the summer in Indiana when we almost met,
my grandmother began to give away her
jewelry. I would lay next to our four-foot
deep pool and blow the filmy black bug bodies
across its fake green surface, carelessly
wearing my saddest, most recent pearls.
if you had seen me then, I don’t know
if we would have fallen in love.
I was too busy
picking tick heads from my ankles
& sucking the poison out of snake bites,
convincing Hannah to french kiss my cousin
while laying in the purple milkweed counting
the buds beneath our breasts. I was off being young
when you took the wrong turn from the freeway and kept heading
east past the town I shoplifted my first something in.
it was the summer of self and I have no excuses
for the permanent sunburn across my chest
from laying in it
that delirious, dangerous spitted out
light. but what am I doing repeating
myself? I already told you I wanted a body
to remind my body what it was. What I wanted
even then was still you. you, some stranger visiting
an aging aunt thirty minutes away. that closeness
I could smell, me and every she-dog I’ve ever met know
smoke and fire and your body best.
I knew it then and years and years later when your mom showed me
the photo album. you were just around the corner
playing soccer barefoot and being that kind
of annoying, all-american kid who never thought of sex
but was just handed it, while I stood around mouth slick.
will you ever believe the same organs involved in wanting
are necessary for not-wanting?
each catacomb of time is suffocating,
why can’t you touch me now and have it be like
I never spent a long summer in corn wishing someone
would love me back.
I can almost wish you to the edge
of that pool, your hands playing with
the dusty pearls sitting in my collarbones
O,
I will never stomach it,
the limit to our limitlessness.