My love for you is a sun inside my chest. It burns like shingles, wrings tears from my eyes like the hands of a tough old woman washing clothes in a tin tub. You’re as toxic as poke salad, your words a swarm of bees. You haunt me like a chain-clanking ghost, yet I welcome you like the mailman. You’re a zeppelin in disguise, the zip line to disaster. I need you like bad brakes, a stick of dynamite, loose bricks in the walk. But step into a room and my heart bumps its mouth against the bowl of my ribs like a starving goldfish. You scissor-cut my will, turn my brain to shredded wheat. Look at me once, and my pot begins to boil. Look at me twice, and the dog of my desire becomes a junkyard beast — though the feral cat in me hungers to call your body home.