by Adam J. Gellings

the beginning of a line at the top of the page, the end of a kind of rhythm we needed to waltz, the you are for me & I am for you, the knees shaking, the I love you’s, the softness, the tulip, thighs, the alliteration repeating, the heads full of dreams, the empty pools, your cousin Martina grinding money into the puddle of a hotel sink, singing a kind of song, eyes twitching, you standing over by the window, your piece of the cut, your hero taking up with the heroine, my bok choy, my smokeless taboo, crescent moon, armpit on the nightstand, swollen lymph nodes, my Robert Mapplethorpe poem, your cousin in jail, wearing our disguises, you as a housekeeper, me becoming everything I never wanted, the conversations overheard one table over, the code-switching, su intenso dolor abdominal, the dolphins pink in the river, a hyena, the pet fee & three children we couldn’t afford, maybe God, maybe the dead, maybe the trespasses against us talking weather & recipes, the anatomy of clams, the decoy of a pond calling out to its wooden duck, Christmas & summers in plaster of Paris, your red scarf, triumphant revenge, your look that said kill, your shot ripping through my motorcade, sending everything into extinction.

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