Against dating

I don’t know if there are any poems about fear. Maybe they all are.

I don’t know if I do want you, it seems like something that could hurt.

But I don’t not want. Is propinquity adequate, you never use my name.

We step down off the seawall to scramble, careful on the slick granite

boulders, leftover chunks of jetty. Your Converse have flowers on them.

You’re skinny and pretty, I think. I am a coward. You reach out your hand.

Later you take it again and I feel embarrassment and pity and more

afraid. My fingers are longer, you are four inches shorter. Eyeshadow

grey-blue with green at the corners, your eyes a pale shock in your face.

I drive back eating potato chips at midnight, scream-singing Olivia.

I drive eating a strawberry KitKat. When I get home the dog has shit

everywhere, sick, mortified. I clean on my hands and knees until two.

I have always fallen in love with someone’s words first, an ingress,

an impolite way to enter someone’s body. I have been obsessed, ob-

served, bought Turkish vanilla cigarettes, waved smoke away, worn

leather, been smug. Now too old for certainty, too broad to fit into my

jacket. What became of those incendiary beginnings, anyway. Each left.

In the cleft of an Etruscan tomb I wedged a thin lira, coin of returning.

You haven’t been many places. I have been too many. You haven’t had any

lovers. I have been vacated by sundry. Does experience matter. Does wit.

What kind of dry spun-out anecdote counts now. What kind of wanting.

I don’t know what this want will look like. It’s a little vagrant, a little lost,

corrupted by hesitation. It’s not pure and angry, not wildfire that leaves

nothing behind after it burns a path through white skeletons of animals.

I can barely meet your eyes, bright revelation in your face. I eat the rest

of the pink KitKat for breakfast. I’m twenty years older, I’m four inches

taller. I don’t know if there are any poems about fear. Now there’s this one.

---

JSA LOWE’s most recent book of poetry, Internet Girls, was published in 2023 by Finishing Line Press. Previously, Cherry-emily was printed by Dancing Girl Press (2015), and DOE by Particle Series Books (2012). She teaches literature at the University of Houston Clear Lake, and lives on Galveston Island.

Return to Vol. 43.2