The night was not silk, but ordinary cotton—
A twin-size sheet, the faint smell of rain,
A dorm-room lamp with a crooked switch
Dimming the world to just our skin.
You were not a god, but a boy
With a nervous laugh caught in your throat,
And I was not a poem, but a girl
Fumbling with the algebra of a bra clasp.
We were all thumbs and elbows,
A tangle of limbs unsure of protocol,
My knee found your ribs, your watch
Scraped a faint red line on my thigh—
A temporary tattoo of the moment.
Your mouth was warm, not fire,
But like toast forgotten in the toaster,
A comforting, specific heat.
And then—the architecture of you,
A landscape I’d only guessed at
Through denim and rumour.
The shy, strange weight of you in my hand,
Like holding a fledgling sparrow,
All pulse and potential flight.
You whispered, “Is this okay?”
A question mark against my neck,
And my “yes” was a real word,
Not a sigh from a movie,
But a decision made in a quiet room.
It was not a breaking, but an unfolding—
A slow bloom, like the night-blooming cereus
On my grandmother’s porch.
There was pressure, then a yielding,
A map being drawn in real time.
I learned the grammar of your breath,
The punctuation of your hips,
How a gasp can be a sentence
And a moan, a whole paragraph.
After, we were not transformed.
The same acne on your shoulder,
The same freckle on my hip.
But the air between us had changed—
It hummed, a low, domestic frequency.
We were two people who had seen
The other’s secret, ordinary shape,
And found it holy in its plainness.
Outside, a car door slammed.
The world resumed its casual business.
But in the cave of those rumpled sheets,
We had spoken the oldest, simplest language—
Not with expertise, but with honesty,
Building a bridge, beam by beam,
Across the wide, wild river of our solitude.
