Maybe I think
that if I spend enough time,
quietly looking,
I will fall in love with you again.
If I just stare long enough,
the ways that you hurt me
will collapse under the weight
of your perfect beauty…
The odd faces you make
when you aren’t talking
or thinking, mouth hung
open, or locked in a frown
How you scratch your elbow
or favor one side
of your body
while you stand in line,
leaning always
into your
right hip.
How your disembodied harmonica
braids into
the fibers
of your thousands of t-shirts.
How it always feels
like the beginning or end
of a hitchcock flick
—yellow light dashing
across a 6 o’clock floor
waxed smooth
save for the ridges
of shadow
that erupt
around the contour of an absent foot
—the contours of a thousand absent feet.
Maybe some of this is about evasion.
Escaping the question all together
—escaping the letters
and books
persistently begging
for your testimony.
Or how you practice
complicated dance steps,
while smoking a cigarette,
waiting in the passenger pick-up zone.
Maybe our new love
won’t leave any evidence.
It’ll all be locked up tight,
swimming in the liberation of memory
—and I’ll have to sit facing you,
trying to form enough
coherent sentences
for you to believe
that you know what happened.
And the love somehow,
will rest gently on the threads
stretched between our open mouths
vibrating.
And then
Maybe it is about occupation.
An occupied body.
The desire to move
through space,
what compels anyone
to carry on
even after you’ve broken my heart
With the tearing apart
Of belief
With the vicious biting
of starvation, rape,
burning books, electric walls.
The executions.
Maybe our new love swells
Inside the seams of occupation,
inside the seams of your body
And the thing that held it together
becomes the thing
That will tear it apart
How you fine tune
your hustle.
Your hustle
My hustle
Sell me a toothbrush
on the go, batteries,
leather wallets,
a tragic story, banjo song.
How you shift
in your leather seat—again
woken up
By the noise of busy hands
sifting through
The trashcan
Looking for food.
How you argue, stare,
fall apart, asleep, wait, walk, run,
drag a toddler by the arm, push a cart
full of flowers, garbage, clothes,
aluminum cans, beg for change,
dodge loitering laws, negotiate
your rolling home, check
the time, take a sip
of coffee, remember.
Remember when you sat on that bench with your lover,
when you found a hundred dollar bill and gave it back,
when you wished someone had asked how you were,
when you prayed that he would accept your invitation,
how you thought it would all work out,
made the best of things,
spent your last two dollars on coffee,
ignored the person sitting next to you,
didn’t check to see if the crying stranger was okay,
stopped to look at rain falling,
fed a bird,
dropped everything on the ground,
ran your fingers through your hair,
took a breath.
Maybe it is about remembering.
kristy lovich 
I really like this work!!!