a Marie poem
There are days
when she cannot touch a book with her eyes
much less her fingers
without weakening. She aches for words.
(eggshell, white, crayon)
She likes to hold them with her tongue,
flick the consonant endings against
the back of her front teeth.
Squeezing
the tiny nuances between that
barest gap in the teeth.
She can kiss syllables but never
a boy's mouth.
This too is love:
(rocket, thou, solomon, moor)
But it is not always the love of la lune de miel,
the moon of honey, sometimes it is a love
of divorce papers. Sign here. You get the potted plant,
I get the chihuahua. Or it is a love
found in wet summer grass that makes
a girl's dress cling to her
calves as she passes the applefrom
her hand to the boy whose feet are also
damp. A love
of ten year old boys and frogs
of six year old city girls and the fireflies
at Grandma's house
in the country.
She knows all these loves even as
she claims never to have loved.
She has been in desire,
in lust, in need; she has waded up to her ribcage
in someone else's soul, swimming with
one hand, but of course this was something
other than love.
She also knows the syllabic comparisons
for all this.
Desire: oregano, silk, tangerine.
Lust: bonfire, underbelly, crevasse.
Need: lace, whisper, piano.
And what of the love that has no name? Why
that is a piece of every word she cradles
in the plumpness of her lower lip,
softening it
before she wrings its juice
from her fingers onto the page.
Yes, there are days.
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
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Author's Chapter Notes:
This is my first poem in a *long* time, longer than I care to remember. It was one of those things that left something in me feeling released after I wrote it, which was just what I've needed these days.