By Courtney Queeney

Featured Image: Study of Clouds, Rome, Italy by Francis Augustus Lathrop 1893-94

This is a little like high school
he said, when I wouldn’t take off my clothes.
It was true, although in high school
I would’ve come over to torture him deliberately
and now the torture was an unfortunate side effect
of my sadness, and had nothing to do with him at all.
Sleeping with you would be like
a drowning woman grabbing an anvil,
I explained. A burning man guzzling gasoline.
Lame analogies, but I was trying to make a point.
When he got up for a drink, I missed him
but that feeling disappeared once he came back.
I sat there and tried to feel sad,
tracking my blue mute form
as it sank to a furrowed ocean floor.

---

Courtney Queeney’s first book, Filibuster to Delay a Kiss and Other Poems, was published by Random House in 2007. She lives in Chicago.

Originally appeared in NOR 7