I’ve been thinking about scent and memory
and my second love, a wisp of boy, rail-thin,
sinewy with muscle, veins strung
under milk-pale skin and not much taller than me,
who left rooms thick with amber and bergamot,
camphor crushed fresh, his delicious dark curls
slick with coconut and shea butter and Moroccan oil.
Pressed close, he breathed me in like nitrous oxide
and floated away in helium ecstasy.

Our dorm was prison-like with its chipped cement walls
and red brick exterior, and together we laid naked
as dolls and lint-stuck in his thin bed, muted overcast light
falling over us from paint-shut windows
and illuminating the scars that laced his arms.
Sometimes I hated him for hating himself.
Sometimes I looked at him across a table of friends
when sun struck his curls and the skin pulled
over his jawbone was achingly beautiful,
like a silky white shark you want to reach out
and touch. I scratched words into his chest
with my fingernail and the red ghosts of them kept for hours.
He was always hungry, ate anything
and devoured most meals, always burning his tongue.
He brought me lemons cut in half and dusted with Tajín
and painted our nails with black gloss he stole from CVS,
the kind of boy who

pressed his wounds to make them hurt again,
kept an age-tattered goodbye note tucked in his wallet,
hid safety-net razor blades between copies
of old high school books: Animal Farm,
Catcher in the Rye, who scored an eight-ball
and wouldn’t stop until it was gone
so I’d pass him on my way to an 11 am class
in the common room, red-eyed,
glued to detergent commercials.

Still, he’d have loved me at my most disgusting.
No performance. He liked the smell
of candles burned out, hoppy beers,
dirty socks, balsamic vinegar, black clove cigarettes,
gasoline, sauerkraut, pluff mud.

I’ve been thinking how
once, a friend and I lent skirts and crop tops
to our boyfriends so they could strut around downtown
holding hands as a kind of gender protest,
we’ll show them, he said,
Southern heat quivering on the asphalt.
Years later, when I heard they’d kissed each other,
probably more, I felt no possession. I only imagined
their knife-flat bodies, knotted knuckles,
shoulder bones sleek as water snakes,
the minus-minus of them, double negative,
and marveled at the magic
of knowing what to do with a body.

How once,
he pressed ice in damp toilet paper to my face
during one of my startling winter nosebleeds.
We were vodka-hazed and unserious,
so when he pulled his hand back from the sticky mess
there was a beat before it gushed again and we laughed,
blood filling my teeth and dripping down my chin.

How he leaned over, kissed my open mouth hard
so blood splayed across his face like a hot stamp,
and licked his lips.