Because “Some Women Are

                Laramie, Wyoming

lemons,” Harlan says he cares for cars instead, the plains

rising like bread from our glowing windows, Harlan’s

neck blushing to heat and the women he’s wrestled,

his barren limbs circling above them in a wash

of sweat and sock. We knead our common bodies

one to another, palm to bulk, and in middle

America, I sit next to a man I will never know,

taxiing, Harlan driving us this giving night. We are

three strangers in the strangeness of the talk of love,

and I am a little drunk, returning to my mother,

who stacked warm lemons on my neck. Like her, I know

how to cut from the wholeness of fruit, how to squeeze

an open body for its juice, my hand a vise,

Harlan’s women softening to my fingers: the waxed

pocks of their skins, how women keep their wetness

under their bitter whites. In Georgia, we learned to drink

the watered sour, heat lightning cracking above

us, and even new housewives know how to release

from three spoonfuls a pitcher’s worth, how to cut

the tart with sugar. The rind, the resistant ellipses,

are not the talk we make for men, only Sugah, have

some more, and there’s a tart too, why, what else

could I have done with so many lemons? and we press

our sweating cups to their lips, slipping

flavor and fragrance—the shells, the containers

we broke for want of ade, cast. From the phonograph

of his front seat, Harlan’s voice spins me, the man

beside me a coiling leg, and juiced, we say lemons! together

in the working yeast of this cab, and what unapologetic

fruit they are, leaving the smell of themselves even

after I have scrubbed my hands free from them, my wrists

having pushed men to drink, oh, Sugar, and I want more

than anything now to call out for my mother,

who could roll into a room with the oval of her uncut

self, who could press her palm hot against my chest

as I breathed. We exhale our imbibed sprits out

to glass, wrapping ourselves in smoke.

Harlan chews a Nicorette each time he tries to break open

a woman and she serves him only lemons. Night

is moving us through another coming winter

and we laugh quietly now to the pressure, each coming

to the cool center of our single selves, and each pressing

the other away from our own opposing bodies, where

we are drifting to our separate and yellowed hallways,

to perfume, the persistence of our missing women.