When We’re in Bed and You Take Out Your Mouth Guard, I Know It’s On

Like when, seventeen, I’d slide into your Beetle and you’d head

out of town, summer daylight, and parked among the furrows

of some field, you’d reach for the wool blanket. I knew you’d

maneuver then into the cramped quarters between passenger seat

and glove box, blanket over your head and my lap, where you’d

sweat and sweat until I cried out. Or further back, first winter

of our courtship, nearing curfew, when we’d “watched” Predator again

from the Braden’s lovers’ row, you’d slow to a halt at the last stop sign

before my house. I knew we’d linger under the streetlamp’s acid glow,

and you’d ask if I had to go home. Yes, I’d say, I better, soon—but I

knew you wouldn’t hit the gas, not for the longest time, three minutes,

five, and snow falling and the silent streets carless, I’d lift my top,

you’d unzip my jeans and treat the expanse of soft skin between shirt hem

and underwear like sex itself, your worshipful mouth, my whole body lit

from within and without. Or even further back, how I knew by the first

electric touch of our fingers in that dark theater, like a secret handshake—

I know you, I need you, like an exchange of life force between two

aliens from planets never before joined across the cold, airless terror

of space, that it was on, that it was on and on and on, forever.