Peaches and My Past
By Liana DeMasi
I tried to write a poem
About romance
In its truest form,
And I deleted it,
Because why
Speak of falsities?
I would write a dictionary
for you
if i knew its contents.
Show me,
Tell me,
Taste me.
My romance
Has been squeezed
Onto the top
Of a pin.
I can look at it
With a magnifying glass,
The one I lost
Last summer
While I was staring too hard
At the wrong girl.
Did you know,
In the South of France,
I realized,
Truly,
I loved her?
Did you know,
In the South of Maine
She realized,
Truly,
How another tasted?
There always remains
Redundancy
In romance.
I know much of one
And nothing of the other.
I can’t bite the bullet;
I’m too busy
Biting my lip.
Are you as tired as I am?
Of complacency
And convenience
Being mistaken
For love?
Give me desperation.
I want someone to think
I am the be all,
The end all,
The reason the moon
Follows the car.
I want to defy logic
And comfort
By becoming both.
Are you as tired as I am?
Of late nights
And early mornings,
Of staring at each other
Over coffee
Overcompensating our mouths
With caffeine
Out of fear of speaking truths
That show each other
Who we are?
I want to know you
And me
Through you
And me.
Are you as tired as I am?
Of being scared of truth?
I want to show you
The way my tongue
has more than one use.
I want to make you cum
With knowledge of yourself.
Show me
Who you are
Through rose-colored lips.
I am who I have always been.
I just need you
To take your thumb
And drag open my bottom lip,
Beg for me,
Beg for my truths.
Yearn for me.
Be the moon that follows the car.
I want to convince you I am
The reason it rose this evening;
I want to convince you I am
That novel you’ve searched for.
I want to convince you I am
The start and the finish
Of every word
You’ve never heard.
And I want you to say,
“This I have always known,”
As you sink yourself into me
And breathe a sigh of relief
“This is what i meant,
This is what i meant all along.”
I want to be longed for
And to long for.
What is it
About you
That tastes like peaches
And honey
And my past?
I’m tired of searching
For what’s right in front of me.
Is it me that fucks it up?
Or the weather?
It was sunny when I met you;
I should stop anticipating showers.
I need to convince you
It is I
That is the only North Star.
I am exhausted,
Don’t you see?
From knowing people
And knowing nothing of them.
I yearn to pour myself into your mouth.
It is the emotionally unattached
I flock to.
I like the taste of familiarity.
I am telling you a recipe,
Are you listening?
I want you to weep
And speak of regret,
Of having not followed the path
That brought you to me sooner.
I want you to weep,
Of having ever colored with another.
I want you to weep,
Of the art you will have to relook at with new eyes.
I want you to weep,
Of having to relearn love now that I stood before it.
I want you to weep,
Of longingness.
Of hope.
I want you to weep
To the moon ,
To tell her that you are sorry
That you were so long
Commanded by the sun
When she had been in front of you
All along.
But I open my eyes
And it is myself weeping
All these truths
To myself in the mirror
For you have gone,
Just as swiftly as the moon,
Just as swiftly as the South of France in mid-June.