I’ve forgotten, really, what it was like, being

celibate, living in a little cell,

a single dorm-room, tidy shoebox,

bed on its hollow iron legs,

break up with someone, days would go by,

nights, weeks, then it would be months since I had

touched anyone.

I would move my body as little as possible, the

air gently bruising my skin, my

breasts like something broken open, un-

capped and not covered, those buds floating in the

center at the front, if I turned a corner too

fast I would almost come. Swollen,

walking like someone carrying something

filled to the brim, the lip of the liquid

rocking, taut, at the edge, at the top—

and at times, in the shower, no matter how quickly and 

cold-nurse I tried to wash myself

I’d be over the top in five seconds, the

whole dorm became the jelly of my body,

and then the loneliness, which had felt so enormous,

would begin to grow, easily, rapidly,

triple, sextuple, dodecatuple, the

palm fronds and camellia buds bent

double under a campus sky of iron.

Months later, when the next first kiss would come,

it always shocked me, the size and power of happiness,

and yet I remembered it—every cell of his

cheek my cheek our lips swelling and

pulling, my hands and feet would go numb, I’d

try not to moan, streaming slowly

across the delicate arc of the sky—

it was always a return, that darkened face in the

dashlight closer and closer like the earth until it’s

all you can see. Each time

I wanted to be coming home

to stay. This morning, sated with twenty

years of sex, I remembered coming from

months of hunger to those first kisses,

and then after the last kisses how it

felt to stand outside of life, held

back as if by a thick pane or the 

way they grip a woman by the waist

when her house is on fire—

and yet no one was holding me, I was

floating there, very near the human, 

all my violence uncommitted, I was

saving it. Once I stripped and

entered the pit I did not ever want to come up out of it.