Surrender is a cold rain.
Prone red leaves— our veined backs bowing
to the end— we lie down in bed, me next
to her, I teach my hand rest in her hand. She speaks above us
up into the ceiling, breathes pearl blue winter
past and through my palm, says:
there’s an aperture where
your fate line
shudders, it looks
like a wall
of falling water. I watch the angles
of a spider and whatever
crosses her night window: pause and climb, pause
and climb—
Your heart line leans
long as the angle of a cave
closing itself in
pitch blackness, a blindness
full of echoes.
Who’s praying screaming
alone? I remain attentive, calm—felled moon and moonlight
because I cannot hear her.
Distance holds a forest in her eyes.
That’s all I know.
Your head line is slicksweet,
is the purple tentacle of the octopus
you ate in the heat
of a market far from home.
Your fault line— What I am
drips and smears, the weight of want shadows our bones. I watch
the thin promise of her mouth. My hand
still in her hand, I watch her pain slip open, become a clutch of tendrils
burrowed in my own. Touch happens when I stop
wondering what a man and woman do with power.
Aaron Coleman is the author of St. Trigger, which won the 2015 Button Poetry Chapbook Prize, and Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2018). A Fulbright Scholar and Cave Canem fellow from Metro-Detroit, Aaron has lived and worked with youth in locations including Kalamazoo, Chicago, St. Louis, Spain, and South Africa. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Apogee, Boston Review, Fence, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Winner of the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Contest and The Cincinnati Review Robert and Adele Schiff Award, Aaron is currently a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in Washington University and St. Louis’ Comparative Literature PhD program.