#lesbian poem

I always anticipate an ending

It’s my nature to prepare for a fallout.

But, if this ends…

I know that you’ll always be the girl

Sitting across from me

At a dive bar in downtown Toronto

Looking at me the way that you do -

The softness, the rebellion

All of the beautiful contradictions

That are wrapped up in you.

A look that would send me diving in after you,

A look that I didn’t know I had been yearning for.

You’ll always be the girl,

Porcelain skin, scarlet hair,

Thin lips that curl into a half-smile…

Sitting across from me at a bar

Looking at me, sipping her rye.

If this ends…

I know that I’ll still see you, seeing me

If this ends…

I know that I’ll keep looking for you

In ghosts and in other girls.

I think of the women.

The women I’ve touched. The women who’ve touched me. The women whose bodies are now so far from mine. The bodies I grasped, pulled inward, knew intimately. The bodies I drew warmth from.

I remember these bodies vividly. I see flashes of their hips, their thighs, their belly buttons. It all happens at once. All of it. 

It’s us - when we wereus.

It seems so drastic, to shift from exchanging breath to exchanging glances. When did we stop breathing into each other?

I knew that the marks I left on your skin wouldn’t last. But I can’t help but see you without clothing or inhibition. Maybe that’s why you avoid me. Because your skin still stretches too thin. 

Because I still seeyou.

You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I’ve ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.

I don’t want to remember you as that
four o’clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You’ve grown into your skin since then; you’ve grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.

While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days’ routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine-
assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust-
balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
She’ll never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didn’t know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgive
you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox-
imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind,
want where it no way ought to be, defined
by where it was, and was and was until
the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled
through one cheek’s nap, a syllable, a tear,
was never blame, whatever I wished it were.

You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.

Marilyn Hacker

“gracious your form and your eyes as honey: desire is poured upon your lovely face Aphrodite has honored you exceedingly…” — sappho: If Not, Winter (2002)