Love is a stranger

Abstract

I. Love is a strand, a lead, a leash, a way out, a tunnel in. It is a stranger estranged, astray, cigarette left mid-breath on an ashtray. It is believing when the knock comes, you would answer it with ease. II. I want to miss you by making you leave. How love redeems by its punishing needs. III. Even after the kiss, the finality of a key snapped in the lock, these promises not to love but just once, a chance to belong and be broken on each other’s back, heart gutted and yet, to all appearances, nothing untoward, nothing changed but a weight shifted, nothing that cannot be made absent by re-chalking lines-- there is you, still, in musk gloving sheer over my hands where we last touched, roving up my fingers to rest my tongue, wistful for a past never quite over and undone. IV. I’ll remember you in the glow hovering at your lips, your cigarette ready for flight by a flick, hot breath reaching for seconds as white heat, last kiss, leave a slow burn in the air, turning inside me, a draft of something written off as ash but how it lingers, how it lingers over my litany of nights and this short fuse of pen ignited between my fingers.