By Alex Mouw

She said, kiss my shoulder. 
I kissed each one hundred times. 

The moon rolled across the window 
as she drew her hair, like a curtain, to one side. 

I don’t care about money, she said  
when I bought a loveseat knit with ten thousand green threads. 

To prove we are an adventure in the clouds, 
I lay down and took three pictures 

of her easing to a cliff’s edge, 
not the mist settling on stripped mountains. 

She advertised for an agency, a university, a corporation. I filled  
ten notebooks with black ink. We came to want a statement sink. 

She asked me to count the greeting cards we’ve set 
on the shallow counters of eight apartments.  

I wanted rings stretched to orbit 
without a planet’s mass.  

For her I cracked hard fingertips on a guitar as now 
I burn them over butter and pearl onions, stuffing bird legs in a pot. For me 

we bought a second car. Do you want more?  
I asked for three Decembers, meaning, like a hairdresser, 

can I take more, 
it will be beautiful? 

She tweaked the lampshade and tried on dresses. 
Nearly naked—seven times! Fourteen when I counted the mirror. 

Were we a calendar reading FIRST RED LEAVES,  
TWO JARS OF HONEY SHATTERED IN THE STREET, 

are we the kind of flight to blaze orange-winged, thinner than stained glass, 
or shrivel to a dusty moth?  

Love the hunger—unyielding and, once fed, asleep— 
or love the house we built around it, the concrete troweled to the edges of a pit.  

I held a key to her. She slid it 
on a ring with seven others. 

She said, kiss my shoulder. 
I kissed each one hundred times.  

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Alex Mouw is the author of the poetry collection The Unbelieving Yelp of Prey (Texas Review Press 2026). His poems and scholarship appear in The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, and other venues. An assistant professor of English at Samford University, he lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with his wife and two children.