No 1: LOVE IS WILD AND WILL KILL YOU

PHOTO BY LUCIA AUERBACH

REBECCA KOPELMAN

Love is wild and will kill me. Kill us. 

Because us is a unit now, because we are married in the care of our naked, twitching child. Love is her name, and we hate her together. We laugh at how ugly she is, how cruel, how she pisses and shits all over us.

And now, it’s

 tongue to cheek to teeth to neck to lips to lips to skin to jaws to bones. I tear at your muscles, your organs, the pulsing, unclean, unpretty side of you. 

“I’m going to eat your heart out,” I say, and I really do mean it. My canines are sharp, like a mean little animal’s.

Sometimes I feel myself to be a savage and brutal thing. 

I am wild and will kill you. 

Sometimes I love you so much I hate you. Sometimes I look into your 

gray or blue or green or black eyes and I see nothing, sometimes your features rearrange before me into a face I don’t care for even a little bit. 

My stomach is bloated, it swells with love, with this burden I can’t seem to deliver. 

this tumorous thing lies between us when we intertwine our legs, our fingers, our hair. 

And you tell me I taste like

watermelon or fireball or strawberries or bit tongue and iron. Like everything

sweet and everything evil.

I plan on aborting, crudely, with a coat hanger or a bottle of liquor. Once I can. There’s no rush, no ten fingers, no ten toes, no little heartbeat to worry about. Best not to give it a name. 

Best not to make it real.