–Author’s note: Another new one in its 3rd draft currently.  Sort of a companion piece to “boys and girls in the night” but these two characters have intersected before in other places.

gibson and celia are in love

gibson and celia are
in love. kisses tattooed
on their fingertips, pouring
makers down hollows
in each others’ backs and slipping
firecrackers into mailboxes
on aluminum summer nights. gibson
reads her carver and murakami when
she gets too much into the nineties.
celia is a nurse in the ER and
she carries a teddy bear at
all times. she says it belonged to
a young girl whose parents
were killed in a fire and the girl
ended up in a small on-ramp
in the carpool lane of celia’s heart.

still, celia
loves the smell of gasoline and
can’t help but lift her finger to her
nose when it rivers onto her hands.
gibson does the graveyard at a local
homeless shelter but is a master of something
fine in the arts from past days of
possibilities. he carries a lighter in
the shape of an eagle and the
flame spits from its beak. he got it,
the lighter, from a stripper he
wanted to make it with
when he REALLY thought he was THAT kind
of guy for THAT kind of girl
on an occasion but
we are all only incorrect instances
of what we thought we wanted
to be at a given point of
hushed lust and burn on
a larger landscape.

celia believes in the
concept of breathtaking and
thinks it’s no small wonder
that stars seem to dance like
polished marionettes
if you look just so. she prefers
the word “fuck” instead of “screw” and
when she first fucked gibson
she said it was more like
a screw but gibson said screws
have ridges and they agreed
bodies conform to those ridges.
the hype was justified, a perfect
font imprinted into the thin
paper of their swollen aortas.

celia tells gibson he talks too
much of anatomy. gibson says
anatomy is like caffeine for him
and she thinks of swooning but
not quite. he asks if its love and
she says “have another one” and
he does and they bump broadside
against each other like two
boats in adjacent sloops in a
slack tide. “where water comes
together with other water,” quotes
celia and that starts it all
over again, that answer taking
the breath away from their question.

(the words on the pages of
our skin can never, truly,
be erased.)