Maybe I Need You
A little something for the holiday season. Nothing special. I will say, though, that the poetry isn’t mine. If you like it, or if you occasionally like to be punched right in the feels, listen to Andrea Gibson. She’s brilliant. Other than that, enjoy. :]
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Regina, with her arm laid softly across Emma’s stomach, and one leg thrown over slim hips, sated, content, took a breath and drifted off into the warm scent she found there. “Sing to me, love?” she murmured.
Emma smiled. Without delay, without opening her eyes, without any questions, she began to speak. “The winter I told you I think icicles are magic, you stole an enormous icicle from a neighbor’s shingle and gave it to me as a gift. I kept it in my freezer for seven months till the day I hurt my foot. I needed something to reduce the swelling. Love isn’t always magic. Sometimes it’s just melting, or it’s black and blue, where it hurts the most. Last night I saw your ghost…”
The brunette listened to her lover speak, lost in the melodies of the poetry she voiced, and felt her heartbeat slowing, quickening, melting and pounding thick like molasses all at once. She felt alive.
“Love isn’t always magic, but if I offered my life to the magician, if I told her to cut me in half, so tonight I could come to you whole and ask for you back, would you listen for this dark alley love song, for the winter we heated our home off the steam from our own bodies? I wrote too many poems in a language I did not know yet how to speak, but I know it doesn’t matter how well I say grace if I am sitting at a table where I am offering no bread to eat. So this is my wheat field. You can have every acre, love. This is my garden song. This is my fist fight with that bitter frost…”
She felt love. When Emma spoke, she felt it. She felt loved and, too, she felt love — the untouchable truth, the force of life that is pure love.
“Maybe I need you the way that big moon needs the open sea. Maybe I didn’t even know I was here till I saw you holding me. Give me one room to come home to. Give me the palm of your hand. Every strand of my hair is a kite string, and I have been blue in the face with your sky, crying a flood over Iowa so your mother will wake to Venice. Lover, I smashed my glass slipper to build a stained-glass window for the every wall inside my chest. Now my heart is a pressed flower and a tattered bible. It is the one verse you can trust. So I’m putting all my words in the collection plate. I am setting the table with bread and grace. My knees are bent like the corner of a page. I am saving your place.”
Emma turned her head to press a chaste, gentle kiss to the crown of Regina’s head. The brunette, in turn, held Emma tighter to her body.
“Merry Christmas, love,” the blonde murmured into the still silence.
Regina smiled into the downy flesh of Emma’s shoulder. Love — at times, her heart felt as though it would burst with it. She knew, however, that she would gladly follow it to that end. “Merry Christmas, Emma,” she whispered back, the last words to be spoken that night.
