The First Time You See Her, after Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre

The first time you see her you know she will gut you like a fish one day, start from the abdomen, a ballooning wound, work her way up to the sternum, make a flowering of your blood bloom wild across your chest.

& instead of turning around, you cup her hands to your naval, say: let us begin at the beginning.

The first time you see her, the gleam of her necklace draws you in like a proclamation about the divineness of the skin & the stardust it carries. You smile with your body like a dog at the pound, daybreak but not sunset, a sigh of relief. You smile a stumble in the dark knowing where the light switch is, arms stretched. She sees in you the likeness of her need.

She sends you songs that tell a story you desperately read. You listen especially close to the melodies about her marriage, about her mother. You share oysters over candlelight and finish each other’s sentences without even speaking.

The first time you see her, you are strolling the streets of Chinatown, of Cambridge, of Providence, of all the places your dreams didn’t take you (yet). She is telling you about the first time she hooked up with a girl, the last time, she believes we are, at the end, animals, not meant to be tamed into sanctity. You believe her for the way something instinctual in you, makes you keep coming back, despite.

The first time you see her, you two are crushing the loneliness between your ribs like licked fingertips to a wick, extinguished. She is walking to her bus stop, says: this is where I leave you, even though you both know you’re taking each other home in your own ways, even after you cross the street to yours, knowing there are still so many days left in the week to part ways on a street corner, that you will make infinity of a night together again tomorrow.

The first time you see her, you bend your throat for the taking & thank the blade for kissing your neck when no one else would, think of her weight behind the cutting of you. Grateful.

She will stare into you & it will be as if she is saying: do not hold me like I am a woman; hold me like gravity holds us all. So, naturally, you will make yourself galactic, you will make black holes of each of your traumas & love like you are sun enough, like in the burning you will forget you’re still the smallest star in the universe.

The first time you see her, you will recognize the hurt you see & confuse it for a love language, twist your tongue into fluency. Her mouth will call you by your name in such a way that it takes on a meaning it never had, like it wasn’t an accident those letters were put together, formed into sound, her tongue, your breath.

& one day, when the word love is about to spill out of your mouths, she will look upon her promises & name you a mistake. You have been waiting for this; everything about you, borrowed time. You will take your anger, swallow it, this will not be the same as burying it. She will stitch herself in the pit of your stomach, like the last one, make your hunger not forget her as she forgets you.

You will ride the bus to work in the rain & think about how much better off she is with her higher paying job, her family nearby, with her husband (a doctor), how perfectly it all fits without room for the otherness of you, your ocean heart, those unblinking eyes. & you will hate yourself for doing the work of your oppressors for them. But you will not entirely disagree, either.

The first time you see her you are looking in the face of your erasure, proud to be threat enough to call in that pink burning rub of invisible-making women, of making women, like you, invisible. & you will identify with the not there but still kinda there resemblance of something once written, ghost writing in the white space of everything that she is supposed to be & love & for a while you will think this means that you matter, that you had to have mattered, right? But you didn’t, & you knew it from the first time you saw her. That she would make air of you.