What I thought you would do I have done, only without doing, else unintentionally.
I thought you would love another. Oh, I have not touched him, love, nor even enlanguaged this longing aloud, but his is the image with which I brim.
I never have, and never will: my tongue is not made for it. Love, it is all soft, immaterial as a single petal.
This spring I should celebrate— warm sun-burnished hair, cherries in full-blown flower, tenderness of new leaves— undoes me.
In spite of all signs I did not see its coming, never more than wondered what comes after. Just last year I was its arriviste. This year, nearly overripe.
I thought I would always fill from the well of you. Well, what now, knowing how we are not vessels, but vines? Tell me, who am I to claim to love?
Each morning the dappled light sweeps, caressive, across my bed. I tried, but do not want him any less.
Michaela Mayer is a kindergarten teacher who moonlights as a poet from time to time. She has been previously published in Windows Facing Windows Review, Snapdragon Journal, Mineral Lit Mag, Minute Magazine, Perhappened Mag, Tilde, and Burning House Press.