I killed the poetry in him.  It was not on purpose.  I had never known a man with such delicate spell-caster hands and ironic tone.  His eyes were so pale, pupils enormous.  He was a mystic.  He loved and hated me simultaneously.  I still have the poems he sent after I left, telling me that gods and children live in my eyes.  For two months he wrote incessant.  And the damned say goodnight.  How I murdered and resurrected him every night.  He called me lovely and hard.  When I last checked in he’d stopped writing, as though he’d exhausted his passion on heartbreak.  He’s studying martial arts now, in an attempt to discipline.  He was furious when he realized I wasn’t coming back, that the city was eating me alive and in that death I found new words.  He burned into my skin like a ritual.  And the damned say goodnight.  There are moments when I can’t move past the tragedy of it all.  How I killed the poetry in him.

– Andrea Grant