"Graze"

Skin against sweater. My forearm hairs bristle, longing to make contact with your mulberry cotton cilia, the faintest of brushes like pinning down a breeze. The tenuous moat of the armrest, the studied romance of negative space, an elbow navigates dark waters to pioneer your crooks. Skin against sleeve. The creep of desire is still mute and unsteady, a bug inching down the bedlam following a flood, seeking harbor among all this mud, flotsam and catastrophe. Absence as foreplay, I retrace the spaces you inhabited, mapping the swiveling blue-black river, disarmed by the mere premise in the reciprocity of touch.