By Kate Smith
I find myself back in bed with you multiple times a day. I pour cereal into my bowl and follow our bodies from the sidewalk outside the bar where we stole that man’s fedora to the leather-sweaty backseat of the Uber. I fill out my timecard on a Friday afternoon, and I think of your smile while we danced on the tiled kitchen floor. found us snacks and then all four of us claimed our spots on the floor of my bedroom, like we had done hundreds of times before. I put on my left turn signal too late, missing my chance to merge and wishing I knew what was different about that night. Do you remember it? Do you remember how we first found each other? All I remember is the softness of your lips, made softer by what might have been hesitancy or a desire not to be found out. My breath was so hot. I don’t know how they didn’t hear, especially when I ended up on top of you. Maybe they did. Do you know if they did? Neither of them has ever said anything about it to me, but then again, neither have we. Every time I find myself sitting at the edge of a pool, legs dangling over the edge, I remember that next weekend, when I came to stay with you for a night. I was eyeing those college boys with ice cube trays for abdomens, but I was also daydreaming about finding your softness again. I found it then, but that was the last time in the flesh. I have always wanted to apologize for how I handled that—putting the dreaming before the talking and a new connection over ours. I am sorry I started dating someone new so soon. I have always wondered where we could have gone if I had breathed into you first. Or even simultaneously. Can you imagine? If we had met in that pink upholstered restaurant for lunch, if we had walked the gardens and kissed after. I am polyamorous now, but I wasn’t thinking about relationships that way then. I wish I was. Maybe I will ask you out on a date next time I visit, and we can finally talk about all this. The brunch place has moved but it’s still pink, still bubbly like the marks the sun left on your shoulders.
Kate Smith is a bisexual and polyamorous poet and editor based in Walla Walla, Washington, in the U.S. She writes about mental health, earth, and queerness. Her poetry has been featured in anthologies from Sunday Mornings at the River and Beyond the Veil Press and in HNDL Mag.