By Andrea D. Lim
Poetry

for H

1

Our arms that shared the chilling language
of letting out before letting go lock our present selves
to the presses of each other’s heads onto our chests
minutes after midnight in front of a studio room mirror, under
the dim yellow light. This is a forgiving Sunday hour
for faint shadows shaping the human only late encounters
can trace away.

2

I am the first to dare gaze at the ground where
the edge of our conflicting want, the feet attest, has the feel of crossroads.
The surface finally suffice. My eyes shift direction to our reflections,
the disheveled bed hair, skin-deep reaches and plunges, two bodies taking a place
through giving in to its chance for the temporal haul
of an endless whole.

3

You are on the receiving end, looking above
my head. You take the time to discover more inches,
to be the one to see for ourselves that you are now
higher than me. I used to be taller than you
when we were closer to our inner child
and had the time for open-ended narratives.
Now you are proud of your ruling, grinning
thoughtfully for history’s sake, for what comes
more during comebacks.

I tilt my head to your side, just enough to arrive
with a slanted face. In for all, I was shaking—it must have been
the coldness of inner pitch-black space, the weak refusal
from being filled this way, or the emptiness
that must be contained.

4

So you just take place, you holding on to your ways
of freeing me from the fixation with crashing at checkout time.

The bags are packed before you came, still. I may not yet be
tucked on the window side of the bus but my growth,
rooted between knowing better and minding the current, dawns
on the crevices of my heart. It does not shy away
at the height of honest desire.

#

And so you win, still. The heart tends to an aged love, but you,
you have outgrown me.