It’s Not the Body’s Fault
but yours is where the ache resides, site of a thousand delicate harms—soft of a cheek on the soft of a cheek—and hers a door upon which you try and try not to knock. Yes, remembering hurts, though you won’t indict the jaw, skin of the wrist, belly or its button, little hollow where the tongue in your mind still dips, conjuring the ghost of a moan from the mouth you have ceased to kiss for good. You don’t blame the hands, not yours or hers, not the animal they made when they touched, all sinew and heat. Type specimen and endling. Precious, I’m saying, then extinct. The fault is not the shoulder’s, warm or cold. The back is not the culprit, even turned. Body is setting, not plot, whether burning or burned. It’s the farm you already bought, and now—field sown with salt and somehow blooming—you’ll have to live in it.
First published in swamp pink, 2025.
"Field sown with salt and somehow still blooming." Somehow, laughing at the phrase "enough," somehow already beyond the phrase "more," somehow already, that earth and those blooms turned over four times into their recurring seasonal bodies.
Wow… this one… I don’t really have the words but this cuts deep