Poetry
But by the end of it,
Nine years as your friend, three years as your lover, one year as your stranger
I still can’t picture your reactions
The bass and tenor of your voice
The drumming of your fingers, the thick swallows through your Adam’s apple, the strict precision of your mannerisms
I still can’t picture
The color of your eyebrows, the bodily sites of your twitches,
The questioning, the frowning, the loving expressions
Of your face
Can’t
Could never tell someone, with certainty, “This is exactly what he’d say,”
Can’t
Could never anticipate an argument, a laugh, a tear
Can’t
Could never craft responses, retorts, reassurances
Every interaction foreign and the same, every déjà vu
Eternal and new
What I wanted was an exchanging of the rib cage,
A hiding place through the bones, yours and mine,
My breath in your lungs, your breath in mine
A bedroom in the chambers of hearts,
Scouring ventricles and atriums for each other, yours and mine
Yours and mine
Yours and mine
What I wanted was secrets,
To slip under frames and knobs and hinges,
To dip into floorboards,
To feel the folds of subconscious
What I wanted was the absence of friction,
No sanding each other down,
Glass grating against glass,
But something slipperier than intimacy,
Something that stitched the distance, stitched the phone calls, stitched the mattresses
Together
But what I got
Was nothing deeper
Than love
Summer Hamzeh is a poet and writer from Los Angeles studying at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been granted the titles of Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate, California Youth Poet Laureate, and West Regional Youth Poet Laureate Runner-Up. She has been published in Middle East Monitor, the Daily Cal, and several college journals. She has an upcoming piece being published in So It Goes, the literary journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library. She is also an alumni of WriteGirl and Get Lit. Besides writing, she enjoys reading, hiking, and spending time with her pet cockatiel, Luke Skywalker.