Alison Petrash-Hall

A selection of love poems, from the early days of my relationship with my wife to years into our marriage, in no particular order.

I Already Knew You

Burrowed in the valley between

neck and shoulder, in simulated nighttime,

your flesh surrounding my face and shoulders

with the steady heat of summer.

I can hear the crickets, see the

amicably rippling pond, the grass wet and high.

I was watched those nights

through the billion holes pricked in the sky,

by the moon’s drunk face,

and knew it was impossible to die then, that

everything slept and would wait until tomorrow.

Pulling back into the bedroom light,

the pink, sun baked sandstone of your skin

flecked with pebbles, the rift of your lips,

squeezing between to an unknowable

system of caves, crevices too tight for my

head and hips, but I feel their panting.

I’ve known you before, and

always went to you for answers.

–

Too Stupid

Yesterday you told me there was
another school shooting, in my hometown.
The din seems to be
closing in on us, breaching the membrane
from nightmare to consciousness,
but each day I’m less afraid.

During our drive home you told me
about a passage you read, which said
we are too stupid about each other,
too busy having sex, and writing poems,
and savoring every text
to save the world.

–

Bread & Butter

Don’t split the pole, I say,
threading our fingers together and
maneuvering to your side
of the stop sign.

Bread and butter, I say to myself—
the way I’m spread across
your bare, freckle-sprinkled back
in our bed.

A universe conspires to
tear us to pieces, reducing the shapes
we make beneath the sheets to
atomic ingredients, stealing
bigger ones every year,
under our noses.

Every day is obstacles and partings,
a long wall that obscures you from
my view until we find the
fragile gaps, and wait there
as long as we can.

Quit your job, you joke,
covering me with your body, and
quit yours, I challenge back.

My new life’s work is
packing a bag to run away with you,
becoming two interlocking continents
on a bald blue end of earth
where the fruit grows juicer.

–

Smoke

Last night, words exhausted,
I watched for half an hour as
you lay naked on your back
in the radiating lamplight.

With every microscopic movement
I ached for something else—
an emptiness that attacked me
from different angles.

The focus of my appetite
shifting like the fine hair
of your skin in the raw air.

You cast shadows
across your face with an
upraised elbow, and your dark eyes
burned at me through the shade.

There’s a wildfire raging
inside me, too—setting
old growth fears aflame and
hollowing space for you.

We’ll collide in the smoke
like leaping deer and
house each other soon.

–

Becoming

When I tunnel into your eyes through mine,
I recognize love, and become it.
Sloshing lake, meniscus rising like bread
and sighing open under rainfall;
rabid, stamping, slumbering,
purring with pleasure at the contradiction,
apologizing with open palms;
kissing for the first time, the five-hundredth time, straight As,
hefty discount and exact change;
oxygen in airlock, blood transfusion,
fat that cushions bones,
waking and realizing it’s Saturday;
last year, and three hours ago,
and now, yes even then, and even if;
bowling pin bolted to the floor,
piano that came with the house,
load bearing wall and protected species;
planet and moon dancing, universe
bumping against the shores of gravity,
contracting, booming and blooming
all over again.

–

Red

I remembered hues I’ve
never seen, only discussed
in clipped dreams between
me and myself.

I understand now,
from the vibrations she
mouthed, too loud to hear.

The girl in me was there,
plain, patient,
insistent, pushing me
from my orbit
with both hands and
closing the gap between
satellites until our signals met,
too tired to be distressed.

I bloom in my guts, red,
the deepest parts of me
grown wild for you,
cracking open vases,
seeds hurtling to the dirt.

You’ve unfastened
the animal, aching
with loyalty,
galloping to your garden.

And your lips—red,
the better for me
to see you.

–

Marriage

We are domesticated, and I say that
with nothing resembling regret.
You know we are silly animals in captivity,
bothered by the wind hitting us a certain way.
I hope, forever, you don’t mind my searching,
my turning of every rock under sunlight
and foraging for the closest thing to sense,
for objects you’ve already found and hold
close to your chest, knowing like a parent.

–

Never Forever

We sit across from each other
eating bottomless fries,
and I’m drinking a beer so big,
like something from a cartoon.

I’m not grateful, don’t appreciate it?
Jesus Christ, it’s the opposite.
I’m watching it melt like a candle
and the flame’s too tall to blow it out.