{guess who I've been reading}

Saturday

when we stumble home after dinner
at the Lazy Catfish, Southern Comfort
both warming and tumbling our stomachs, lime
edging our teeth like a parade, and we’re staggering
not out of drunkenness but between laughter
and ice, old snow sludging in the gutters,
and you find your key first with your fingerless
gloves, and the mailbox is empty
which means no new bills, at which we are both
silently pleased, after the four flights of stairs
past the bean smell and television mutter,
past the bicycle and the newborn’s faint wail,
and you didn’t lock the door because we can’t
yet afford anything worth taking four
flights of stairs to steal, and you say
you need to hear this song and put on
Mos Def singing you must know that I love you
as if you’d spent all day planning this, to stand here
in the middle room on the flowered linoleum
we keep planning to replace and just
sway, like they do in the movies
when someone says hold me
but I didn’t have to, and you
didn’t have to and we hold there,
fermata, as if we’d never
been lost, as if forgiveness
were a word we could learn.

{please come to my show tomorrow at bar 13 if you're in nyc}