Hothouse

Our tongues strike rich veins,
filling our mouths with
bubbling gold
after the permafrost that coats our bodies
melts away.

I flow across your room—
invertebrate,
all salt and acid.
Little flecks of gold and candle-fat
forming islands
on your faux-cherry wood floorboards.
My jaw vibrates
like an engine,
the nerves in my gums
fire and combust.

The sun has stripped you bare,
too.

I hear you sizzling in the shower,
trying to scrub away the forest fires
that cling to you

like the memory of that time you told someone you loved them
and they just looked up and away
at the sun and muttered
“Was it always this bright?”
to themselves
and there wasn’t an inch of shade left on Earth
for you to hide inside.

Ashley Naftule is a writer and theater artist from Phoenix, AZ. He's been published in Pitchfork, Vice, Rinky Dink Press, Nice Cage, Ghost City Review,Moonchild Magazine, Bandcamp, Occulum, Cleveland Review of Books, Four Chambers Press, L'Ephemere Review, Amethyst Review, Hypnopomp,X-R-A-Y Lit, Ellipsis, The Molotov Cocktail, GUEST, Pretty Cool Poetry Thing, and Jenny Magazine. He's a resident playwright and Artistic Director at Space55 theatre.