For My Baby, Bedside
Past the pines we swam the pond with a
cool touching our bodies in forgotten spaces
Underwater I look for the glimmer of her
gold chain, pedal boats docked, shore markers
of the distance lapped to your side We make beds
of stolen trucks, cloths in the haul, park on the lip,
crease past peaks, full water blooms, mouthed
grapes from the vine, canyon-scape for two, drive
airplane mode until our love exits from signal
I meet you at the bar a stranger far-flung
and order Cherry Coke twisting plastic
All of my life a long list of possessions
I do not want: bruises on my back, children
atop the bed, key lime pies dipped in chocolate,
firewood, the drawl of your vowels, hoops through the ear,
a postcard that reads
‘i know things aren’t easy sometimes’
What the body holds now is too much of a weight,
buckets under trees caving until you share the syrup of wealth
I see her later in a Quarter of New
Orleans and she is sleep-deprived,
buried in the way that morning arrives deep
Past the pines we swam the pond with a
cool touching our bodies in forgotten spaces
Underwater I look for the glimmer of her
gold chain, pedal boats docked, shore markers
of the distance lapped to your side We make beds
of stolen trucks, cloths in the haul, park on the lip,
crease past peaks, full water blooms, mouthed
grapes from the vine, canyon-scape for two, drive
airplane mode until our love exits from signal
I meet you at the bar a stranger far-flung
and order Cherry Coke twisting plastic
All of my life a long list of possessions
I do not want: bruises on my back, children
atop the bed, key lime pies dipped in chocolate,
firewood, the drawl of your vowels, hoops through the ear,
a postcard that reads
‘i know things aren’t easy sometimes’
What the body holds now is too much of a weight,
buckets under trees caving until you share the syrup of wealth
I see her later in a Quarter of New
Orleans and she is sleep-deprived,
buried in the way that morning arrives deep
K Chiucarello is a non-binary queer writer and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. Their current and forthcoming work appears in Longleaf Review, XRAY Lit, Trampset, Rejection Letters, Lammergeier Mag and others. A few months ago, Spotify alerted them that they are amongst the top 1% of LDR fans.