One Without Water

The problem was, I fell in love with a boy

from the desert. A boy who had never seen

the ocean until he was fourteen, and when he

did, scooped sand into his mouth to compare it

with Coconino’s silt. Then again, when confronted

with the ocean the first time, I paid more attention

to a jellyfish washed up on shore—flattened glass cup

of its body I could have mistaken for a melted

plastic heap. I’m mistaken all the time for one type

of boy or another from the way I speak

with my hands, or from the husk puberty stashed

in my throat. And how many men have I flicked

through on my phone, broken the link one swipe

right has forged because they missed bi in my profile

and on first dates had more questions about how

I could want to fuck both men and women and I’m just

so exhausted with fucking. I meant to say, talking

about fucking. I only ever wondered where the desert

boy’s fingers had been when he told me

about Arizona’s red cliffs—if he had clung

to those sandstone rungs, scaled a mesa’s edge

for some personal record or because climbing

higher really does get you closer to God and

his hands were proof of that, the ridges cleaved

deeper by sharp rock. I imagined the landscape

altered his fate in that way—palms a map

with a new river shredded across them by the Buckskin

Mountains, oxbow of head creased into heart.

So what if the real problem was I needed him

too much? For so long I went out with my head

cocked back, throat open and tongue splayed

beneath gray clouds for rain. In one story, a man

held the whole sea in his mouth, but I found

the Atlantic’s salt sting intolerable. No doubt

drops of the Great Lakes still flash through

my guts. When I told the boy freshwater is also

called sweetwater, he didn’t believe me.

Even with canyons etched below his fingers,

all the water I poured slid from his bowled hands.