I try to wash my hands clean of you
but the place where ring finger meets palm
is still calloused, still rough with memory
of rice battering us like cornstalks’ tassels
which slapped our bodies the night we ran
naked in your grandfather’s fields, you forever
the neighbor girl whose laugh was a song
I heard everywhere—in birdcalls, in wind
wrestling through thistles, in April thunder
unsettling my parents’ sleep—and me always seventeen
and embarrassed to look too closely
at your still barren belly lit by the moon
as I dabbed at cuts and took the red away
with my undershirt, knowing finally what
it must be like to want for nothing
but to be locked in a heart I’d never thought I deserved.
Photo by Joe Lencioni
