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Desire: Chapter 1 
They met you in your body where you couldn't
go alone
—Brenda Hillman, "The Spark"
and you depended on them, once you found
what they could do their hands
despite the awkwardness (for a long time
there was awkwardness but you didn't know, having
nothing
to compare it to): those hands
with the half-moon nails, calluses
from the guitars the oars the
paintbrushes
what you found they could do I mean, you could
spend hours
just looking at their hands in lecture hall, on
steering wheels
and at parties. Even though until then
nothing had happened really— there was this idea first
that they belonged on you, in you (starfish of the
real,
the key to your release. Your adult life: this
thing
you were saving up for: incandescent)— unlike the
other girls, the ones
with their demure sweaters, and maybe the ones too
in the leather pants, both of whom
wanted only the smallest, simplest— You wanted
everything.
The luminous, the underwater. You thought their hands held the
spark.
No wonder, then: their turns away, the squinting
and shuffling.
The sea-green glow of your inner eye.
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