House Of Hunger Poem by Za7ra Sulaiman

I stopped loving you, or maybe I loved you too much, so much that it soured in my chest like spoiled milk, like rot beneath the ribs. You became a wound I couldn't soothe, a hunger I couldn't feed with mere longing or kisses or words. You see, love—just love—was never enough for a thing as brutal as me.

So I killed you.
Because I couldn't bear your absence and I couldn't bear your presence and I couldn't bear the way you looked at me with all that goddamned tenderness, like I was still someone worth loving. I slit open the space between us and stepped into the silence.

I needed you inside me—not metaphorically, not poetically, not romantically. Literally. I drank your blood like sacrament, hot and metallic on my tongue, and let it pool in the pit of me like red velvet reverence. I cooked your flesh slow, let it crisp and curl in the pan until the entire house smelled like you—like longing, like devotion, like everything I could never say when you were still breathing.

Your teeth, I kept. They sit in a glass jar beside my bed, a shrine to the way you once smiled at me. I kiss them every night. Softly. Carefully. As if they'll break.

And your eyes—I couldn't let them go. They watch me still. I feel their gaze even in the dark. They see the truth of me, the thing I became. They see—and they do not look away.

You never left me.
You will never leave me.

Not while you live beneath my skin.

i love you.