By Arpita

I am not smitten. I’m just licking the months
to try their sweetness. It’s not that weird.
You’ve thrust your face into water fountains,
you know what I’m talking about. Not
just thirst, but surprise, the anticipation
of surprise—they made me do it.
I would jump if my friends jump. I would be
the clown at Costco; try a baguette over my head
and say, ‘I’M A VERY BIG SANDWICH’,
just so you can chase me with a cast-iron.
It’s not that I enjoy putting on a suit
every morning and advocating for the man
with two horns, but it comes with benefits:
eyelashes part like zippers to fuck with
what I’m saying. You laugh too, there’s that.
Oh the things we do for love! Carry massive
pumpkins up the stairs, scoop cat poop
at midnight, bawl ludicrously for the first time
in another’s arms. Then there’s all the shit you say—
I would keep you in my pocket if you were a worm,
or, why kiss with mouth when we can
rub armpits, or, yes, of course, I would move
across the world to be with you. And you do,
you drive to a desert with your cat in the backseat
and curse the Fahrenheit gods. When it rains
for two weeks straight, you don’t realize
how rare it is; why the drivers panic. Instead,
you waltz into every 7-Eleven in a five-mile radius and
befriend the workers. I had a feeling there’s
free pizza involved. Why else would anyone
buy into this nonsense of ephemeral metaphor?
These, you fondly name my off-ramps:
when a word falls from my mouth, followed
by another and then a string unspools.
You kiss my shoulder. What a brilliant plot
to make me forget that space isn’t real.

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Arpita is a Creative Writing PhD candidate at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has received awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Vermont Studio Center. Her work can be found in Iron Horse Literary Review, Cream City Review, X-Ray, The Shore Poetry, THRUSH, and elsewhere. Arpita is from Kolkata, India.