I There we are spilling over//ourselves and onto each//other//Your body//at war// at odds with yourself//we are fifteen again//and in love//or (at least) I am in love (with you) and you reach across to move my hair, on the stairs//and on the bay and on and on until I have no hair left, and then you look until there’s nothing left to look at, tiny burning ulcers begin to form your name across my chest, so obvious and obtuse//I hear your name when I say my own//A small constellations of fissures//road mapping skin//leaves craters—thick and leathery//everything deviated by the tracks in my arms like ladders//an obnoxious sign of having been thirteen//so when the bell or the phone or whatever perpetual alarm rings, this keeps us from doing what been done to us, to each other//I notice how little you look like yourself//how little you look at yourself//when you stare blanket stars at me//Now your hands have gotten so wide and so thin, like a paper lantern or paper plate or a papier-mâché photo of you taken from far away// II If I was you and we are both in the photo one of us would be bleeding: You standing behind me, taller than me and I look so small. Your arm across my chest, both naked— we are outside, and the frame tightens in around my face, only I am so much younger, my lips full and blushed and parted// It’s romantic —sort of, but throbbing — inside the nucleolus of seventeen and with no- where left to go but up and up and up into the sky like fighter jets or falling in and out of time and it’s all blazing saddles and who loved who first or //more or//better// We are hostage to each other and I fall asleep to the sound of us falling in and over and//over while the water laps the bay// I wait to touch you so bad I can feel my skin so acute and florescent where it burns, it burns hot and the fire in the hill lashes on.
Featured image courtesy of author.
