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.