

"One day you’ll be beautiful and free," she said,
palming my face like a map of dead ends.
"And then what?" I asked.
She just sighed, a sound like a mattress hitting pavement three floors down.

We were hieroglyphs spray-painted on alley walls,
two shadows learning to hold their breath underwater.
When the eviction notice came, she left her journal
on my counter—pages full of moths, their wings
whispering run, run, run in a language
only the broken understand.

Now, the gunfire’s a lullaby,
sirens kiss the curb like disappointed mothers.
I trace her words like fresh bruises,
recite them to the rats and the rain.
"And then what?"
The night, forever starving,
chews its answer with a grin.

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