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You say intimacy breathes.
I drop in.
I know the sexiest
sentence there is—the most
erotic. I know it
like I know the last moment
wants to draw us
closest.
If we could say it doesn’t go—
plainly as that
knowing the most intimate
line there is
or I know
simultaneously
on so many occasions those
yes yes yeses almost
what they yesed—
Copyright © 2018 by Rae Gouirand. Used with the permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Quarterly West Issue 94.
after Obergefell v. Hodges, summer 2015
I still have a question to ask—
what I don’t know is which words might compose it.
I know it lives, but where it might begin—
I have to squint like I do as it downpours
in the mountains; I cannot read the road.
Driving after dark, we feel the way, the last two
who don’t roam where others seem to—
I have told at least that many I would marry you
but neither sees our names before the code.
We seek no coverage, lower tax,
On that last day, we read images taken
from a moving car, listening
to the artist speak of wanting that way
time stretches things out
readable in the frame
so the image caught is the image itself
passing, then of how
she experimented with how long
to keep the shutter open. When things
line up or sit atop another, I join
a lump there, join the bottom of myself.
You sit beside, stroking my hand
those moments, first squinting at long skies
over Laramie then nodding.
What if: stone is what
you get. A gun of stone. What if
the table beneath it were:
& the walls catching the sound. What
if no one knew: you were
around. If people came: from stone
& found only that.
What if stones were: deaf & mute
& cold. What could be
warmed. What word would you hurl.
At what would you point
your blood. Of what is a stone:
composed: what holds what
to itself. What is there to break it
& why when it goes does it
go only: to smaller ones. A stone