Simply a Poem on Wanting

Poems by Erin Elizabeth

Sun is a mole, an abnormal speck of sky
plastered onto the decrescendo of dusk.
I am sitting across the Antarctica of his grey
'94 wagon, and it is there, I grapple for you,
for your almost reachable limbs, spread
vulnerable that late May evening,
your body soured by her eyes, landmines.
I place a hand, two, over my gaunt shoulders,
brushing my cheek, thinking how different
every night under those assassin stars should have been.

Now the scenery is static, the beauty of freedom,
green and tedious. The promised Delaware coast,
steady rise of Virginia peaks, a day tossed over his head
into the cool chlorine; all like newspaper.

There is just you and my ancient musings–
almost asking what all your music meant
before Orlando, how she could hold your alphabet
in such tight and diligent fists, and how I was supposed to
find your feet when the weight of my existence collapsed,
and I became a featherless child, in a world of cutouts.

There is just me in a fitful quagmire, without verse or veins
to destroy. Just me in a bright pink reality, the tar
of adolescence mopped, resealed. Ziplocked, and driven
into boxes and bags. Me, wanting to kill the sticky mascara
puddles, the creek of eye liner, the girl I couldn't be.

There is just him sitting like a monument,
his eyes not heeding the fallout, the mushroom
movement of me, poised in a pirouette, trying to push
out of this crypt, this sepulcher of fidelity, a pall, pressing
itself in thick blasts onto him, while he turns down the music.

Just me watching the sun spit itself across the war-torn skyline,
pressing my fingers into the sideview mirror, wanting
a man so distant he's close, and feeding on the distance
so close its licking the stone of my inner thigh
wishing to be you.