Tag Archives: gabriel gadfly

Afterwards, your lips will part and
mouth, Wow.
Riven,
held open against flustered
and flushed sheets, drawn off like
rind from the bright fruit heart,
tart sweat lingering on two tongues kissed by
escaping breath.

Worry-heart, rabbit-heart,
this is the still order of passion’s pause:
Recover before I kiss you again,
before I draw another poem
into the flesh of your shoulders; a poem
rouged, pattern-rhymed with every sound
expelled from your open
shiver-shudder lips, every sound a
susurration and earthquake.

Come, love. Again.

That night, I kissed your shoulder,
your neck, the back of your wrist,

kissing scars and asking you
to tell me their origins:

the brick wall that shook
your brain in its cage of bone,
windshield glass, rearview mirror,
the knife you plied yourself.

You sat across my legs,
took my hand in your fingers
and navigated your scalp
so I could feel the dimple

under the hair
that grew back silver,
where the staples held
you together.

Your catalog of injuries
is just the smallest part of you,
but I couldn’t write a poem
long enough to catalog
every part of you
that my body, my mouth
longs for.

Even when I haven’t seen you in days
I find reminders of you everywhere.

I slept last night
curled against your pillow
to breathe the scent of you in sleep
and woke with a thread of your hair
braided to my beard.

I bathed and glimpsed you
on the shower wall,
a coil and wet snake
I try to divine
like tea leaves or runes,
attempts to suss out
predictions of your return.

I dress myself; brush a string of you
from breast pocket, and walking out,
notice another in the hallway mirror,
a kiss nestled at my lapel.

You are in the headrest of my car,
my bag, my books, filaments left like gifts;
they tether me to you
until your hair and you rest at night
beside me again.

I never dream of scents.
I dream and miss vanilla and strawberry.
I miss the scent of morning hotel coffee.

I dream with my nose cut off.
Dreaming dreams without skin and cunt,
without the scent of ink drying on your back.
I dream of all of you but you.

At two a.m., you are drunk on bourbon.
Celebrating on your balcony,
in the warm air on the last day of February,
with just a protein bar
and some kale chips in your belly.

You write me poems
and send me songs
and apologize apologize apologize

and you text “Call me please”
from three hundred and sixty five miles away,
because you’ve gotten yourself stuck
on the bathroom floor.

It’s the first time I hear your voice
since Birmingham. You are weepy drunk,
embarrassed drunk,
and I tell you jokes to turn you giggly drunk,
and you slip into horny drunk and tell me
the things you want to do with your mouth.

You are adorable, and I am a year of miles away,
coaxing you back into bed with just my voice
crackling over radio towers.

Rest, little drunk.
Tomorrow, you have a hangover
and this poem
and my love to look forward to.

You are sleeping when I come home.
The cat stirs from her nest,
butts her head against my ankle,
her motorboat purr the loudest sound
in this sleeping house.

The bedroom door always creaks
and I hope it will not wake you,
even though I know by now
that when I strip off my clothes
and crawl into bed beside you,
you will stir. A murmured hello
in the dark, fingers finding a hand
in the dark.

When I wake, you are gone.

We converse in notes and memos.
A scrawled poem, the sketch of a heart,
sticky-note I Love You taped to
a laptop cover, to the bottom of
a bowl of keys, artifacts traversing
the gulf between our waking hours.

A convoy of tiny black ants rolls across
the cover of the book you left on the floor
beside the old porch swing.

For the last hour, I have amused myself by flicking
every fourth ant away from the line of his peers,
just a few inches.

Even that momentary isolation
panics him, and he scrambles, jitter-legged,
to reorient himself into the normal processions
of his tiny black life.

A few inches, a few hundred miles.
It’s a silly thing, the disruption created
from being beside a person and then
not being beside them any longer.