Climbing the stairs to your room was like struggling to find air
while drowning. I remember the way your thighs opened
on the bed all those years ago, your hips rising up to meet mine,
the way the dark poured in tunnels through the window,
ripe and shining as two halves of the moon.
The sink in the other room gurgling with indigestion
and the sound you made when my tongue filled
the space between your legs.
I wrote you letters there, in that secret place,
over and over again until there were no more words,
no more consonants,
all the syllables gone into the fields of cherry and wheat.
There must be a name for what I was feeling,
something akin to the sweet crunch of tires
over a doe’s tender skin
when it already knows it’s been dying.