Before the Station / Celestial Lovesong, B-Side / Now, I write you | poetry by Alison Lubar

Before the Station

I wish the traffic light 
to red for ten more seconds. 
I wish the train to be early 

or late, or a sudden parade 
to slow and reroute us back 
to my house— zip time up 

to seven hours ago, to linger 
on each inside-wrist, every-
thing between those two 

points on the map, simple 
as the meeting of two legs.
Transmute to the sheets

you smoothed, seven minutes
ago, to stay pressed together
in rosy thread-count. I part 

them that night like two lips 
and they hold me in between, 
this limbo and timbre of limbs 

a symphony, missing only your 
crescendo, green light, & go.
  

Celestial Lovesong, B-Side

             I want to turn inside-
out with your hand as the axis

spin into silver, glistening fascia 
and network of veins, the map 

to heart and pulse everywhere 
I feel you even when I'm feigning 

nonchalant, pedestrian stoicism, I am 
all fireworks, indistinguishable glass 

and diamonds, gold chains as veins—
that river of blood belongs back in my 

body, take me between your teeth, pour 
the life from your throat back into me, 

this pulse, I beat on our frequency.

Now, I write you

into the waffle weave of this winter-heavy blanket, 
into the exotic chocolate's gilded wrapper, under 

the bent page of a poem you marked and kept 
in memory. You bloom upward, perfume curls 

like smoke around curtains, weaves between 
Venetian blinds like sun before dusk.

I press myself into you 
like a flower left in a book, 

the pattern of your words 
on every petal. 

I spend the Sunday making poetry 
with my hands, spill it in your lips, it lilts 

in a whisper, every follicle responds 
and every hovering fingertip leaves whorls 

of molecular wonder, whole worlds.
The next morning I am ready 

to fall in love again and I already have
knit you into my life, a golden filament, 

a celestial thread, illumines within; we 
generate subcutaneous sunbeam. Now I write
to keep the light in.
 

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