Nights Measured in Empty Bottles

My liver is a bombed-out cathedral,

stained glass shattered into bilirubin yellow,

altars slick with the sacrament of cheap vodka

that pours like napalm down my throat’s trench line.

I wake inside my own fucking ribcage,

a soldier who forgot the war ended at dawn.

My heart stutters like a jammed rifle,

each beat ricocheting off scarred valves,

while my stomach folds itself into white flags

that no one ever honors.

Fingers tremble holding the glass,

not from cold, but from the memory of precision,

how once they could thread a needle,

now they fumble the cap like a grenade pin

pulled too many times to matter.

Veins map my skin like supply routes gone dark,

bruised tributaries feeding an enemy that wears my face.

My kidneys surrender in silence,

two small countries collapsing under siege,

pissing rust while I pretend it’s only cranberry.

Still, I return to the bottle like a woman

crawling back to the crater that made her,

because the war is home now,

and surrender would mean walking away

from the only battlefield

that ever learned my name.