Desoleil hums in the background. i am twenty again.
twenty years not wise enough to unbuckle my seatbelt
when you leaned forward to kiss me in your car.
i am fork-tender, clumsy, a child tumbling down a grassy hill,
never noticing that we’d only ever lay
by an open suitcase—usually mine.
Sweet plays in between our kisses hello and goodbye.
i am twenty-one, and so are you.
our soles are blackened by
the irish soil of st stephen’s green—i am
a channel away from my house, and oceans away from home,
hiding in the folds of an atlas from everyone i know.
thanklessly,
you get down on one knee to tie my laces as
i surrender my search for a villian in our story.
it’s just you and i, and the world feels like
the bud of a flower, then a full exhale.
Surf is the next song on your car’s radio. we are twenty-two.
we hug, two charred wicks melting into a single flame,
anchored in stillness on the same side of a glider swing.
we’ll never meet again. when the night ends,
you call out from behind for one last kiss
and i indulge you like a mother does a child,
fishing my last cookie from the jar.
from behind my front gate, your face is
a portrait undone by inches of iron and air,
but all i remember is the way, that winter night we met,
neon lights spilled across your unweathered cheekbones—
a shimmering, otherworldly mess—
and how, past the smoke-laden air and tide of bodies,
you looked at me with a question you couldn’t answer,
as if you’d found something more than magic.
twenty-two is all we have, and all we will know,
so i linger at the gate. i do not leave.
not until the tyres of your car pull you from my street,
when the last crack of the gravel
swallows the song of you leaving more slowly than you came.
more slowly than ever before, and ever again.
precious 