Poetry by Kayleigh Ott

Edited by Caleb Azu

You came to the suburbs in the spring, the winds 

sultry whisper and the darlings perched in the cherry

blossoms If you do not come, these details do not matter 

If you do come, these details do not matter. 

I do not believe there is much philosophical thinking nor

scholarly compositions having to do with love 

just evenings of intrigue, and fingers finding hip-bones in the

dark, and then those night’s memory will never salvage 

smearing the face in 

During the day I stumbled after you 

at night we dozed off, limbs intertwined 

there are these means that we have within each

other– deprivations – that will never be uttered by

either body nor communicated off the tongue 

Peer out from beneath your screen 

I have arrived with trinkets for this imperceptible place so that

we can establish a life here, sugar dissolving in coffee, butter

melting on bread, the shriveled berries appearing the same as

the plump ones; an amalgam 

What’s worse than having no word from you 

you won’t speak to me if I love anybody else, 

you love everybody else, threatening to overflow 

my dripping skin dripping on yours 

but pooling into puddles at my feet, the blood 

I wore to love you, an imitation 

of each other’s colorless rainbows 

sometimes I don’t even know if I can say “each other” 

These words I am saying so much they begin to lose

meaning my words and what they mean to say 

swept outside the window of a moving vehicle 

flying down the highway, I love your hair 

abducted by the wind like glinting wet 

fingers wrapping around my throat 

I would take the finger into my mouth, polish it

off until it begins to prune and it is no secret

where

you have been 

You are an exit sign with no off-leading ramp 

or maybe you were always the driver’s seat, blurred

face a dream over and over of you back in that kitchen

place where the hand that feeds you remains never

bitten perhaps taken and held, and in the wind 

your hair feels how a warm embrace sounds 

except your voice sounds how being locked in a closet

feels and you have never cooked for me. 

I cradled you for years in the glass of my eye 

the face that has colored across a pillow, draped over

bedding, maybe a tabletop, a bustling sidewalk 

I know I can’t hold you here with me, in this 

past tense where love might have happened 

a moment unaware of any other earthly vibration And you

unaware that it was happening when it had happened 

Our closeness is this: 

anywhere you lay your hand, feel me 

in the intoxicating sensation within your

fingertips How is it, in your love 

I can feel the unintelligible world, but never you.