Dear Mr. Baudelaire,

I worry my prose is too specific to tell the truth.

It’s entirely possible that your spell is actually my own—my wicked and romantic intelligence writing the most beautiful story of you ever written.

The only way the truth of you can actually be told is to touch you, delicately at first, with my fingers on the slope between your ribs and haunches, then with the inside of me, pawing.

But you cannot—you turn and are untouchable.

I dream of other bodies and wake bellowing in the room next to you. I wish I had killed you after all, like we’d always imagined, with a potion or a poison blade. Then when I’d go to nightmares to touch you freely, I would not eat my shame, only grief. For that I would gracefully attend a banquet.

I wish you had sweat more, let yourself be a hypnotist, a snake charmer of love. I always wanted to find you feasting like a desperate animal, to perch behind the partition and catch you in your privacy.

When I am alone and your face grieves me, I smudge it with bird grease and watch it pull itself into a mess. Sad face, sad sex. Then you are no longer dangling on one leg, far above me.

Not twirling, not trapezing, not the exuberant spectacle from before, but dripping face paint, messy mouth, spent lungs still bobbing for apples.