Palms
Location
Palms
The first time I talked to you
I looked at my palms
And wondered what it’d feel like to have them suffocated by those webs you call palms
Now I know you can not spin out fibers
To make these maps on your extremities, you are not a spider
But I know you could be clambering up my skin
And kissing me like venom, stinging, until the first time those pincers clasp down
And divorce the gossamer marriage of my top and bottom lips
Somehow you got into my bloodstream, as if you went up the water spout of my heart
As if now the itsy-bitsy spider is not a nursery rhyme
But a metaphor of a love tainted by distance and time
Running out and few
I looked at the mirror
Dipped in white toothpaste and paper towel residue
And asked myself, “What am I now that I was not before?”
I juiced the new petals of our bathroom decor
And saw not the girl six months ago trapped by fear
But instead a woman, radiant, like the glass bottle, clear
That you picked up that night
Full of golden liquid, ambrosia to the honesty that is hard to find
Golden, like the Holy Grail, hard to find
You told me you would pull down trees to save yourself
From the ruins of the bad guys you said, words not from a shelf
“Think as mine and move as mine now”
I looked at the panels of water, no, of silver and glass
A reflection of myself trapped in silver and glass
Like yourself in snow that night the first time
I let my eyes drown in the ocean of your eyes
And my ears plunge in the cascade of your throat’s sighs
The beating of my heart concussed itself to throbbing
My dad told me every sound in existence could be reproduced but then
Why can’t I remember the way your voice was when
I made it uneven, shattered, and low
When I looked, I saw not the corpse I felt like, varnished in dust from the wind that toppled me
Six months prior, no, I saw not the black and blue body, brother to a bruise
Nor the body of a twentieth century shot down Kaiser
The first time I talked to you
I felt my heart overflow
The blood trickling from my veins to the trenches in my palms
Wondering what it’d feel like to have them sewn together by those strands of silk you call palms