faraway place
After Kiki Petrosino
by Savannah Olsen
Stay as long as you like in the blinking peach moon that doesn’t swallow.
Lay flat like a smooth wrist in the catfish lips of your waistband, ice hot;
find a faraway place etched in your pillowcase like a boy you’ve yet to see
naked and catch the drip of his green paint skin in your elbow, his fresh
clip nails pressed at the cable of your thigh—dry in his muscled architecture.
Triangles are the strongest shape to build with says the faraway torch-light you swig
from the night of his faraway eye. You think this place isn’t your country,
that you don’t know the bridge-maker who sank his tools in the sea. Instead
of spooning your hands in the soil you wonder how fast the earth will harden
around you; if your rubble shoulders will tremble when the world spins; if his
candle-wet smell will stick in your sheets. When you find your hand underneath
his shirt let him keep it, let him breathe you into his atmosphere, pretend you’ve
existed here forever.