8/13/12

The Way I Fell in Love with You
By April Salzano


The way the candle’s dancing light quivered
its orb on the ceiling. Your surefootedness
as you walked across a rooftop
stringing multicolored Christmas lights
as you moved, strong, stable, a boy
smiling down at me with ease. I forgot
that we had just met a few months ago.
I have known you
all my life. I have searched for you
in and among my fears friends places
for years. And here you are.
And here I am on the ground looking up at you.

The way you loved me that morning
with your eyes your hands your mouth. The way
you found me in the dark
the night before, pulled me toward you,
as if we had been apart too long,
panting through dreamscape, twisting through
the place where dusk comes too fast,
where I am lost in terrain
you navigate with long-legged ease.
I had been hiding a long time,
when you found me and asked where I had been
like you were expecting me all along. And there
I was, my answer
mirroring yours: I was looking for you.

The way your eyes searched my skin
for a place to call your own. The way
you let my body welcome you
as if no one had been there before,
the way you knew no one would be
there again. You let me belong
to you from the moment we touched, a reunion
between two people who had never met, two
divers who had been down too long, needing
air and light and a place to step
that would not give way like water.

The way you gave me
flowers on my birthday, unsure
of their color, of my reaction. The way
you hesitated, the way you smiled, shy
and nervous, the way you asked me to stay,
the way you let me go, the way you waited
for me to come back to the place you had
already created for us. The way you let me
love you, the way you know I always will.


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April Salzano teaches college writing in Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in Poetry Salzburg, Pyrokinection, Convergence, Ascent Aspirations, The Rainbow Rose, The Camel Saloon, The Applicant, The Mindful Word, Napalm and Novocain, The Second Hump, Jellyfish Whispers, The South Townsville Micro Poetry Journal, The Weekender Magazine, and is forthcoming in Inclement and Poetry Quarterly. She is working on her first collection of poetry.