Interiors
by Caroline Stevens
Blue memory silhouetted
against the barrenness
of daily life—every morning
now with no one
to look at, not even in sleep.
My sex is dormant.
Longing a song lost
to the ground-clinging mist.
I've lived in many rooms
that belonged to someone else,
walls left blank,
their only movement
in the aimlessness of light
flung against them.
Like my Madrid bedroom,
its two windows framing
either side of the bed—
one could look straight
through me while I slept.
Or the room in Montevideo
with its balcony overlooking
the club where couples
in skintight jeans smoked
outside, reggaetón pushing them
towards daybreak. What I want
crests and falls. At times,
like then, it's to be fucked
over the balcony.
Or to purchase
a one-way ticket to a city
I've never seen and wander,
disconsolate, from café
to boulevard as if
a stranger will mistake me
for someone they recognize.
In transit, I transform into
part of the landscape:
bodies in stillness rushing
forward together,
our intimacy a theater
of not-looking. To lose
desire is to become foreign
to yourself. I lose and lose.
Mostly I want not
to be found out,
whatever that means—
it just feels like I'm always
getting away with something.
A fraudulent postcard,
a stolen champagne flute.