First Date on a Blue Moon

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First Date on a Blue Moon Jerl Surratt (bio) Home from dinner and drinks, I’d oiled my handsafter scrubbing them good. Now, as I tryto type, my fingertips are slipping acrossthese keypads and tipping sideways into valleys.The sensations as my fingers recover from thisremind me how it felt, earliertonight, when you pulled out of my hug, my hands not letting go a few secondstoo long, fingers stuck to the shallow spacesbetween the jointed bones sheathed in your shirt,bleached white by the blue moon. And it feltas if the moon, now set, we parted underwas guiding me to take that liberty,not common among men new to each other. Set, but somewhere else still bright, likethe face of this screen, and seeming from that placeto be guiding me toward the right words here,an unlikely prospect I can’t rule out but, ifsober, probably would, given how manymistakes the machine I’m the heart of has made, how longit’s taken to write, with such a clumsy touch: Any world that doesn’t have as its pointmy being with you again, that’s not my world. [End Page 106] Jerl Surratt JERL SURRATT’s poems have been published in Endymion, The Gay & Lesbian Review, The Kenyon Review, Minnesota Review, The New Criterion, Podium, Washington Review and the anthology Gents, Bad Boys & Barbarians. Copyright © 2019 Jerl Surratt