You, and him, and you even harder

Sometimes when his tongue heats
my flesh
and I close my eyes,
I let the lightning bolts
flicker across the back
of my lids,
but they don't touch ground
they don't
electrify.

I looked at my hair today on the Metro and thought, that is not my hair. I fingered the ends, almost-blonde, butterscotch tints on black matte. They came from another time, a warmer time —and then I stopped and thought of you, summer heat, oozing through the afternoon like caramel, letting go, rounding you, your cave, your shelter— my hair. Those shades, the opposite of shades, because there was nothing in the shadows there. It was bright, brilliant, and very far away.

Bosses who say, "you didn't get the soul out of this one," bosses who aren't you. The nicest thing you ever said to me was, "you give me input," in a way where you half-pointed to your head to indicate things going in there, from me, from what I gave you. You didn't need to say it. You made me want to lose all of my experiences and have only this one, this pearl-threaded disaster, sewn with the intimate, heart-flesh color of roses. You made it feel like my tongue and throat were one, pulsating together with my heart, and on downward the thick river, inky and muddy now with stunted edges.

I occasionally read words I wrote about you, but I can't see all of them. I see "trace" as "thrown." I see pain as poetry. I see my poetry and wonder how much I've poured out into it, how much is left, how much more juice will I get out of this non-romance, como si toda la vida fuera un gran cuento. I read things I wrote about you where I indicate that I am over you, that you are not on my mind. And I laugh at my silly younger self, tossle her hair, which is not my hair but butter-blonde tinted, soft and innocent, so fine and untangled that no secrets could tumble out of it.

I once wrote about the lover after you. "He's young and teachable." Teachable. What a word.