I.

First slowly, then all at once.

While eating takeout on your bedroom floor

because you do not have a table.

II.

Also: when I terror-wake sweaty in the night to wonder

where my clothes are, what this looming overall warmth is,

about our joint cardiovascular health. On top of me you

are pink as an aorta, oxygenated and saying impossible things

about the stars.

Then I lie flat on your chest; you tell me about your cat that died

of diabetes and the gulping way your sisters cried.

III.

On a consumer holiday we begin to touch each other

like wind sounds. It is the fourteenth and it is hailing

which stings as we go outside and touch each other there.

You give me dog treats and a matchbox wrapped

in the New York Times Book Review

and you stick your tongue

in my ear and laugh so terrifically hard as I put a contact lens

on my nose, pretending to be a reindeer.

(Later, we touched each other like sea glass

when I found out about the girl

who fell under the truck.)

IV.

Sometimes it hurts when you touch me. I scream.

We thumb our bruises, yellow from the wanting. We touch

even as we fight on the phone. I’m crouched under a plastic tree

in the food court of the Charlotte airport and you are saying very gently

Madeleine you’re not the only one

who knows about the world.

V.

We touch each other at this suitable cruising altitude,

seatbacks in an upright position, captain coaxing us onwards

with the voice of a talk show host, telling us that no one is

as hand-to-mouth as we are. That no one is as fight-or-flight

as we are.

Here, at our own ten thousand feet, I reach out silently

to strap you in: there are only so many words I can use for

just how much and just how hard.

VI.

We touch each other some newborn mornings,

your vast unconscious pressed against my flawed conscience

like fierce border ruffians and I realize

my shirt is where we left it:

folded neatly on the floor.