When we make love I turn invisible
and my mind walks through places I’ve forgotten about:
the dark hallway
leading to my locker freshmen year
or the staircase of my childhood home.
It has these windows.
They put smile-sized rainbows on the walls.

Sometimes I’m looking in from an unlit corridor
on the always vacant study room of a dormitory
with fluorescent lights buzzing on the other side of the glass.
Other times I’m on this one beach I was too scared to return to.
It’s on the outside of a forest and it’s the dead of winter.
I’m standing fifty feet in front of this cabin I’m not sure was ever real.
The wood is wet and breathing. The sounds are inaudible.
It has windows in the same place on every wall.
You can only look through it, never inside.

Then I’m in the connector between the parking garage and the hospital.
I can see my breath. The windows are frosted.
I used my finger to cut our initials out on the glass.
It’s melting. I want to stay and watch it disappear
but I fade out like a song snared in the static on the radio.

It’s kind of like emerging into a dream—
I can’t remember when I opened my eyes,
but suddenly I realize I’m there
while you’re making me come
and I want to bring my body
back to where my mind is standing
but it feels too good to give up.

12/21/2009

Author's Note: Working draft

Posted on 12/22/2009
Copyright © 2010 Stephanie Lane Sutton