This summer, I am keeping a collective of my writing, from drafts through revisions to the version I am willing to let live. This post is for the poem “From the second we met in November.”

For the Time I Meet You Again in November

I tell my mother

because I think thinking of him

warming my breath and the backs of my knees

means I’m in love,

but not just love it’s escaping 

in place in the garden at twilight,

light from my bedroom spearing golden bars to the skyline

twenty-three centimeter feet soaking in chlorine

ex-friend’s shorts eroding against the poolside

berry-black eyes on police-blue lines on my thighs

looking up and seeing you,

hair cutting against the dark 

five feet apart you are still

like ivory pressed into a boy so now should we

stare or speak or could I

be honest and say the world should stay quiet

so I can hear myself breathe against your shirt

the sound of us sinking over the pool edge 

feeling you up

aurora underwater

and then I get up

walk back inside because I

have a test in four hours and a text I forgot

to open so I take my clothes off 

and put them back on

forget to look up until I’m at school

and it’s high school so I just have to love someone other than you

who’s tanner and taller and I reply to his text in person

leave and tell my friends I’m going to marry you

someday in a long dress with

baby’s breath in my hair and our photo will be

me bending my knees so you’re taller than me

us in love with the camera freezing us in

love this must be love

I am in love I love 

you I am in 

love with you and I ask my counselor,

because high school has counselors,

do you ever say the same words too many times that you

— and then I say never mind and replace the words with

I’m going to marry someone someday

and take out my lunch.

I am obsessed with you and everyone who’s not you it’s

the boy on the subway in the taxi at the checkout still in

high school then it’s my counselor’s 

husband sometimes too so I listen to the same songs on

the kitchen radio like this isn’t the twenty-first century

like I didn’t take a picture of you from the yearbook just

to delete it and the next time my mom asks what

is the plan, I’ll tell her it’s

to leave here

bring the dress that feels like perfume

grow some hips, save some cash

for garden party berries and

whatever else you’d like

at our wedding.

to write you

this poem

a thousand more times

and wake up

underwater

feeling you.

Revisions

• poem felt conversational
• elements about high school “counselor”
• liked conversational aspect
• feeling of high school, being obsessed with somebody that you talk about it over and over
• obsession spills over into other people
• even with a poem that’s chatty, each detail should be as catching as possible
• tension in the poem between having it be an imagistically precise/formally inventive love poem VS letting you inhabit the mind/relate to a voice that is younger
• cut all the parts that aren’t quite as sharp

From the second we met in November

I’ve told my mother we’d get married

the way I tell myself

there is a third lung that grows when I’m underwater and that it

pillows my chest from the pressure. In identical, 

infinite square minutes of night, I find myself

looking up and seeing you,

hair slitting the dark still

like ivory pressed into a boy

sinking over the poolside, 

feeling you up

aurora underwater

and then I get up

walk back inside because I

have a test in four hours and a text I forgot to send

and it’s high school so I just have to love someone other than you

who’s tanner and taller and I hold his finger up to the sky

fit his nail in the curve of the full moon and then

tell all my friends I’m going to marry you

someday when I’m older

with baby’s breath in my hair, and I’ll be

bending my knees so you’re taller than me

us in love with the camera when we said

we didn’t have to be our parents and then

grew up to be like them anyways and I ask my high school counselor,

do you ever say the same thing too many times that you

and then I say never mind and replace the words with

I’m going to marry someone someday.

I am obsessed with you and everyone who’s not you it’s

the boy on the subway still in

high school then it’s my counselor’s 

husband sometimes too so I listen to the same songs on

the kitchen radio like the music isn’t spent once I 

hear it, like I don’t know teenage girls only bite

off what they can chew and then spit out again, do I 

really not know? Sometimes I like to think I am holding

your unbroken neck, your fingertips on Chopin keys

and a green cotton shirt and silver-lining teeth so the

next time my mom asks what

is the plan, I’ll tell her it’s

to leave here

bring the dress that feels like perfume

grow some hips, save some coins

for garden party berries and

whatever else you’d like

at our wedding.

to write you

this poem

a thousand more times

and wake up

underwater

feeling you