Sometimes I imagine you

Frozen mid-stride

Footsteps, halted

Arms, lopped off

Your heaving form

Once coursing and molten

Battered now, broken

No longer rope-muscled and tromping

You who had all that power

Folding into yourself

Heavy with your own weight

Hemmed in and melting

I watch you peer through

Smudged-out eyes

Distant ears

Collapsing face

So muted and soft

Stripped

Of all you were

With no one left to bear witness

Where will you go

What will you do

I have sorrow for

This ripping away

Those neighborhood boys

broke

into our apartment pool

stripped

their t-shirts off in the dark

as if no one was watching

but I saw them from my bedroom window

their arms and shoulders

so much more muscular than mine

They dove from the cement ledge like

they belonged there

split

the surface with a splash

cooled

their worn-out roving bodies

slick with August nights

If I had left my bedroom

when they saw me watching

crept

down the fire escape

after they called to me

without my father knowing

slid

out of my clothes

and joined them

far from trash-choked sidewalks

our broken-glass alleys above

If I had allowed myself

to plunge

into that quiet rippling world

maybe I would have found

the softness I needed

our bodies cradled together

in those faultless currents underneath

Rose Louise Hovick

 It was good when she held me

close to her

What we had

different from what the others saw

Her hands on my cheeks

arms encircling mine

smiling in the sun

When she had the time

When she remembered

Singing

washing clothes in the stream 

where we camped

He loved me also

To be in that sunlight

almost too hard to look at

the world was big

so many people

But I felt the heat

it filled 

my whole body 

I was solid and heavy for once

Now I feel pieces of me

blowing away

I can’t take what’s gone