them

 

He burns his armor
into honeysuckle,
into your country-side home.
Your palms lose their char.

He is holding your jaw
between his hands;
peach in his mouth,
juice oozing down his chin.

You left New York;
your wet eyes ruined the painted
stripes on the West Side highway.

People whose love I
believed in fell apart.

You went to the end of the Earth
so you could hear
your own voice again.
You owned up to the
twenty-thousand-person apocalypse,

understood the way everyone’s
hungry tongues flapped for
the pit of the peach
that rolled from your mouth.

There were two hearts
I invested stock into.
I was trembling for
something vivid and clean.

I watched you kiss the wrong person on New Year’s Eve.
And I almost did too,
but I’m obsessed with being careful.

Imagine a leather love,
so tough that you flat line
against the atmosphere.

Imagine everyone standing in place,
finally healing.
Finally getting the
bubblegum wrapper of love out
of their teeth.

The reality is denim; squeezing around two
thick thighs, and it’s so tight
that it hurts, but it rubs
in all the right places.

 

 

 

lockdown

We’re driving, on our way to Mystic Beach. My phone rings and it’s my mother. She asks me if I really
am in love like I said I was. I look over at the driver’s seat and then out the rear window. I watch the sky lose light. I think I don’t know. “I don’t know”.
My driver, my girl, turns to me. One hand on the steering wheel, one reaching for my neck.
My mother sighs into the phone and says okay, let me know when you get there. My teeth chatter as if there’s frost on the inside of this red car’s windows. There may as well be. I didn’t bring enough clothes for this trip and I’m scared to borrow hers’. I would never ever forget the way her sleeves smell and I don’t want to be at risk for heartbreak.

I’d like to set my belongings down on a cheap Connecticut bedspread. Bring her to meet my grandparents and teach them the lines of her face. We have the same wide eyes, honey from our irises to prove it. And then a trade; swimming lessons for trust. If it was winter they would make us shovel the driveway. I’d stuff snow down her back and push her underneath the basketball hoop.
Our breath feels like molasses, curving together.
We’d race to the shower. We wouldn’t waste any hot water.

But it’s summer on Mystic Beach and we’re sitting with lemonade by our wrists. I fought for this space on the passenger side, here with her hand curled around my neck.
Sweat is making a home for itself above my upper lip, my silent teeth.
The air: coming through the sunroof.
The sound: salt exploding in the sea.

 

 

 

Zofia Provizer is junior at Lesley University where she studies Creative Writing and Women and Gender Studies. She has been published in Commonthought, Lesley University’s literary magazine, and by Studio 360, reading on air for them in 2015. She has also been published by grlmag.com and has read in Červená Barva Press’ reading series. Zofia is very passionate about pop culture and only writes what’s deeply embedded in her heart.