Last Room, Fourth Floor

 

Waiting to meet you, I’m afraid of what you won’t say,

and of how your hands can move too quickly, undoing

the buttons that hold my in place my privacy.

 

Clouds with no instructions in them pass overhead.

I know how to be a thimble that holds the secret self,

or live as empty as a closet in an abandoned house.

 

But because you stroke your tongue along my throat,

everything hard and fixed within me clatters down.

And pointing to the heart, that unsteady double spout,

 

I feel the vine swarm with swollen red petals, the caves

I hunkered in destroyed, the fences broken. A hummingbird

sways over me, loosening the mind from thought.

 

All this waited. Now I know the day pulses in its own

electric skin. I live in the cult I’ve invented for myself, and lie

beside you compact, a box inside a box. 

 

Our margins glow against the blanket and erase each other.

My only room is here, and I open it for you.

What used to break now bends. Nothing knows my name. 

Janet Smith

Barnwood poetry magazine