LOVE Poem: Midnight After, by Abby Pullan

Twelve cuts clean through everything we built from paper and spit.

White blossoms scatter the carpet—

Someone dreams horizontal on leather.

Salt mouth, foreign tongue. Three walls between your
laughter and my archaeology of bad choices, each one a
small burial.

Porcelain altar, silver streams carving territories on my
cheek. The mirror holds a carnival ghost—

dust of dead stars in my hair.

What remains when the costume slips?

Just bone and the weight of knowing how easy it is to
become someone you don’t recognise.

Then warmth finds the spaces between my shoulder blades.
Your voice,

a soft excavation:

“I’m sorry.”

The apology lands like rain on already flooded ground.

By morning,

even the glitter will forget where it

fell.