#morningseve

Tell me about the time when we crushed our small
bodies against the back of the couch in the basement
and I held your ears with my small palms and whispered
small breaths into your soft drums. How it was dark
and all the cloth animals had been tossed
astray and the twine swing hooked
to the ceiling swung slow shadows.
How his car had been broken into—radio stolen, window
crushed with knuckles and she was mad and yelling
and we felt small.
 
Bought the car from an unshaven man,
once in prison, on impulse—how love can
unhinge us so. He would sell all the cloths on his back
to repay her. Rip them off me. Tear them off my back.
Off me. Off my back. This is what I remember.
 
Tell me you were there, my warm back crushed against the black
basement couch in the morning—so early, it was the night. I imagined us
then in the apple orchard on my birthday—
braches sinking in the morning sun, low enough
for us to reach our arms above our heads, shirts rising to our belly
buttons, grasp a leaning apple, squeeze it in our hands,
break the skin, juice on lips’ crease, dangled between rows of trees,
maze of branches, earth heavy, apples shadows leaning towards it.
 
Everything falls small in the morning light—it’s like being
someplace and knowing you are someplace else,
when you know you are dreaming, lights dimmed in the orchard,
fruit crushed in dirty morning moist like two kids crushed against
a couch—crushed between words  too old to dangle
here.Tell me you were there.