Ugh drafting…or oooh drafting. I haven’t decided which, but in the meantime:
SURRENDER
He had the patience of a saint
for a girl socialized to make him prove her worth;
to corroborate an alibi she wasn’t convinced was true.
And so when she finally surrendered to his postponed kiss;
when she interrogated the nape of his neck with her fingertips
trying to find a grip on herself in the unsteady arc;
when she stumbled, off balance, into the strangeness
of cellular memory opened like books of history, biology, geometry
spines broken, graffiti’d with all the ones who had come to this place;
When she remembered Mary;
When she remembered every week, a peck;
his arms growing slippery now in her grip;
When she remembered his elbows, and now his hands
their fingers braiding with hers, pressing the new rope of them to his hips,
pulling her, their bodies crowding any half-hearted effort she willed;
when she remembered her eyes and willed them to see
the door, a person, an escape but couldn’t;
When she signed her statement with her nose on his still heaving chest.
