poem: the second boy

with a desperately quick–“wait”–! in the golden

brown bricked coffee house with her hair curling over her eyes

and her palms warmed to perfect cosmopolitan happiness by hands cupping

coffee & hands cupping at fragile hopes which already written themselves

into great chronicles in her soul: she can already see them: friends, first,

then maybe lovers, her graceful drooping eyes falling onto his shoulder after yet

one more film-night with snow whispering outside the window and

steamed chocolate still thick in her throat and his throat thick with things

he maybe wants to say and do, his fingers brushing against her sleeping cheek.

But they have not even met yet.

So infinity is in the coffee-house “wait”–! and his odd mannerisms making him from a

fictional boy into a real one, smiling at her with an intelligence she expected and a fully

masculine self-possession that she did

not expect & likes all the same

(because it is in the best way, because he knows himself like the ancients did, she

thinks). she is nervous

she does not know what he is saying

and neither does he

his smile brings her floating sharply out of her head and into sudden late-night reality

because her speaking up and being the one to talk to him first

is real

and they shook hands & he left but she sits there, alone, smiling, with her hands fluttering

up to cover her mouth.

It is a beginning. It is everything. It is maybe

nothing, no future, but still.

she said “–wait–“!