I Love Your Crazy Bones by Barton Sutter

Even your odds and ends. 

I love your teeth, crazy bones, 

Madcap knees and elbows. 

Forearm and backhand 

Hair makes you animal. 

Rare among things. 

The small of your back could pool rain 

Into water a main might drink. Perfect, 

From the whirlpools your fingers print 

On everything you touch 

To the moons on the nails of all ten toes 

Rising and setting inside your shoes 

Wherever you go.

Lucia by Ravi Shankar

My hair, voluminous from sleeping in

six different positions, redolent with your scent,

helps me recall that last night was indeed real,

that it's possible for a bedspread to spawn

a watershed in the membrane that keeps us

shut in our own skins, mute without pleasure,

that I didn't just dream you into being.

You fit like a fig in the thick of my tongue,

give my hands their one true purpose,

find in my shoulder a groove for your head.

In a clinch, you're clenched and I'm pinched,

 we're spooned, forked, wrenched, lynched

 

in a chestnut by a mob of our own making,

only to be resurrected to stage several revivals

that arise from slightest touch to thwart

deep sleep with necessities I never knew

I knew until meeting you a few days

or many distant, voluptuous lifetimes ago.

I have to tell you, 

there are times when 

the sun strikes me 

like a gong, 

and I remember everything, 

even your ears.

The Quiet World

In an effort to get people to look 

into each other’s eyes more, 

and also to appease the mutes, 

the government has decided 

to allot each person exactly one hundred   

and sixty-seven words, per day. 

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear   

without saying hello. In the restaurant   

I point at chicken noodle soup. 

I am adjusting well to the new way. 

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,   

proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.   

I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond, 

I know she’s used up all her words,   

so I slowly whisper I love you

thirty-two and a third times. 

After that, we just sit on the line   

and listen to each other breathe.

Singles Cruise

It was a singles cruise but it wasn’t a singles cruise:

each participant simulated detachment but none

was actually single. Some, like the recently widowed,

were attached to ghosts. Others were legally attached

to a living person they once but no longer loved.

A surprising number loved their partners profoundly

while fearing said partners inhabited the category

of those who loved them no longer. These participants,

whose fears may or may not have been founded,

attempted to self-protect by labeling themselves single.

Soon a pattern emerged: those who feared abandonment

developed around them a planetary-like orbit

of potential new partners to whom they could not attach

because they were already attached. Such orbits lasted,

sometimes, for years. The orbiters went to self-help groups

and/or analysts and/or wrote letters to advice columnists.

Because they could not detach from their objects of unrequited

affection, they became the predominant clientele for future

singles cruises, unilaterally sustaining the singles cruise business.

I like myself when I'm around you...