On the first date he wanted to make love in the dark, undressed
with the lights off, the curve of his back gleaming like the white half
of the cross-section of a pear, jeans pooling at his feet on the floor below.
Ten minutes later, after the condom was tossed in the trash,
his teeth brushed at my kitchen sink, he slipped out the door
with a promise to text me when he got home, and showed up again
two days later with a bouquet of nectarines and breath mints,
but this time we didn’t make love, only ate the fruit naked on the rooftop,
dark red sludge coating our mouths and fists. The city below us
sang its siren song and flickered, moths burning themselves to death
against neon signs advertising for lottery jackpots and Folgers coffee.
After three months had passed and he still hadn’t called, I came round
his apartment with tickets to a Johnny Cash concert, his favorite,
and caught him bent over the back of another man,
their bodies fitting so neatly into one another like the last lingering word
of a sentence and its corresponding comma, curving down, back, down, back,
a ship sinking into the roiling current.
At first I considered keying his car for all the heartbreak he’d caused me,
but then I realized that the reason he always wanted to make love
in the dark was so he could pretend I was a man,
and I quietly let myself out the back door and left the tickets
on the hood of his car, ice casing the wheels, two sparrows
diving hard into a glass window across the street,
reminding me of the look on my ex-lover’s face, one of pure joy,
as if he’d been falling headfirst to some certain death
but had finally found a way to pull out a parachute
and slow the descent.