A Hundred Lovers

Coquelicot

I pretend to sleep when he leaves.
He rubs his thumb across my chapped lips,
he touches the hair grown long around my ears.
I remember smelling him and the garrigue.
I leave by fast train, passing through suburbs,
poverty, dilapidated buildings so close
to destruction from within, poppies in full sun,
the blurring dross, the violet
graffiti, then nothing. My dirty clothes
packed above me, the T-shirt that carries his smell,
the weak black pepper of him,
the T-shirt he wiped his penis with.
I’m afraid of falling asleep,
because I will desire him in my sleep.

Every Night

I listened to the études through the early winter,
so quiet, so fine
even my breath could ruin them.
I asked my boyfriend to suffocate me,
I made him lick the mirror.
The nineteenth-century moldings
expressed an indifferent perfection. Breeze
at the window, our skins shivery.
I ate all the time at that place where they cut pizza with scissors
and you pay by the weight.
I kissed my classmates,
I walked aroused under the chestnuts.
Every night I told him
you should take a shower before you come over.

Street of Dyers

Coming home early in the morning,
I heard withered cats

behind the sycamores, the canal rushing
from a different century. The alleys

so quiet in this city I never really liked.
The widow with an Hermès scarf tied around her head

walked her ugly-beautiful dogs.
I lived behind a Louis XV door

in a room that imprisoned winter
even as spring was rife outside—

I was not in love, there was nothing to experience.

German Cities

Next week he will be away, auditioning:
Stuttgart. Frankfurt. Hamburg. Berlin.
We talk about music, style, discipline,
the great composers—
He sings and speaks
with the voice of a priest, father, or devil.
I pull on my jeans, in my pocket
the department store strip of paper
sprayed with cologne.
The garden that enters
the room is the garden of a childhood
in Munich; the naked old men
who smoked along the banks of the river
are dead now. My pocket smells of masculine lavender.

One Another

We are knotted in the white bedding.
I don’t want sleep to separate us. We breathe
with the darkness, like an enormous animal.
Our bodies manufacture their odors. I taste earth
on his skin. Eros enters, where shame had lived.
Pale sun, then morning. How easily the earth closes
its cavities. I leave the apartment
wearing his black anorak.

Underground

My friend paid a little money.
We waited outside, above the stifling staircase.
A muscled boy danced foolishly.
Music pulsed through a window.
A $400 puppy mask,
light on our foreheads, the glasses sweating. His husband off
to the toilets to snort cocaine.
The room was full of shapes.
I wanted to feel tenderness,
but the love everyone was seeking
I already owned. All Sunday,
I was like a baby with a long memory
not able to touch or kiss anyone,
in the long twin bed with the lace coverlet.