POEM A DAY – May 5 – VANESSA SHIELDS

The way she looked at me

For N.

into me, the way she read the words out loud, a few at a time, held them in her mouth, tastebuds shocking, savouring then swallowing the meanings, her blue aventurine eyes pushing brilliance, bridging us in a spectral hue of heaving hearts…I mean, my heart was heaving, and a puny fear oscillated in my throat…uncertain in direction, meagerly meandering toward release as a question: do you like it? I twisted it away, dropping my chin to the buried bowl of my clavicle. she looked almost angry, but it wasn’t anger because she spoke, finally, in between more reading, more burrowing into me, words I couldn’t hold onto, my chest shape-shifting to closed metal door, stopping penetration of compliments like they were a deadly virus, but that looking…the way she caressed the pages, the way she held me in the cauldron of her blue, blue inspection…the way it didn’t end when she closed the book, handed it back to me, the way that her face was the first image in my morning as I inhaled the thick petrichor of the rising day…when my chest was a chest again…her gaze a hardened charm, weighty.