romantic connecticut

there is no romantic connecticut the text says, but I don’t take this as rejection. I don’t blame autocorrect. I read her words again, but can only see Connecticut, cut with all beauty this time of year —clean snow over old hedges and children sliding streets in stiff jackets—how could it not be a contender? This must be how loneliness and yearning fell us, because in an instant we have a future, one that takes us to a winter under the covers, whispering romantic connecticut after exhausting all good language, spending our mouths on the thickest parts of our bodies. I want you to see it too—
my teeth taking her thighs until you’re pulled so close that I can only hum into your skin.

no, there is no romantic connection she writes, but that isn’t accurate either, as if shovel didn’t meet dirt to tend, as if she hadn’t spent her whole life planting one pretty word against the next. She can say I’m empty of what she desires, though what to desire? We don’t know.

Here the mountains sit as the hunched backs of women, still in the grey, storing light beneath their hard peaks. It goes this way, our confusion and complexity, so I keep no romantic connection as truth. She offers friendship. I thank her for honesty.

What I want to text her now, without exclamation points, is this: I’ve shared soft beds with women whose names I can’t remember. Some I only knew for hours before I gave: here –- here –- here –-

In the lightest part of a day, a girl dared me to look right in her eyes

and say something hot about her tits. Now I speak. And I speak. And

maybe every fifth one hears something unforgettable. Maybe I’ll

congratulate myself for urging women to such greatness, spooning a

food they’ve been told to taste, moving for the ones who learned for

men, and such construction should come with consolation. The best of

the exes didn’t believe in marriage, or longing, even when she felt it

build inside her. She ducked her head whenever I pointed a camera her

way, so I don’t have much in terms of reliving our time, but how do we

remember love now if it’s not recorded, then

rewound?

My mother never cried. But on long road trips, with me and my sister strapped into the back seat, she sang Linda Rondstadt’s “Love Has No Pride” with such conviction that I thought she might drive off the road. And she did sometimes swerve for dramatic effect. She sang with her hands off the wheel and implored me and my sister to listen, really listen, so that what survived from these coded life lessons is this: feel pain and pleasure equally, let experience top vulnerability, give and feel, give and feel, then pay for it later.

In Northampton, MA, lesbian capitol of the world, a lover said I might be the most passionate person they’d ever met, but we’d never be in love. I, too, sing out and raise my arms to the air. I can’t carry a tune, but passion can make a mother proud. I think of Mom now, how quickly married men snuck out of her bedroom on school mornings, how she worked my father into one last time, how her loves came so relentlessly and intermittently that I never learned to land between starvation and saturation. I think of how she stocked full this inheritance, what we transfer from one woman to the next, how

I once kissed/with uncertainty
my mouth tightened/hands
slid from the waist/loose
despite what I offered/I knew
if I stopped/ I’d have to see
in her/myself
searching

Tell me, then, how to watch fears take truth, how a teenager’s missteps return to beat fruition, how to just go and go, because that’s always been better than standing still.
I said, “You’re really beautiful.”

She said, “You’re really not that short.”

What I believe, still, is everything I give is the beginning of what I can do, that I can stand in the desired without having to call up the ones I’ve loved to listen to them say

you are good

20 years and one day, I’ll feel enough like a champion to stop counting. But now I still need one lover + the next + that naked blonde on her birthday + the way my girlfriend slept with fists on my back so I would always feel her weight + the weight + one who said I turned her straight + the fling who came back 4 years later + the best friend +

Simple math: time has never given one more minute, time has me now tired

But I go and go, with hope, with shame, with collections that stay like trinkets shoved in the bottom of a suitcase, carrying what has always remained

her possibility

and mine