now and later
i.
years from now, you in a dress of duck egg blue, your ankles showing, hair a yellow frizz. laughing at my flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows. always trying to butch it for you. nails bitten to their core. voice fake-rough and spewing profanities, talking ‘bout how I want to eat you whole.
always trying to be the man you never wanted.
trying to toughen up and prove these barely-there muscles, these twiglet wrists, these birthing hips could protect you if you ever needed it.
ii.
i save your wedding photos to my desktop and consider making one my background picture. your husband is in the photo with you, but I wouldn’t notice if it weren’t for the context.
I see
only you.
glory in a white dress.
you are the most devastating thing my heart has ever known.
iii.
I’m going to beef up so much I can fight all your demons. and scare off strange men with just a grimace. and you’re going to take me home and kiss me girlish. let my hair loose from its baseball cap. remind my breasts they exist at all. oh, the things you can do with your mouth. the things you can do with your soft understanding.
how you release me like a fist that didn’t know it had been clenched so long. how you give me the freedom to give up the act.
and I do.
I melt in your hands.
I pool like rain in a pothole.
iv.
you are an awful far way away from me. you are an awful hunger. a yearning that does not take time outs. a need that takes the midnight watch every night.
this is one of many times I’ve let the ocean make a fool of me.
less of a fool, more of an animal.
more of a howl that its vastness swallows.
v.
still more years from now,
I rise like a fever when you enter a room.
I keep your wedding photo framed on our bedside table,
a reminder that you were not always mine.
a reminder that you have always been glory.
