One Year Anniversary of the Last Time I Had Sex

Gracemary Allen

August 11th 2022

I strip in the parking lot, bralette and a rose quartz cord necklace we peel wheat stalks off our Doc Martens, make fragile boats made of wayward leaves toss things off the rocky ledge

I sit beside the muddy river in my boxers, a butterfly alights on my neck, drawn by the psychedelic bright.

We talk about the Bell Jar, and try to remember what country ISIS used to occupy. She smiles indulgently, as I dip my dirty toes into the rushing water a little afraid to be swallowed.

I walk a couple meters upstream, lower myself into the shallow beside the old wood bridge. Let the current carry me that part’s easy.

It takes genuine effort to stop beneath where She sits to hold fast to a drowned tree branch, a dragonfly on my mosquito bitten thigh.

I feel like a mermaid watching a life forbidden to me. She takes a picture with our disposable camera and cries a little, though She won’t tell me that until later.

A (fish? snake?) indeterminate white thing splashes in the periphery and I throw myself at the shoreline, scrambling for solid ground.

A moth lands on my big toe, a butterfly on her sternum. Another takes a breath on the soft roll of my back.

She asks me what sex means.

I think it’s a form of closeness.

Not (necessarily) a penultimate one, but something akin to sitting at this river, annotating our books in silence.

She drives me to the airport, brackish water still drying in my hair.