2/7/11

The Lover's Pantoum
By Harmonie Rosenberg


He makes fun of the way I pay twenty-two & tip for manicures
and claims it to be a “New York thing.”
In the Midwest girls work with their hands
so your reds and purples would never last.

The thing about New York is
we’re just like the rest of the nation,
only the reds and purples of dusk never last
behind our keyboard backdrop of buildings.

When the rest of the nations rests, he and I
survive on Simon & Garfunkel as he
builds a keyboard on my back, each skin a
shift, control, or space.

His simonized eyes survive my poetry,
each stanza an added string to the threads he engineers of me.
Ever shifting, we lose control of the space
between us and kiss instead of sleep.

Threadbare discrepancies on string theory and the
ten dimensions of this world steam up from us
to the ceiling fan, its wires kissing air and
panels stagnant, in need of his repairing hands.

He matches the tendrils of my curls with his piano playing
fingers, and lingers on the strands closest to my face.
The panels of wood that sleep on the floor are the lines on his hands,
a palm reading that grants a long luck-filled life.

Stranded in his apartment we waste close hours molding
my curves to his jaguared abdomen,
two palm trees branching life in tandem,
sturdy in our roots.


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Harmonie is a student at the University of Miami where she majors in Creative Writing. She loves her family, traveling, dancing, her sorority, poetry, and the 'Canes!