when the sun learned to be like the moon by Auseel Yousefi

sun-soured days at a

sunflower age, seventeen, sipping simple

sunkist babes like a slip-n-slide

straight into my insides

more dimes than a vending machine

and rhyme and flow to stick a kiss,

summer sucking on bottom lips.

don’t blink, you might miss the

boy wonder speaking swift at

honeys.

you found it awful funny,

“in an alabama summer, only

you could want more love

than the sun”

i lash out to lick your

spirit with burning gravity,

dissipating depravity

“i prefer the moon,” you said

and loved me nonetheless.

i couldn’t be the moon for you

but we were light and lovely when it rained

I WANTED YOU

to be a desperate dust bowl farmer,

arms wide as your smile when

you danced in my raindrops,

rejoiced in my kisses on your windshield,

dream of me in springtime traffic

held me in your hands like prayers

for a world with no hell or heaven;

simply downpours to keep us

cool, composed, and complicit in

your demise:

you drowned in me.

the world grew cold and days

without my sunlight still couldn’t

recreate the nighttime you yearned

to love. still couldn’t

recreate the nighttime i burned to be.

no longer was i burning, still as

silence at the center of the galaxy.

the boy who fucked like a supernova reduced;

a singed rock in space, unhinging slowly

into orbit around the spot where your

lungs overflowed with flames dressed

in the trappings of a rainstorm.

i’d pour in efforts and hopes

your body might be buried in

a lake of your name -

you deserved a goddamn ocean.

i’d drift aimlessly into the

arms of other lovers who chipped away

at a dying star until i was merely

a cratered pebble piercing the night sky with

love notes, illuminating the darkness from

outside your window.

i remember the prayers you’d keep

between your palms and purpose

and make my own:

that i might reflect patiently

the purity of your spirit

that i might close my eyes in

the presence of dusk and

love like the moon once did.