my first love was literature:

my first skipped heartbeat belonged to lazy afternoons
when i skimmed my hands over the surface of an open book,
all surface tension, skipping stones and soaring -
i could not get enough.

next was my fluttering stomach, from tempest-tossed evenings
when fiction and a flashlight were my friends
where i read of silver mountains and dreamt of golden seas -
(the best books always followed me in dreams.)

and last, my first hitched breath, stolen from moon-still nights
when i drummed my fingers across the printed words
to soak them in like moss does fresh-fallen rain -
and that was when i knew that i had fallen

deeply, irrevocably in love.