Time

In the world - always - women fall in love.

By: Bell Thompson

Years ago, two goat herding girls, unwed

now sand, now scrub, now lizard bones

coughed up by a bird

met late at night

in the desert where our ancestors sat

to carve stone tablets, left body marks.

Heads on each other's bodies, the girls

laced their fingers together carefully,

their actions unrecorded.

And someday, soon, this part of the country

will be swallowed up by water,

even the libraries and archives, dry ink

so painstakingly arranged. The churning sea

and its denizens, building their lives

in dark water, will not

remember us.

And today,

there are flowers in your hair and

strawberries on your breath.

Your linen fingers trace across my face,

scrub some dirt off. It falls,

and laughing we link hands

and linger red-cheeked in the sunlight

until we grow too warm, and have to go inside.

Bell Thompson is a recent college graduate currently doing administrative work at a nonprofit. She grew up in Annapolis, Maryland and now lives in Silver Spring. You can find her twitter @a_r_thomps, and her Poetry Jam chapbook "Leaf Litter" here.