o.

through the most recent experience of femme-on-femme i've learned this: i tend to like girls who look more like boys, girls with sometimes shaved heads, cologne, boy's clothes to match, and a sensitive core. most of the world does not understand why a girl like me would go for a girl like my ex-girlfriend and like the many women i was with before her. soft butch, gender queer, whatever you want to call it. i have to be the tough one, warding off stares from those men in restaurants and video stores and bars when they see me with a girl like her.

Our lives
had been like two lines
running parallel on the map
for years, always missing
but almost touching at street
corners and drag shows
until this one night when
an earthquake shook the room.

Your blue eyes peering out
from under a baseball cap
gave me butterflies.

Coffee dates evolved into late
night phone conversations, words
scratched into notebooks while
I smoked forbidden cigarettes.

It was autumn:
we were driving through the
confetti of falling leaves not
knowing where we were headed
exactly, the headlights of your car
forming an arc of light through the
fog and trees and I whispered “stay”
and you stayed beside me:
my first true lover
my girlfriend
butch, femme or femme, butch
glittering rainbow sign
our names recorded on
an intricate map of women
connected to her and her and her.

Your touch was
aloe vera to burns.
Sex
an erotic dance
between hands
and sheets.

Kissing beneath a full moon
not knowing whether this
would last 3 months
or 3 years
I savored the
taste of
apricot
sweetness.