She Writes You letters
Olivia Fantini This is the summer you learn to cry in transit, driving to the bus station, riding to the blue line, transferring to the green, then the red, and over the Charles looking out at the sailboats and thinking about her and how unhappy you are but how happy you believe the two of you might be. You don’t have the words for what is happening to you—it took me a long time to find them for us. You will later remember this as the worst summer of your life; but before that, back when all you could do was love her with a fistpounding insistence that ricocheted through your whole body, she bought a stamp book of famous authors and copied their quotes onto the backs of envelopes for you. I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox —William Carlos Williams From the all-girls camp a time zone away, sunburnt, bugbitten, chap-lipped and rope-burned, she sketches a map of the place for you. Another counselor shares your name, and whenever she hears it, something happens inside of her that she can’t explain. She is sitting on the dock in the blue flannel shirt she says still smells like you. A loon pops its head out of the water not ten feet from her, and she interrupts her sentence to describe its black and white grace. She wishes you here. She misses your mouth and the way your breath comes slow and heavy just before you fall asleep.