me, sitting
on my hands.
Summer swings in, electric—I will draw you a map back to where I hope this started: low
ceiling, periodicals; hot apartment seething with poets; me, a heartbeat inside.
How could she say your body is strange, now. Find me an unstrange one.
A lover says my body is different: belly softer, ribs heavier, calluses yellower—than what,
I ask. It’s never the bodies I remember, but how they lurch from thing to thing like the
monsters they are.
My own responds well to coffee, slow trace, finger hook, scoop neck, ankle boot, swal-
lowed hair.
In the midst of an epistolary gulf, I found a book of poems about it.
My freckles fade blue, fingers wind through, worming, dirt notched everywhere tight.
In the end, you wanted longing. Above all, lips sticky with glue, grim face of distance,
geography victim.
In me, the pool goes much deeper than we thought, and you drop page after lined page
in through my mouth, silent, waiting for the blip of water at the bottom, pin drop in
cathedral where you came to pray.
No matter where I am, I dream of trains in the night.
At some point, while writing in the book I borrowed, I decide that things that are yours
could also be described as mine.
Cauldron Anthology
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