Forever

The water was so still
            I believed it would keep us
                        right-side up forever
there in that pool
            on a night so dim
                        it looked like the negative
of itself, with the friend
            I loved in high school,
                        a boy (I thought
they were a boy) who
            had also shed
                        their clothes and risked
the bare run into
            chlorine heaven, a place
                        that seems like a myth
to me now, where I felt
            no shame, our twin forms,
                        from far away,
naked mirrors
            of the other, bodies
                        we both lied about
every day, but that night
            I helped you shave
                        your legs for the first
time, soaping them
            and edging a cheap pink
                        razor up your calf, rinsing
sixteen years of
            growth in the wrong
                        direction down the drain,
listening to Karen Carpenter
            whimper from another
                        room, we’ve only just begun.

Source: Poetry (December 2023)