after Shira Erlichman

I pick the salt from my armpit hairs & hear

lemongrass rooting to my knees in the garden

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the first track bites my neck dark in a dorm room

while her roommate pretends to sleep

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I inherit the hand-me-down clothes of big cousins’ girlfriends

& smell their old tee shirts when no one is watching

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my first track – a self-inflicted hickey

to hairy arms as I practice in the motel hot tub

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I am 19 at the back of a sex shop purchasing my first strap

learning to hold the plastic leather cracking at my hips

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what if the sky is trans      too?

what if each body of water that has found me

is an ancestor who loved the way I do?

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my first gay kiss – a strawberry chapstick

shared with an entire t-ball dugout

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I open my mouth & flying cockroaches

swallow me with the kitchen ceiling

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