Helena Lipstadt

ALL BY MYSELF,

I am having an affair
with you

you don’t care
you don’t know
ty lubie

I’m wrapping
my lips
around you

your tongue
your throat
your body of cherries

your smell, familiar
as an orchard
of dangling fruit, fallen,

then folded in a cone of paper
I don’t want to be rid
of you, I can’t

it would be like
tearing the pink belly from my peonies,
the bark off my tree.