it is harder to see you as we are at great distances these that i spent often time trying to unravel. sometimes i go to the top of the hill to watch the sunset and other times i seek to steal the world away in a underneath of stars. the way you looked at me was untrue it was like hearing for the first time all the awful noise that blood coursing and the eardrums ruining and the skeleton always in a collapse upon itself the gravitas and i wanted none of it the body made me sick you were like that a building standing without a brick you rose out of the ground to trap the summer heat and sob through the pipes like a nonentity you wanted to be something and were hoping that i knew what that was but in the terror i could hear nothing but a heart beating and there was no one there this is the greatest blessing to be alone.

there is truth in what you say i’m sure but i cannot think of a time when you were really there for me, and hardly any times when you were with me.  there are many worlds in which you love me and worlds in which you do not, where you cannot stand to be near or hear from me.  i wish you did not feel so ashamed. i wish that how i love you could be something good for you but i will never know.

the little minotaur is crying. it rained and so it is always raining. you left and so you are always leaving. there are many worlds in which you do not love me so it doesn’t matter whether this is one of them. and yet i want the sea. i want to be overcome. maybe i will die on the highest plateau. maybe if we walk through this door now that the world has ended we will find a new world. maybe if i fish your corpse from the river you will remember because we are amnesiacs wandering the world and everything is in every thing, the universe is in you. all that remains is how you remember.

i think of you and i think of the moon too. nothing goes away, here is the eternity of your look and look and look–is that love, like the unsound of your eyes which in a dark, and glancing, small words, the neverminds and the sleep that is how you move and to know you love me too, i love you, it is always here even as it is forgotten of us and even as in all fear of the universe it is not, you are forever gone.

actually never you mind. for you, i am probably best forgotten.

Elena Botts grew up in the DC area, lived briefly in Berlin and Johannesburg and currently studies at Bard College. She’s been published in fifty literary magazines over the past few years. She is the winner of four poetry contests, including Word Works Young Poets’. Her poetry has been exhibited at the Greater Reston Art Center and at Arterie Fine Art Gallery. Check out her poetry books, “we’ll beachcomb for their broken bones” (Red Ochre Press, 2014), “a little luminescence” (Allbook-Books, 2011) and “the reason for rain” (Coffeetown Press, 2015). Her visual art has won her several awards. Go to o-mourning-dove.tumblr.com to see her latest artwork.