I know you will make your own way in the world.
The way you favour linen and leather, and walk like a boy.
Your teeth are like pomegranate seeds, sucked clean.
Your motorcycle helmet unleashes copper strands.
You do exist.
The way you bathed me in mud, adding champagne and orchids.
I flogged you with gerbera daisies and spruce boughs,
marked you with pine cones and bear claws.
You fed me honey from your hand at a Classical concert.
These are not metaphors.
The way you mailed me your teethmarks
imprinted in chocolate. I carved desire
into the dark bar and sent it back.
Your finger failed to find the gooseberry I once brought you in my sheath.
You flung wine onto my hot skin.
Poured peppermint water through my folds from fluted glass.
This should be hard to take seriously.
The way you called me Poet, shouted it out across crowds
and arrival gates and pillows.
You kneeled beside my notebook and licked the pages.
Ate my fifth love note without reading it, demanding I whisper the words instead.
You dropped flat onto asphalt at the sound of trains crossing,
promising always to do this for me, wherever, whenever.
No one will believe this.
The way you met me with a fistful of stolen
daisies then asked, “Did you think you’d have me forever?”
I plucked all the white petals at once
and threw them at the stain on your wife-beater.
I lay naked upon naked stems
while the blades
of your ceiling fan filleted
the air above me.
This is not hyperbole.
You said our days together would outnumber eyelashes.
I still hear trains, though the coyotes are howling.
I know you will make your own way in the world.
Monica Meneghetti wrote What the Mouth Wants: A Memoir of Food, Love and Belonging and translated Italian adventure memoir The Call of the Ice: Climbing 8000-Meter Peaks in Winter. Dagger Editions launched her translation of MP Boisvert’s Québecois novel The Fifth: A Love(s) Story in February 2021. Meneghetti offers manuscript development services, with a focus on supporting marginalized voices.
