Two Poems

The Affair

An economy of touches,
your hand, my hand
your hair, my hand
your swallowing throat,
my lips but no further.

Let me be tantalized
by your roundness
eclipsing the sun.
Let me undress
in the expanse of your light.

Turn your smile
as always for we are modest
in this place of imitation—
freedom like a ship

twice tethered that still
forgets itself in the wind

Hallelujah

I can’t remember a time
where I didn’t cry at the sound
of returning birds, dark as a mouth
against the sky.

It is then:

that something changes impossibly
in the cogs of my body.

I hear my name & I say
take a message.

I know my slip is showing
somewhere between the lines
of this poem

& I don’t care.

I know the blooming of this year
will prove unremarkable. Yet,

I abandon the raft of winter
to swim through a torrent of flowers
whose color is no louder
than beige.

The shape of fear, of safety in static
no longer seeks home in the hollow
of my throat.

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​​Elysia Smith is a writer, poet, and lover of kittens. She recently earned her B.A. in creative writing from Ball State University and will be leaving town in late summer 2013 to continue her studies at U-Mass, where she will work for her M.F.A. in creative writing.