That Fun Auntie (Round 2)
Let’s workshop this prose poem that captures a deeply intimate reunion between astral lovers before they begin the work of dealing with the consequences of their surreal but inevitable affair
That Fun Auntie
Say I flew into LAX, the flight number keystroked inside one of the ciphers of our one-way communication. Would you be waiting there at my gate, scanning faces? In the spark of locked eyes, would we know right away—and more deeply in a hug, fierce in its collapse—that we have the right twin soul (all our trepidations, swirling beforehand, dissolved in one collective exhale)? Rehashed scenarios of first contact lost now to former lives, would we whisper “I love you” into each other’s ears with a funereal gravity of breathlessness that almost wells up homecoming tears? Would we pull back to lock eyes, and then fall into each other’s mouths, as if there were no “awes” from onlookers needing this dose of joy?
Would we hold hands in your car, our stroking fingers entwined in exploration, as I take in your smell of Jean Patou’s Joy for the first time? As we make our way according to your shifting designs, would you break the clasp to point out roadside landmarks personal to you, ones you wonder whether to take me to—only then to come back to my hand? Would I stand aside in quiet admiration, restraining my typical role as the jester of a group—you showing yourself to be, over low-volume rap I could never identify, what has me fall deeper for you in the calm of the passenger seat: an even wittier jokester, blacker than I would have thought?
After a whimsical dance of shifting plans under your indecisive vibrations, would we end up simply cooking in your eclectic kitchen of potted plants and frankincense, somehow our kitchen—the reverse-course thought “But I don’t even know this person” reduced now for blurred hours, but in what seemed no time, to nothing? Knowing the disruptive magnitude of our uniting beyond the astral, would we even be able to eat as we sit at the table surrounded by travel photos of a sun, outshone by your quirkiness, always lighting your wind-blown smile (and several with you throwing a goofy kick instead of a peace sign like those around you)? Would we walk the human-food-happy dog, you venting about recent work drama and tiny irritations, almost as if I had been away no more than a week?
Would we cuddle in bed with the dog while you confess what I already knew: that you hang on my every poem, each line a secret note for your heart to decipher—the waiting for the next and the next having become enough of a purpose in the gloom that you were prepared to put off meeting me forever? Would you go deep, but with no apologies, into a wanderlust tapestry of travel tales I have only conjured in dreams? Would we continue to snuggle in the silence, the dog elsewhere in the impatience of a third wheel, while I inhale the fragrance—carnal whenever I go deep—of your bohemian hair?
Even though we have only journeyed in dreams filled with faith that the other was dreaming too (like that one where I called you “Sun” before I even knew your name, your electric limbs tight around me), would it be understood, without need for clumsy conversation, that there would be no protection—that protection would amount to blasphemy when every ounce of me is meant for you? Would it simply be understood in the melting frenzy of oneness, as I suck your jojoba neck, that my load—like my poetry—is not to be wasted, as if its deepest procreative placement were crucial to you becoming what you are meant to be: something more radiant than just that fun auntie?
This poem is unpublished