to touch is to feel is to love

I

our blankets wound around us.

in our movement,

it beat our bodies like a breath.

gentle vitality.

we pieced together like the sky.

your body half-mooned mine.

I craved the lingering,

then detachment,

of a cloud.

the warmth of a touch slow-waking

then dies as electricity does—

hot-shock

to cold

to dead.

II

I'm familiar with how disjointed our sex seems;

there’s this stark difference, but interconnection between us.

our names must've aligned in a crossword puzzle somehow,

met each other like tides meet the sand:

with different properties and anatomies

but a physical touch.

III

boy I know you touch to love

but I touch to feel

and smile

then throw away,

like I catch beads on mardi gras day.

IV

yesterday I brought myself out of this rain into your house. clothes

soaking wet

on my skin.

clung to me

as if saying

I shouldn’t take them off.

V

the love on your hot skin on mine like a chemical burn:

melts my skin, breaks my bones.

something about these feelings makes you want to conform, to mold.

the ghost-permanence of our first time

like always remembering the fingers of a priest during a baptism

but I’m a heart-full of atheist, not buying this worship.

VI

the way you threaded me into you was too soft,

afraid to cuss me out, to pull my hair.

I wanted to be the girl you'd fuck, not the girl you'd make love to:

the dissociation between Hunger and Appetite, of Needs and Feelings.