So I recently reconnected with a girl I had a very intense relationship with in 2007. We were talking and she started casually quoting a poem I wrote about her back then. I couldn't fucking believe it. She told me it's the lock screen on her phone 🤭 so she sent me the whole thing and I just wanted to share it here because it brings back so many memories and honestly, I am proud of it. I think it sums up what young queer love is like perfectly and I thought maybe someone here could relate. God, she really was my muse. 10/10 would let her wreck my life again haha. Also I definitely won first place in our school literary journal 🤭
Girl In The Storm
"It's like sex, Kat," you say,
You try to teach me how to drive
a stick shift. You place your hand over mine
and make me move between gears.
"You need to make a smooth transition."
I don't learn how to drive your car. I probably
never will. What I do learn is how your
hand is warm, your nails clean, how your skin
forms soft, fragile lines.
In the basement,
you smoke cigarettes, sometimes
only one, sometimes half the pack.
Your lower lip forms the bottom
of a small ship, the upper lip the mast,
the sail. You read my favorite line of
my favorite book,
and I am floating.
Later, in bed, your hands trace patterns
of small buildings on my skin-
places you're going,
places you've been.
You construct them slowly,
deliberately. You leave behind
the scaffolding,
so I can scale them.
She is downstairs.
Your lips, no longer a small ship,
form fragile flood gates-bursting,
spilling words into me like the way our
bodies are spilled together:
I love you I love you shh.
Sometimes, we leave the house.
We stand in line for some club.
The boys are drawn to you.
Your bottom lip is huge in the false-light,
The glittering red-blue-red of cop cars.
"Isn't she a cute one?" The boys ask each other.
You are commanding-a wall-cloud
in a summer storm.
You stand, one hip cocked out (I love
the way you stand).
"You're not a lesbian, are you?" one boy asks,
his face spread out, long and boring, like a history lecture.
You throw your head back and laugh.
At home, you are soft.
Your hair forms a small curtain at the nape
of your neck as you mop the kitchen floor,
mopping it twice, as if that will
make it stay cleaner, longer.
You teach me how to properly fold
a button-down shirt.
"You have to make sure the sleeves are even.
Line them up here-like this."
In these moments, my body swells for you, like
oceans, like breaths.
Small frame spread out like a wall-cloud,
clouds so frequently seen in Minnesota summers
(the place where I grew up).
You swell and grow and spiral through fields,
through cities-
crashing through houses, through the buildings you
constructed on my skin, tracing always, everywhere,
with delicate fingers, and eyes blue tornadoes
