yesterday, while lugging a box up the stairs
to my new apartment, lungs aching in the
stink of a hundred cracked and rotting pears 
soupy with august under their mother, 
green and sweetness-heavy. it once would’ve conjured
an image of us, older, in a perfect little domestic
countryside life somewhere, called to mind the songs 
about dizzying and soft love i collected for you. 
the ones you listened to once, and then never again. 
i was always ladling beautiful little images in my palms
and offering them to you, cupped and warm. if only 
because the rest of me was cold, if only because 
your softest touches split me from my skin. 

Eli Shaw is a queer, trans writer and current student based in Gainesville, Florida in an apartment whose floors aren’t quite level. He spends his time watching pens roll off his desk, working at a rock climbing wall in the woods, and thinking about the dispersal of cactus bugs. Their work is forthcoming in Rust+Moth Literary Magazine.