Saudade

It is spring again, better yet: it is May first again, time’s hollow tick

Still ringing, teeth still wet in my mouth, light still golden on young leaves

Air still sweet and bright, wind still lavender-soft. I am quiet in my bed

With unwashed hair and the afternoon half-wasted, green tea

Iced and sweating onto my nightstand. I want a cigarette

But I lost my lighter a week ago and I’m sick of souring my skin

With tobacco-yellow smoke. My window is open and my

Neighbors’ windows are open and the world is a palm waiting to be

taken. There is a boy on my mind because there is always a boy

On my mind. Last year I wrote that I’d hold you like home,

That we’d share this bed and this table and this broken mirror,

This bread split down the center, eat from each other’s mouths.

It is a new May and I have forgotten how to be the girl

Who wrote that poem. It is a new May and I am forgetting the boy

Who got me down on my knees, taught me how to hate myself

Skin-side up. I am here despite it, safe in the open glory of a blue sky, green 

Leaves and warm light, a gentle wind like forgiveness in the happy silence

Of my childhood room far from the filth and rank sweat of sex like teething

I am rebuilding myself in spring, twenty days away from being

Nineteen, and I am tired of sickness and burning. I want to be sun

Light in the summer snapping over white-linen washing hung to dry

I want to be a lemon cookie, cold coffee, fresh flowers and my mother’s 

Perfume decades-old in her bathroom. I want to be a girl like love, a girl

In love with living with the world, want to hold your hand grin into your mouth 

Squint-smiling into the sun, blind with spring. Summer promising

On the horizon as day sinks into cicada-warm dusk, hammock-dizzy.