//intimates,// by t.cook
small poems about small moments
[[table of contents]]
[[bedtime, i]]
[[winter]]
[[before new year's eve]]
[[the long way]]
[[bedtime, ii]]
i only go to
bed after
midnight. tonight the
lights are on, wrapping around my
room, crown molding of white
wire and teardrop
bulbs. it's past
midnight, i am
alone and i can't
sleep, can't
dangle my foot off the edge of the
bed. i am too old to be afraid of the
dark, but that doesn't
stop me.
i sleep next to a
fevered body, hold
them close, push
my heat into their
skin, pull the
covers up to our
necks. sickness is something
i have never been afraid of.
let me
curl around your
aching back, my
sternum against your
spine. together we
will make the fever
break.
watching the streets slide
by on the ride
home, paper lantern
moons bisected by the
grilles of the nearest
window, an empty seat on the
shuttle, my hands reaching for
nothing. it has been a long
year. the sky never turns all the way
black in winooski, the
streetlamps dilute it, the
clouds hold the
light in like
body heat in a
blanket,
as the sky turns
to snow
the heat is out in my
shadowy apartment, i
pass the gate and walk toward
Orion, whose belt marks the halfway point on my
forearm; toward the moon, half-
bitten, hanging
juicy and curved in the shallow, shallow sky.
i am almost hungry enough to
pull it down
the rum sits on the
top of my stomach, perching and
watching each careful step i make, towards
the sky, towards this place, the
bed feels like home. these rooms
are what i think safe
feels like. my clothes,
when they hit the floor,
do not sound like threats
the stars cannot
see me here, and i
can sleep.
On the way home from work the bus takes me down a street with the house my best friend used to live in,
and the house I had my first Tinder date,
and the house I have never been in but know in the way people who have stacked cordwood on their porch know each other.
Corelle plates do not break unless it is thirty degrees in your house on Christmas morning, and when they do they shatter into a thousand strands of white hair on the speckled linoleum.