REMEMBERING THE OTHER
In dream sleep
your body finds my back pressed like a stamp, sticky
against yours. You can go weeks forgetting about me,
like your face wild in my hands like finger-lick like
let me taste. If we still care in 100 years, if we remember
after all that time, I’ll come find you with my boots
laced up my shin skin, scattering the ashes of your name
around your fort in the woods, barred door holding
its shape like a prayer with an empty room inside it.
Even now, if I followed the oil-blackened river
with my barest moments building a nest
of paper & spit inside me, I’d see your ink falling
from the leaves like drop dumplings, and I know
I’d reach you.
—
HERE’S TO MY SAGGY TITS
Mine, fat-lipped things
with no direction. They are ugly
next to hers; trinkets lost between their cushions,
only to emerge later, flapped and see-thru
and wrapped in skin-smell.
I can’t imagine them any thinner.
They teardrop dangle with their wine-
colored stretch marks against my ribs,
the meat of them: on their own revolution,
grown to stretch the fabric of every blouse,
every bad plan, every silliest thing
slipping below the neckline.
They won’t stay put unless I tell them
to Go, I say, in an exaggerated movement
of fingers and wrists, to the best pair
of lips you’ve ever seen.
—
Shelby Vane is an MFA candidate at Chatham University and has had poems published in Softblow, The Summerset Review, and PIF Magazine, among others.
