He is

The sort of man who really means it when he closes his eyes.

Smiles three different ways and walks all waltzing suggestion.

Gives pause. Like this moment: holds his breath before he puts his hands upon the table. Always to say, this is a reckoning.

Knows your next glance before you do.

He’s longing. An empty parenthetical. The heron’s wings just above the water. A few drops of rain.

The equilibrium of air muscling its way to be close to him. Condensation a ruse. I want buckets of ruse. And he's yours now.

in the bilge water

Drag you down with me into the gutter day, slick swim, a drowning man's clothes, weighed down by the wreckage of heat and sheets, we will suffocate in the chambers and temples like we weren't supposed to be here. Yet.

Salt sting in your eyes, rivers down your forehead, your neck, drip dripping, slide slick, trembling with the slow crawl, we are belly beasts and mouths that swallow their swallows.

The lurch of the bed. Waves break and put themselves together again. Hurt and lick fight in the bilge water. I press back, one hand on your wide chest. Brand you in the swelter. Then push you under.

Assuage

Things that stick to the table, get caught in your hair, fly out of your mouth, fall from your nose and shunt around in the alley when you’re busy trying to be ready for desire.

Broken blades of grass, sky chipped at the edges, the limping tree by the cankor road. Things you can’t see behind me.

I could get rid of all this leper longing if only I had a glass of water, a quiet room, and you with your eyes closed your arms raised above your head.

Osiris

He stood there at the end of the parade like an apology, like scattered coffee beans, like wreckage in the lime trees.

I would love him to his own demise.

The last time on the floor in the living room, the movers had taken everything. I was late for work, but I could smell a chance, like something whispering, the rented moment.

He lay with his back to me, the curtains closed to the afternoon, billowing like something wanted into the room.

I am sad like this. I want what I can get. I will scavenge. It's an Osiris curse.

Hold plank against the broken window, muffin crumbs the measure of morning, and the espresso stains on the mug rorschaching.

There are no more words with grace. When I open my mouth they bounce off the lighting fixtures and chip the concrete floor.

How he'd look among the pillows and sheets, always just found, something always lost and found, lost to be found. Again.

Warnings

Patterns of you. Patterns traced all Pompeii like you used to be there, standing just like that.

Desire is a bag of oranges on the elevator floor.

I’ll rest when this is done. When the right words have put this moment in their mouth, something to taste when the thinner air rushes in, the blind doing of nothings and day-to-day detergent wash.

The people in the field searching for hands and heads and other lost moments.

We’ve reached the end of the world and wonder now where all the warnings went. This is where 'to' and 'from' fall into one another. And all that's left are tattooed Hiroshima shadows.

I stand under the eaves, waiting for the rain to finish its rant.

Flutter

It’s a small moment. Dusty, the colour of dark limes, something lacking generosity when squeezed, but still puckers the lips. A flutter of eyelashes against my neck. I can smell his thirst, but I want him this way, thirsty against me, the sheets resting on us, the afternoon light caramelized. On the kitchen counter a tall glass of water. But he can wait.

A crack in the pocelain

I’m a wonky dervish, a driverless car on a gravel road. Close my eyes to edit out the lame parts, the scenes that hurt. Time still to measure another man to see if I might fit.

I don’t remember lying down to sleep. I don’t remember getting up; it’s the in between places you need to worry about. And sometimes along the streets and avenues, the gutter lines and ponderers beg for smaller change. She doesn’t know what she’s asking for, but I’ll find some way to give it to her. Finalizing the details, what measure of things will be lost in the disintegration of the minutiae. I’m anything but details.

I am all details, but nothing about broad gestures. If you could smile differently, not so crooked, cross your arms the other way, hug harder than you do . . .

The limp embracing people, the big breath ones. Medussa wants and longs among the dam builders again shoring up the little things. I am lusting for the big gesture, the larger muscle groups, the firm machinery of happens and the broad shoulders of answers without ambiguity. A split sideways chronicle of the falling away, but I wasn’t good for much more than that.

Some days you can’t get upright until you’re going down the other side. You fall for people who are getting up. Maybe you feel taller. In between breaths there is a moment, before you want the next thing, before the loss from the last sets in. A crack in the porcelain. But it’s gone before you know it.

How this begins

Thrums he does, thrums like waves breaking, falling over each other on their way to his feet, but who can blame them.

Up along the street the maples look awkward in their new dresses, billowing in the traffic gusts. Everything has to begin. This is how this begins.

Later we’ll recall this moment, though I won’t speak of his clavicles and he’ll not mention my bottom lip. He’s trying to find some way to offer me a strawberry from the bunch he picked on his way to work and I’m trying to find some other word for clavicle but am distracted by his full-throated approach to wearing a t-shirt.

There are strawberry seeds under his fingernails. Tonight, falling asleep, a hand near his face on the pillow, he’ll smell the strawberries and the green smell of the plant where he plucked the fruit, where he shucked the strawberries before putting them in his mouth. He will remember my bottom lip.

We won’t agree. He’ll think it was a hot day, summer finally giving in. I’ll remember mostly the breeze through the open door, how spring just kept hanging around.

This will be the moment he liked me the least, but I liked him the most. He thought I was a snob. I thought he was dumber than he looks.

He will kiss me, outside at a table, leaning down to me as I look up, suspicious of a man who kisses me so soon and kisses me in a café.

He’ll wonder what comes next. I’ll wonder what just happened.

He won’t know I am on my way to therapy. That I was going to tell my therapist I am tired of longing for longing. Tired of making up stories about strawberries.

For the Time Being

There will always be places on you no mouth has touched, but I have great plans anyway. Despite the sand-grit day today, can’t you see I want to stop the longing, the limpid swoon thickening press.

The boat’s under water again. You’re swaying on deck, limbs akimble, hush, lips trembling. Me somewhere between the deep and the shallows.

Nothing to say but you win. Your unfair advantage. An ass made for hands and a back that could be used as a raft in case of high waters.

On the shore, even the trees shrug. Why fight it.

Hands

River slagging mud high the swelter humping its leg again, a rack pack of flies stealing thoughts, I try to focus, but everything is listing sideways. I focus on your hands. You’ve dirt under your nails again. You see me see your hands. You slide them under your legs and sit on them.

It’s possible. You can choose to love a boy who lives on this road, on this block. He can work just a block over. A smaller life, simple in gesture and what are you going to do tonight, nothing more than be quiet with him. The birds in the branches have found their footing, though they searched for it longer than you think.

I love your dirty hands, don’t you see. Look at my tracing paper lantern origami hands, delicate, die-from-a-papercut hands. What I’d do for yours. You have no idea.

She and her lips

She is nothing more than me, but a figure suitable for longing, for want: lightly doused in sambucca, washed off with rain water, rolled in the sweat from his sternum when he climbed that hill that time in Spring, note the waft of cyclamen, or maybe it’s the non-scents of the cherry blossoms, their mad ramblings and far-flung flirtings.

She walks with her hips forward and her desire back and she wears nothing but that brief black dress and a simple idea of everyone else’s desires. She never licks her lips.

She is his.