~ your body tells me ~

No one ever touched me so

completely – men who’ve said they loved me did not

make me tremble with fingertips and breath,

or just walking into

the kitchen – I know

you don’t think of yourself

like this, and we are not lovers. We smile when we see each other, glad,

acknowledging – I am a door you pass through, often walking

away, or arriving. Sometimes so close, I see you best with

fingers in the gestural way charcoal

joins one muscle to another. In gestures, we are

interwoven – your hand stroking

my hair back from my forehead, inviting me

closer with a snap of your wrist. Everywhere

I sit, my hips leave room for yours, grow still in your

grasp, thighs parted enough, warm

and dark – night sky eclipses the meadow, our laughter

echoing in the valley where I

breathe (a new geography) through your skin, learn

from another’s flesh my own

landscape (arms bound at the water’s

edge, mouth flooded, blood close to the skin). In the river of your

chest, my ears fill with heartbeat, surfacing alone, pulse cracks ribcage

wide, eyes no longer meeting are strewn.