Lovers

The Charles jumps its walls and floods the city while we’re out feeding
strays. We try to run but can’t escape it. I tell you again that I’m afraid
of The Blob. This time you don’t find it charming. You cut open
my thigh each evening to practice stitching it back together. Use
a lighter to burn the tip of the needle and the fishing wire I have
in the apartment for suturing. I can’t remember the last time I cast a rod
with any intention. There is worn furniture, conversation about the melting
glacial shelf, and one of us, inevitably panics because we are hairless
and entangled and we can’t tell whose limbs are whose. You say,
it is always dim just before the dissolution of a boundary. I tell you
about the Egon Schiele pencil-drawing where a naked woman is sitting
on an invisible chair, nylons pulled high, a naked man kneels before her,
chin on her thigh, arms cocooned around her sides, her breasts lightly skim
his arms and she is tipped so far forward the crown of her head pours into his.