The best way to fall in love, they say, is by moonlight:
it illuminates the beautiful, masks scars and pockmarks.
As I quickly discovered, dimly lit four-hour bus rides
have a similar effect.
We didn’t fall in love, of course,
but I couldn’t swallow the chalky pill
of recent heartbreak
and you coaxed it down my throat
with your tongue, which to me is close enough.
You were 23, and whether you thought
I was 18 as is true or 20 as I claimed didn’t seem to matter.

You were beautiful, an inescapable mountain
to climb, the other passengers vibrating,
shadow-coated foothills.
We had the ethereal intimacy of two strangers who know
they will never see each other again. I kissed you.

It was to forget the taste of empty mouth,
frothing memory foam,
the way smoke whistles through toothgaps:
a caustic taste, one that I’d had no luck scraping away
like so much tongue plaque.  


What does a year of love smell like?
Sweat, mostly.

Frozen central park ramble, attic and basement musk,
my sweaters turned her perfumed pajamas
turned peace pipe turned dusty relic. Whiskey,
and shattered glass windshield,
the St. Marks hotel because it was cheap
and took cash. All colored by one perfect summer
that I can no longer remember anything
but the specifics of. All this you did not smell like,
but it was dim and you felt cozy
nuzzled into my shoulder.

I held you the way I held her,
so maybe we did fall in love
for two hours on that bus ride to Boston;
call it love by proxy. We burrowed
into one another because we had found
some eternal twilight, a midsummer night
on a Peter Pan bus in the dead of winter.
I gripping your thigh as if I only held tightly enough,
I wouldn’t be ripped back into reality
when the bus stopped. In the bright
fluorescent lights of South Station
we brushed lips awkwardly, exchanged
numbers, I grabbed my bags,
and you were gone forever.

You’d invited me to a bar,
and then your friend’s couch,
but ******* you would have made it much too real.
You and her would be differentiated,
writhing bodies are undeniably unique.
The ripped gut-wrench feeling I felt
the next day would have been unbearable.
Because intimacy informs loss, and
love by proxy only ever serves as a distraction
from the fading marble of plasticine light hovering,
indifferently, just out of frame. But it was love.
You were beautiful, and we’d found a moment
of viscous life. You numbed my pain for a while,
reminded me why I hadn’t swallowed those pills.
In that eternal twilight, it was all I needed.