From Solomon’s Song

Come back
with your
beautiful feet
in scuffed shoes

Come back before
I slip again
into metaphor

Your thighs are something
a jeweler fashions
in the Diamond District

Your belly button is
the rim of a wine glass and your
belly is a loaf of buttered bread

Your breathing
is soft like
sleeping deer

Come back
I am trapped
in these never-ending
metaphors

You are
for delights
and tangibility

If you were a fruit tree
I would climb you
and pick all the fruit

I am yours
and you are
delightful

Sometimes I pretend
we are children growing
up together on a cul-de-sac

I find you wandering
down our street and
bring you inside

My parents are terrible
at hiding their love
making—I already know
how to do it

It usually starts with
soft music and
supermarket wine

Then dad puts his
left hand under her
neck, his right
around her waist

But their love is
indoors and ours
must be under
the apple tree

Some mornings I feel
you’ve sprung to
life from its seeds

Especially when it
begins to drop
ripened apples

Carved on the lower trunk
is a heart with
initials too worn
to read

Carve my initials
on your heart. Tattoo my name
on your arm so our love
can’t wear away

Love is strong as death and
passion lasts even when
six feet of earth is heaped
between us

The planted seed re
members the tree it will
grow to emulate

We spark together
and set this tree on
fire; with lightening the
lovers initialed it

Between us
flows a current
that can’t be switched
off or bought by monopoly

You say,
“When you hum along
to the carousel’s hit parade
I want to hear you”

Then come to me!
You have heard my
metaphors you
are a tree you
are a deer you
are a bicycle down 6th Avenue

Come to me

By Brandon James O’Neil