November
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
Back row of the theater, and I held my bare ankle
like a guard rail, to steady myself. Your hands,
unlit matches in the dark. My throat was so bare,
the air conditioning was a hurricane of feathers.
Its hands were everywhere your mouth was not.
I didn’t know there was this want in me:
the outline of your knuckles in the silver light,
your thick wrist, the swell of your forearm,
all the effortless heat you shed. I didn’t know
that the desire would break through me,
wave after wave of it, pounding and sudden.
How I worried that you’d turn to see it, that
I wanted to have you pin me in the dark, to be
held down by you, to have all this hunger rise
to my surface and to have you taste it.
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