Love Letter Penned By A Pining Princess

This poem was recently featured in the second issue of TUGZ Magazine, which you can check out here! It’s a bit of a sad one (and a bit of a long one) but I hope that you enjoy it and also check out the rest of that issue for another flash fiction piece by me and also some great fiction and non-fiction content from the other contributors.

Love Letter Penned By A Pining Princess

This choking sunlight never burned
the skin you kissed when you were here;
one street away, another cul-de-sac,
and you saved me from the sting of this–

this suffocating existence, where normal
is king, and kings have queens, and I was yours,
but all they saw were two suburban princes,
living their best lives, side-by-side.

Light never found our intimate embraces,
when flesh melded and two became one–
in the daylight, even our fingers remained
so solitarily separate, never intertwined.

They could never see our hearts; I wouldn’t,
couldn’t, let them in. We lay on manicured
grass, letting sprinklers cast their liquid jewels
onto half-clothed bodies, attempting to forget

hidden nights, hearts throbbing together,
borrowed basements, never close to our own
carbon-copy castles–friends, knights, sworn
to secrecy; you threatened one with a knife,

some promise to ruin his tongue if he ever,
ever ruined our fragile regal lives, then sobbed
onto my lap once he left us to be us, not knowing
what could have ever driven you to such a thought.

Me. I knew. Or us, to be specific, because if I
meant nothing to you, then we would be nothing
and you would have never brought your blade
to his throat, and he would have never widened

his poor, bright eyes, still caught in a trance
of laughter, rapidly becoming terror. You were
a strict prince–we were a beautiful monarchy,
but no one could know quite how beautiful.

They still don’t. The day you left, I promised myself
to never tell a soul and preserve the kingdom’s memory
of their poster child–so athletic, so smart, so normal.
I take the walk up to the school alone, now,

no longer fielding questions about you because everyone
knows you as the one who left. I count the trees
until a full sixteen lead me to the gates
and I wish I could enter them by your side again–

truthfully, you were the only one who could ever
melt the edges of this stifling world, where I
cannot be me, and we could not be us, but still
I hold a little hope in my heart that you and I,

far from this desert of languid, performative life,
will meet again, and finally become the king and queen
we ought to be; rulers of a throne of our own,
so far from these homes that cannot be our homes.

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