Poem for 2/13 - Love Poem Attempt 3/? by Taylor Byas

 

Love Poem Attempt 3/?

Taylor Byas

I’ll say it—the most remarkable way a man  has touched me is when he didn’t intend to, found the heat of me on accident. I’m saying his hand punctured the gap between our backs, rooted around for the blanket we shared and swept my rib-ridged side. In movies, that touch is the domino that starts the chain, but his bed did not abide by rules of fantasy. He touched me and, oh, I held my breath. Waited for the regret he never felt. My God, he touched me then slid closer beneath the duvet, our spines close-set arches that joined in the dark, kissing. I did not know it then, but his fingers flexed with want into the night. His heart at my back. Desire out front.

Copyright © 2023 by Taylor Byas. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 13, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. The author writes: “The loneliness of the pandemic has forced me to think about intimacy and touch in ways that have never been required of me before. I find myself redefining my previous definitions of closeness, of desire. I wrote this poem weeks after laying next to someone I love very deeply. I realized that the proximity to him, along with his accidental (and non-sexual) touch, was such a special vulnerability. We were comfortable enough to just be close, to touch backs, to be felt even as we drifted off to sleep. Is that not love?” —Taylor Byas Taylor Byas is a Black poet and essayist from Chicago. She currently lives in Cincinnati, where she is a second year PhD student and Albert C. Yates Scholar at the University of Cincinnati. She is also a reader for both The Rumpus and The Cincinnati Review, and the Poetry Editor for FlyPaper Lit. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Hobart, Pidgeonholes, Jellyfish Review, and others.