lover

Another Version of Three Loves

/ Arambler / 2 Comments

I steal. It’s my nature. No license.
So I will count three loves
although there have been

so many more.

Lover #1 had no licenses. Didn’t need
one to play guitar. He jumped
off a stage to kiss me. But there were

so many more.

Lover #2 was made of glass
and tall and straight
and bottomless, which was
the little problem that became
my big problem along with

so many more.

Lover #3 is a secret
especially to me. I’m told
to pray and he will come. But
I only half believe. I worship
the moon, and she has no time
for such nonsense.

So no more.

The Dead Can’t Hurt

/ Arambler / Leave a comment

No longer in the run around, she traipses
across an invisible line
between mentor

and visitor, room
and mask, smile
and lie, tears
and truth, lover

and ghost. A new
preoccupation might not be so kind.

Skyway Anonymous

/ Arambler / 1 Comment

You were not allowed
up here—that hole
in the carpet couldn’t be
a careless discard

of one of you. A pizza
delivery man exits an elevator
to one of those office towers—can I

smell it? Oregano,
tobacco, the cigarette
that man outside on the corner
was smoking was too sweet

smelling to be
one of you. Old lovers
who were never really friends. A convenience

store becomes like a liquor
depot—no further purpose.
And I can go anywhere now.

Still Alarm

/ Arambler / 5 Comments

I’ll write everything down
so I can forget

you and how you were my last
smoking one, my last

lover to take flame
so literally, the one daily

companion left to invite me
to climb those pariah stairs. It’s time

to put you in the cupboard
behind those pans I never use.

The only things left to shake
are these hands—then they’ll quit too.

Love Death Unfurl

/ Arambler / Leave a comment

“And so, every building we have walked through begins to walk through other buildings.”
—Colum McCann, from his essay “An Imagined Elsewhere: The City of Cities” accompanying Matteo Pericoli’s World Unfurled

As far as she knows, he is the first
to go. Others may have
exited too—she can’t monitor
all egresses, all trap doors

lovers walk on, all the hot air
balloons that crash
into lagoons and straits.
Better to travel on foot

with skyway vision in January,
bridge perspective come spring.
That he has missed two seasons
already, will never feel the first

blast of warm euphoria
in Minnesota again—this is not
a spinster’s regret.