An Air in a Minor Key

We reach for what lies always out of reach,
and so we touch each other along the way.
The opacity of you that cannot be gotten through
returns me to the senses of this day:

the bruise burned by a young child’s fierce affection,
the swamp of sunlit sheets, thrill of thigh
on thigh along a length of light, a still
and unfigurative eye to eye,

and how quickly the moment dissipates
into work or dinner, another more or less aware
instance that insists on being lived.
We live here. We house untouchable air.

Mary Romero

Mary Romero

Mary Romero’s work has appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Christianity and Literature, and Crux, among others; and her chapbook Philoxenia was the recipient of the Luci Shaw prize. Mary lives in Ch