I RECALL ALL BRIGHT & GLITTERING THINGS
After Aracelis Girmay
Once, you pretended to push me in front of a bus,
caught fistfuls of my jacket, laughed—
joking—said if I were injured in your city, I couldn’t leave.
Another time,
we got so high we stumbled down the street
looking for food-trucks, meatballs or tacos,
something. Anything.
Near the end, but before I knew it was the end,
we stayed up all night to watch the Perseids,
meteors falling like judgment day
over our heap of blankets
in the mountains, middle of nowhere, & we got drunk & naked
& you licked my clit until I couldn’t take any of it
anymore, that tight feeling in my belly
& the beauty—blueblack sky, falling stars,
their soft-streaks swimming through air
thick as honey—& you lay down
next to me, your heart beating so hard I could hear it
between your breathless phrases.
Maybe this will explain how my body still reels
when I hear you, imagining your mouth
shaping each vowel, each consonant.
Until you called, just now, I hadn’t realized
my mind’s already begun to lose your sound.
Liz Purvis is an MFA candidate in poetry at NC State. Her work has most recently appeared in the anthology plain china. In 2015, her poem “Before the Movie” was nominated for Independent Best American Poetry by Cahoodaloodaling. Other publications include work in Deep South Magazine and Damselfly Press, among others, and forthcoming poems in Zeit|Haus. She can be reached at [email protected].